Saturday Six – Shows You Stuck With

Welcome to the Saturday Six, where each week I let you get to know me a bit better with the help of a list. Any idiot can do a Top 5 list, which is why I kicked it up a notch to a Top 6. This week’s topic: Shows You Stuck With

So last week I went over the shows I tried to get through, but just couldn’t make it. So I thought this week I’d do the opposite: shows I persevered through and stuck around with even though it was painful and took a great deal of effort.

1. Power Rangers – I mentioned before back during the 20th Anniversary of Power Rangers that I once sat down and watched the first 12 series all back to back. That’s Power, Alien, Zeo, Turbo, In Space, Lost Galaxy, Lightspeed Rescue, Time Force, Wild Force, Ninja Storm, and Dino Thunder, or 534 episodes of various Rangers. That is a lot of Power Rangers. Especially for someone who is “nominally” an adult. The show is great for kids, who have mushy minds and can watch the same thing over and over. But as an adult, you can see the utter repetitiveness of every episode. Every third act is always “Fight monster as rangers, monster seems defeated, is not, grows big, summon megazord, kick monsters ass, go get juice to celebrate, learn important lesson”. Watching the same thing over and over gets pretty boring, even with brightly colored spandex suits and giant robot battles. Power Rangers is pretty much the definition of disposable television. No episode really effects any other one, they can be watched in pretty much any order (within a series, minus the start and end), and you don’t really lose anything if you skip episodes, so a syndicator’s dream show.

 



2. Transformers – It’s not as many episodes as Power Rangers so it’s not as impressive, but I have watched nearly every episode of Transformers from Generation 1 up through Transformers Armada. That’s Generation 1, Scramble City, Headmasters, Masterforce, Victory, Zone, Beast Wars, Beast Machines, Robots in Disguise, and Armada, which comes in as only 378 episodes. The only things that’s missing is Beast Wars II and Beast Wars Neo, two Japanese filler series that never got an English dub. What makes this especially painful is that I did it in 2002. There were no dvds. It was all real media files I downloaded over Direct Connect from IaconHub over a period of several months. Plus for the Japanese exclusive series, the dubs were terrible. All the Japanese series were dubbed in Hong Kong by a team of like 6 guys who all sounded alike to be shown on Malaysian TV, but they had no idea what they were talking about, so the dub is full of nonsensical phrases and errors, people are all called the wrong names, and is just all around very difficult to follow if you don’t put a lot of effort into it.

 



3. How I Met Your Mother – I’ve gone into depth about why I hated the finale of this before, so I’ll keep this brief. The very name of the show implies that there is an endgame. Sure it’s convoluted, but eventually you’re gonna get the story about meeting The Mother in a similar manner to how To Kill A Mockingbird is really a very long story about how Jem broke his arm. There are long periods where Ted is just an insufferable prick, that aren’t really moving the grand story along (his time with Zoey and pretty much all of seasons 4-6 comes immediately to mind). The short version is the show got too successful for it’s own good, and stretched itself on far longer than it ever needed to be, leading to a lot of pointless filler to get to the totally unsatisfying answer to the question posited in the title of the show. I only kept watching because I already had invested so much time already, I now needed to know.

 



4. The Office – I’ve discussed before that seven seasons seems seem to be the sweet spot for a series. This is a perfect example of why. Season seven ended with the departure of Michael Scott, and he had his happily ever after with Holly. “Garage Sale” and “Goodbye, Michael” were two of the best episodes in the series, and would have made for the logical closure point. They however decided to keep going without Carell, which wasn’t the greatest idea. Season 8 was all kinds of weird. James Spader tried his best, but could not fill Carell’s shoes, so Catherine Tate was brought in as well. Neither of them were particularly funny, and were just generally annoying characters. The whole runner with new hire Cathy trying to seduce Jim dragged down the whole proceeding and didn’t feel organic. Fortunately though, they basically just wrote that season off, and retooled a bit for season nine, focusing on the relationship between Pam and Jim, which is what the core of the show always was. The season of garbage was worth it to get to a pretty perfect finale, which brought closure to just about everyone after 9 long years. So it was pretty much the opposite of How I Met Your Mother.

 



5. The Muppet Show – So after my post the other week, I decided to go back and actually watch all 120 episodes of The Muppet Show. I don’t have conscious memories of watching any of them before, but I must have. It was run on Nickelodeon from 1994 to 1996, and I have vague recollections of hearing the end credits announcer saying “Stay tuned for The Muppet Show, coming up next here on Nickelodeon!” The difficult part about watching the show today is it is very much a product of the 1970’s, with its variety show trappings. Now I like to think I’m a rather knowledgeable individual, but I’d say I only recognized the names of about half the guest stars, and was actively familiar with about a third of them, which is pretty decent considering I wasn’t even born until just after the show went off the air. At the time, I’m sure they were all big gets, but most of them have faded from prominence. That’s not a belittlement on the show, it’s still hilarious, and I highly recommend it if you’re a fan of puns. There are many times they say something, and I just catch myself shaking my head and going “Oh, god damnit!” It just leads to a lot of Googling to figure out why exactly the guest was important enough to be on the show.

 



6. Doctor Who – This will probably be unpopular, but a lot of Doctor Who sucks. Pretty much the 9th Doctor was good, I was not a fan of anything with Martha, I didn’t like Catherine Tate on The Office and I didn’t much like her here, but things really picked up with the Ponds, and Clara has been a little hit and miss. I had watched the 8th Doctor movie when it originally came out in 1996, but I only got into Doctor Who because all my friends were into it, and I didn’t want to be left out of their conversations. The problem I think I have with the show was I binge watched seasons 1 thru 6 all back to back right before season 7 started. Because I watched them so close together, I don’t think I got all the nuances of all the season long plots. Plus I want it to all make sense linearly from episode to episode, which by it very nature of being all timey-wimey, it can’t. Like for example, Rose is stuck in parallel dimension, but the Ponds can reboot the universe with a new big bang? I’ve enjoyed the last two seasons much better now when I watch them in weekly installments.

 

JohnScott is the proud owner of a life size replica Captain Kirk Chair. He is a hoarder of Comic Books, Transformers, and Star Trek action figures. He attended Space Camp as an adult. He has taken vacations to the closing of the Star Trek Experience and the final night Shuttle launch. He has been known to yell at his television when the kids can't put together the damn statue in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. When not writing for InsufficientScotty, he is a Software Engineer for a major healthcare communications company. You can Email or follow on Twitter @NotEnoughScotty or Facebook