NaPoWriMo Day Five

I’ve been talking a lot about a TV book that I’ve been working on, and I just made a big decision about the book today (one exciting only to me), so I worked on it instead of writing a new poem. It’s like a poem.

WATCHING 33

Actual news footage when it’s mostly cops walking outside of the crime scene tape.

When my most political act is passively aggressively not sending out thank-you notes after my son’s birthday party. The trauma of my petty Madame Bovarian despair is at the core of all my watching.

In true crime reenactments, when the actors are thinner or fatter or more beautiful or uglier than the people they’re playing, what authenticities does the director want?

All the moms and their bottles of wine. My mother’s sex life.

On The Walking Dead, it would smell terribly everywhere. On The Walking Dead, they probably would have terrible teeth. There should be many more flies on The Walking Dead.

The television show that’s about swimming upstream.

Andrew Lincoln played a schoolteacher on a British television show. He drinks a lot and each episode of the show begins with the weekday imprinted in some improbable place. His face is different.

When the shows melt together, which ones melt together like The Walking Dead and Lost or The Walking Dead and M.A.S.H.

The more they call them names, the more you know you’re beating them.

Television, so noisy. Lost my body in my spectatorship. I wish I could use my love of television as a way of making money.

Is this place secure from walkers? Art is never without consequences.

The hypertextual k-hole of watching shows on the computer. I can read about the actors, watch their sex tapes, find out their hometowns.

The shows that I hate-watch.

Leslie Knope: That Chimeric Democracy We Fancy.

The nerdy guy from Breaking Bad is the nerdy guy on The Walking Dead. Does he know this?

Intervention is a synthetic catharsis. The very best shows are.

Something is always happening on Gray's Anatomy. Shit is always going down. A character literally gets hit by a bus. A boy gets impaled by a fence, a plane crash, a train crash happens. A brain tumor, a hostage situation, an explosion.

The 21^st century sitcom feels like its written by the book, yet the post-ironic, neurotic chatter distinguishes it from its hammier predecessors.

TV, you have my permission.

The voiceover is subliminal self-help, but Meredith’s strange lisp distracts me.

How will the show reinvent itself after they move on to other hospitals? On television, jobs are purgatorial affairs.

I read a book while I watch the show. When I feel vigorous and shining, I like the way Gray’s Anatomy plays as backdrop to all of the work I do. I can drop in and out while I fold laundry.

We don’t need a time machine when TV wrings so much from tragedy.

Television drama: not catharsis but flattening the fluttering and frenetic self to a tidy archive. The show sells the evolution of self, a redoing. The television show is after all a language event, an accounting of the self.

The more…beating them- Alicia Florrick on The Good Wife

Art…consequences-Bertolt Brecht