Well, it's no secret that I watch a lot of TV. I mean a lot of TV. I'm billing my time as 'research for my future career as a star actress'. Ahem. That being said, though, I don't just watch any old TV show. I only watch the good ones. But it's not terribly avantgarde to say that I love to watch House, Lost, The Office and Battlestar Galactica, no matter how good they are. (And they are very, very good.) No sir - those of discerning tastes like me (Ahem #2) also seek out the programmes that are excellent, but are not necessarily mainstream favourites...yet.
Here are two of my favourites that, if they aren't on your radar already, they really should be:
This show has such a solid footing in my TV viewing time, that it never ceases to amaze me when I hear of people that don't watch it - or have never heard of it. Co-created by JJ Abrams (Lost), Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci for Fox Television, it's a show about an FBI Fringe Division Team investigating occurences of "fringe" science (a child locked in an airless cave for 70 years that is still alive - and still a child, a man whose dark emotions can infect others causing otherwise unexplained murders and suicides) that are all connected in something called "The Pattern".
It's similar to The X-Files back in its heyday, only not nearly as convoluted. The show got off to a slow start, but was interesting enough that we kept watching it. Now it is one of the shows that I most look forward to each week. The show is not only well written, it is impeccably acted. The biggest treat is John Noble (All Saints, Lord of the Rings) as Walter Bishop, a former government researcher who was institutionalized after a lab accident. It's a difficult job to play a modern-day mad scientist, and he is note perfect - believably brilliant and comically insane. Offsetting him is the dry wit of his troubled son, played by Joshua Jackson (yes, Pacey from Dawson's Creek!). Their father-son relationship is the best written - and acted - one I've seen on TV in a long, long time.
Airing on Showtime, The United States of Tara is a dramedie created by Diablo Cody (Juno) and starring Toni Collette (The Sixth Sense, About a Boy, Muriel's Wedding). Collette plays Tara Gregson, a wife and mother suffering from dissociate identity disorder following a traumatic event in school. With her family's consent, she decides to take a break from her medication to get to the the root of her disorder, and thus her alternate personalities start emerging again: Alice, the perfect 50's homemaker; T, a wild teenager; and Buck, a beer-drinking, redneck man.
I'm not certain that this show has hit its stride yet, but I find it so fascinating that I feel compelled to watch it. Collette is one of my favourite actresses (she gives me hope that women who are not conventionally good-looking can indeed make it in Hollywood), and she handles the switches from character to character deftly and truthfully. But it's the relationships that I find so interesting. The husband (played by John Corbett) who is so patient with her disorder until he finally reaches his breaking point. What was it? The kids who are messed up mini-adults who take care of their mother when they can't take care of themselves. The sister, who is jealous of the attention her sister gets and thinks she's 'faking' the disorder. It's all so messy. I love it.
Those are the programmes that make my shortlist. Tell me, what are you watching that isn't a global phenomenom yet? And why should I watch it too??
picture credit: Starpulse.com
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