BrockLi Soup

My TV viewing habits are not your garden variety ER addiction. I almost never watch shows on TV, because I can find the good ones online the day after they’re on.

Plus, I never remember when shows are on.

This affords me a fair bit of flexibility. I can, for example, watch an episode of Arrested Development during my lunch break, or watch seven consecutive episodes of Family Guy if I’m putting off a final project. I go on streaks where I’ll watch all existing episodes of a particular series - my second year, it was That 70’s Show, last year was Friends, and this year was The Simpsons. Somewhere in there, I’ve seen Arrested Development and Scrubs all the way through twice each.

BP has been making a run through Scrubs again, so I’ve been watching some of them with him. Somehow, we wound up a season apart, so I started over from the beginning. I guess this is my series for the summer.

My guilty pleasure lately has been bad sitcoms. I don’t have any justification for my actions - sometimes, you just need to watch mindless TV.

It started with the Friends spin-off Joey. I only watched it the first time because I was so into Friends last year. It’s really not a good show: Joey is the only one from the original cast, he moved from New York to LA, and the episodes thus far really don’t make the viewer care about the characters.

Regardless, I can’t stop watching it. It’s like some cheap drug that makes you giggle for half an hour. Even as I watch it, I’m thinking This is crap, but I download a new episode every week.

My most recent addiction has been Life on a Stick, starring the burger punk from Super Troopers. No one that saw the commercial thought it would be any good. This show is so scripted and so canned that I can’t help but enjoy it. It’s like a half hour of one-liners: none of it feels like conversation, but it’s still watchable. Most of the actors seem to realize their lines are absurd and deliver them the same way most of my friends would deliver a deliberately corny joke. There’s no flow and it’s mostly crap, but I love it anyway.

There are only about a half-dozen shows I watch on a weekly basis - Arrested Development, Malcolm in the Middle, The Simpsons, and Scrubs fill out the list - so these are the only two that I divulge in for now. I’ll keep you posed on crap TV you just can’t hate.