Show and tell

Margie and I don’t regularly watch TV. That is to day, the TV is on frequently, but, especially in the evenings, it’s rare that there’s anything consistent that we watch from week to week. Sometimes we watch a DVD. Sometimes we channel surf until we find something that tickles one or the other’s fancy. Sometimes we just turn the TV off (gasp).

I’d probably watch more TV, if I were by myself, but Margie wasn’t brought up in a regular TV-watching household, is less attached to the idea, and gets less caught up in TV shows than I do. For Margie, an entertaining evening is unwinding with a book, or playing solitaire, or something else to just relax. It’s hard to critique her attitude without sounding like a little kid stamping his foot and, well, wanting to watch TV.

But one result is that there are very few series we pick up on and stay up with — especially since we are never quite organized enough to reliably timeshift with the VCR (not only is it a serious, error-laden pain, with the digital cable box, but it’s just not something that we do enough for force of habit to kick in).

All of this ties into why I’d love to have a TiVo, and Margie would love not to have one.

And if that’s the biggest conflict we have in our marriage, we are truly blessed.

Anyway, that’s also a long intro to the subject at hand. See, we have plenty of friends who do watch a lot of TV, and who get hooked on TV series, etc. Doyce and Jackie in particular. And the nature of our friendships is that we get a lot of TV show dialog floating around, and “Hey, this reminds me of that scene in [fill in the name of the hot show] last week” moments.

Buffy and Angel have both been such shows, and Doyce went though Heroic Video Tape Efforts one year getting us caught up with both series by the season finale. I greatly appreciated it, and felt vaguely guilty that we immediately dropped behind the next season. And once of these days, I’ll borrow his DVDs and catch up again …

Anyway, the most recent series to get this treatment has been Alias. Not to be confused with the excellent Bendis comic of the same name (which, to avoid such confusion, will be changing its name to Pulse in February), Alias is a smart, hip spy tale, full of intrigue and double-crosses and kickboxing and betrayal and secret gadgets and cool stuff like that.

And I’d never watched an episode, even though Doyce kept waxing lyrical about the whole thing, and Jackie, too. It just wasn’t on our radar, wasn’t something worth making the effort to watch, it seemed, given the tremendous inertia in our household to doing so.

But once I started up my Spycraft game, that was a thing of the past. Doyce did everything but tie me down, clip my eyelids open, and force me to watch the pilot episode on bootleg VCD.

And, yes, it was really keen, and a lot of fun, and the music was great, and the story was twisted, and the actors were fine, and I really wanted Margie to see it, too, but huddlin around the PC just wasn’t going to happen.

And then the Season 1 DVDs came out last week.

And Monday evening, Jackie and Doyce showed up at our doorstep, Jackie holding a bag full of ice cream, Doyce holding a box full of Alias. And we started watching it.

And we’ll watch some more tonight.

Very cool.