It’s cold outside right now (12° up from -6° earlier today), but look at the forecast for Wednesday.

This is Vladivostok cold; battery-freezing cold.

Yikes.

TV ornament from Jade – a former co-worker

As just about every TV reviewer has noted at some point in the past few years, this is “peak TV” or “TV’s Golden Age” (or something similar).

Riding on the rising tide of cable with non-network offerings such as HBO and Showtime, the amount of quality television has accelerated with the streaming services – Netflix, Amazon Prime, HULU, CBS Direct – offering original content of their own. And more often than not, this original content actually is original – not another Law and Order knockoff or a stale sitcom. Think Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and Veep (The West Wing is what [liberals] want politics to be like; Veep is probably closer to reality. *shudder*).

Over the past few weeks, I read many “best of 2018” articles (books, movies, TV etc.), and one thing most TV critics had in common was a list of shows they hadn’t kept up with (season 7 of a long running show) or just hadn’t around to even starting (usually for a show in it’s first or second season). In most cases, the shows listed could be seen on other reviewers’ Top 10 lists – TV shows are so expansive yet impressive that those who get paid to watch TV couldn’t get around to watching highly regarded shows.

Says something.

Now, I like binging on TV shows – I have a lot of DVD seasons and I currently stream off Amazon Prime. And our library, Mount Prospect, IL, has a pretty good collection of DVDs to rent, both movies and TV shows (I burned through all of Boston Legal from library rentals a year or so ago).

Over this period, I have watched some magnificent TV – Mad Men, The Americans (I still haven’t finished this), and the afore-mentioned Veep.

However, I wan to focus on a few shows that I keep coming back to, watching over and over. For the most part they are just “OK” fare, and I could see someone not liking them.

In no particular order:

• Friends – Yes, lightweight but so popular. Some seasons/show arcs are better than others, but good clean fun. Hey, Netflix just ponied up $100 million to keep it for another year; it’s not just me watching…
• Monk – Tony Shaloub as an obsessive compulsive brilliant former San Francisco detective. There is an arc to the show – the one case he cannot solve is who killed his journalist wife – but each show is self-contained with a Colombo-like ending: “Here’s what happened…” Good cast of characters surround him that play (mainly) straight to his neurotic self, yet have quirks of their own. No life lessons or great art; just crime solving with brains instead of guns.
• White Collar – Premise: Master forger/thief/con man is let out of jail (on an ankle tracker) to help FBI find and arrest criminals…like him. Some good supporting characters, especially Mozzie (Willie Garson), and – like Monk – just fun, intellectual crime-solving. Downside: There’s some really bad acting in this show, in my opinion.
• Covert Affairs – Premise: Sexy (Piper Perabo; not really my type) Army brat who has great language skills joins the CIA in DC and becomes a covert agent. Lots of spy vs. spy hi-jinks. Fun, and set (maybe not shot) in locales around the world, from Italy to Thailand to Mexico.
• Suits – Premise: Brilliant, photographic memory guy who is not a lawyer hired by hotshot lawyer to work at his firm as a lawyer – with the full knowledge that he’s a fraud. The first few seasons were the best; Meghan Markle left the show to become UK royalty, and her brainiac husband left at the same time. From what I’ve read, the show went off a cliff after that. This show is a mixed bag; I didn’t purchase it, just rented from the library. I liked the shows where there were interesting cases and how they were resolved; there was too much of an emphasis at times of office politics/mergers etc. for my taste.
• Castle – Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion) is a rich and famous mystery writer (think Michael Connelly or James Patterson – both of whom appear in the show as themselves, at a periodic poker game). Stanford graduate (smart) and beautiful NYC homicide detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) notices similarities between her crime scene and a Castle book murder and asks for his input. Castle is both smitten by Beckett and real-life crime solving, and they become partners of sorts. Some goofy supporting characters, especially the other detectives. Like Monk, there is an arc around a murder (Beckett’s lawyer mother), but it’s more clunky than interesting.
• Burn Notice – CIA spy burned and returns home (Miami, FL) where, with the help of an old girlfriend (ex-IRA gunrunner) and old friend Sam, an ex-Navy Seal, he tries to figure out who burned him. Along the way – and this is the fun part – the trio use their spy/commando skills to help regular people who were scammed, getting threatened and so on. For some reason, they fire weapons, have high-speed car chases and blow up (stuff) more often than Bobby Knight did with a near-sighted ref, yet they never get arrested. And the Burn Notice guy has a great car – and old Dodge Charger – that has been blown up, hit, had stuff crush it, shot at countless times. It should look like a pile of metal shavings. But it keeps coming back, the paint on the car glistening like polished obsidian. Hey – it’s a TV show! Sharon Gless plays the Burn Notice’s chain-smoking mom, and she is great. And gets better as the show goes on.

That’s the bulk of my favorite binges, at least the ones I can recall right now.