Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Guilty Pleasure

Packrat and I haven't been going out the last few nights. We've been sleeping late. We haven't been doing whatever work we've needed to get done. We're blurry eyed in the morning and we stumble, trip and walk into things when traipsing across the landing to give our offspring milk in the wee hours of the morning; mostly because at that point, the both of us had just fallen asleep.

So what have we been up to? It's something we're doing together. It's something that's been keeping us talking. It gets us both riled up, hot and bothered, thumping at the sheets and occasionally caused the pillows to fly.

But nope. It isn't X rated.

For the last couple of nights, we've been living it up with the salacious and scintillating scandals of Manhattan's Upper East Siders. We've been watching Gossip Girl. I'd heard about it, as had Packrat but since we've generally had limited time and are already to watching so many tv shows, Grey's Anatomy (Me), Sarah Connor Chronicles (Packrat), Desperate Housewives (Me), Dollhouse (Packrat), CSI (Us) and have put some on hold, Heroes (Packrat), Brothers and Sisters (Me), BSG (Packrat)... we were reluctant to commit. But a friend lent it to us, enticing us by revealing that Kirsten Bell from Veronica Mars ( a series we are still mourning) plays the same role Brenda Strong plays in Desperate Housewives- the omniscient, never to be seen, always heard protagonist. On top of that, it's basically the lives of these spoilt teen heirs and heiresses who think $10 000 is a couple of "Manolo Blahniks and a Chanel Bag" but it is a blog. And Packrat and I, well more in the past than now, live on blogs.

That and the fact that the show despite its extremely ditzy premise draws elements of the other shows we've loved and lost. A show that draws us in, in the long term needs to have story, needs to be clever (The West Wing), needs to have clever dialogue (Friends, V Mars), preferably change lexicon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and even to a certain extent Grey's), needs to have characters that are not uni-dimensional; that one might start out hating but then realise half way through he's really not that bad (Spike from Buffy, Logan from V Mars) and preferably eye candy. And it wasn't always just about the clothes, the bags, the limousines and the private jets although that did make us wonder how the show was going to be received in a time of severe cutbacks and environmental degradation (carbon footprint much!), it was also about the relationships and the people. And it got us talking.

Even at 2 in the morning and having to be up at any time for the kids' feeds, Packrat and I would lay dissecting what we liked and didn't like, who we agreed with, why she shouldn't have done what she did to who she did it to and why he was justified in reacting the way he did about the thing she didn't do and so on till I had to surrender and admit that it was impossible for me to form another coherent sentence let alone thought.

But we're done with the first season, after the very intense 3 or 4 weeks of it. And we're feeling a little bit lost because we're going to miss our nightly iridescent companions. Just like how
" In every generation there is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer. "
is etched in our pop culture memory, as will
"Gossip Girl here. Your one and only source into the scandalous lives of Manhattan's elite. You know you want all the latest gossip. That's why I'm here.
You know you love me. XO XO"

There's no hiding good tv and there really ought to be more.

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Ondine tossed this thought in at 11:26

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