2006 TV Withdrawal: A Step By Step Cure
June 5, 2006
The fall television season is over and, as sad as it sounds to actually say that, knowing that we have an entire summer to slog through without new episodes of our favorite shows, it’s the truth, and us diehard tube jockey’s just have to suck it up and get on with life. Going through the inevitable withdrawal is a difficult process, but it doesn’t have to be, for you see I’ve developed a cheap and easy way to ease into the summer with as little pain as possible, and though the urge is great to charge $19.99, minus shipping and handling, for a DVD presentation of this new revolutionary system, I’m going to be generous and offer it up for free to my faithful readers as a token of my appreciation, and well, because I’m pretty sure I don’t know how to create and market a self help DVD. In a few easy steps, I’ll painstakingly show you, the average television obsessed couch potato, how to let go of what was a brilliant television season and dive headlong into the hot, dry days of summer that we’re currently starring down, wobbly and frightened, like a sweaty pitcher bearing down on a menacing Albert Pujols. You may be skeptical, you may be weary, you may even be a little bit afraid, but believe me, this system of three steps is tried and true (it will win awards when it’s finally published in the science journals), and if at the end of this tutorial you still feel the DT’s of TV withdrawal coming on, I’ll offer a healthy apology (legally binding), and suggest that you need immediate counseling, and some kind of social life beyond ‘X-Men’ movies and Wednesday night at the Pizza Hut buffet.
Since my budget for the experiments I needed to conduct to perfect this system – which I eventually called the Psychological Effects of the End of May Sweeps (and the Prospects of Using the Off Button and Getting On With it) On the Hopeless Television Obsessed Introvert – was shocking low, I couldn’t pay for test subjects, so I naturally used myself, and after about a weeks worth of prodding, speculating, probing, crying, poking, and numerous black outs, the initial system was set, and nobody but one poor soul was harmed in the process. In my research of my own psychological fragility at the end of the May Sweeps period I found that Step One in easing off of the dense television season is to personally understand, and accept, what you did, and did not like about the way your favorite shows left you for the season. In probing that question of my habits, I came to the conclusion that I loved the way “24” found a way to end it’s mesmerizing fifth season with a cliffhanger that nobody saw coming. As if the day wasn’t long enough for Jack Bauer (sadly Emmy-less Keifer Sutherland), what with his finally figuring out how to take down the duplicitous President Logan (hooray for invisible recording devices), and having to cope with the fact that he is indeed the most ruthless killing machine in the history of heroic government television types (body count: incalculable), he was beaten, in the shocking final five minutes, and kidnapped by the Chinese for his raid on their embassy last season. In the back of my mind the Chinese storyline was always lingering, but I thought the producers had forgotten about it, but it turns out they were waiting us out, comfortable enough with the Logan plotline to wait until the final minutes to spring on us what should be the basis for another riveting season on Fox’s best show. I thought “24” had the most exciting, satisfying finale of all my favorite shows (the downfall of Logan was both sad and triumphant, a testament to the masterful performance of Gregory Itzin), but I watch a lot of TV, and Step One will only be complete once all of my viewings have been properly digested and stored. Unfortunately that could take three weeks, and indeed, when I present this report to the National Endowment for Recovering Television Sociopaths (the NERTS), it will be chock full of analysis on everything from the “Survivor” reunion to the death of Vito on “The Sopranos”, but for the sake of moving on to Step Two, we’ll just say that, as far as finales go, Jack being shipped to Shanghai on a Chinese freighter, after 24 hours of pure madness, takes the cake, and properly deserves my seal of approval as the year’s most exciting conclusion.
Step Two of my system is similar to Step One in that it still involves contemplating the final hours of a beloved sitcom or drama, but it takes it a step further, incorporating speculation into why what you saw was important, and predictions on where it will lead. In the realm of speculation and prediction, no show is more rife with puzzlement than “Lost”, my favorite show on TV, and in the great two-hour finale of season two we were privy to more than a few revelations, yet almost twice as many head-scratching new mysteries. One thing we learned was that the famed button in the hatch, which Locke thought was some kind of cruel B.F. Skinner experiment by the Dharma brain trust, did indeed need to be pushed, and that when it isn’t, a great wave of electromagnetic energy (like the one that crashed Oceanic flight 815 when dear old Desmond, off killing his roommate, failed to properly administer the numbers in time) bursts into the atmosphere with a gigantic flash and deafening roar. Also, on the other side of the island, we learned that, prior to previous beliefs, Henry Gale (Michael Emerson) is the leader of the Others, and that, his experiments with Walt sufficiently over, he now needs Jack, Kate, and Sawyer to further construct his Utopia. When Michael asks, prior to his freedom with his son, who exactly Henry and his cadre is, Gale, in iconic Galeian fashion simply says, “We’re the good guys.” Never have the good guys been this creepy before, or for that matter, this mysteriously fascinating. In conclusion to my analysis of this mesmerizing, one-of-a-kind mythologically complex drama, the show I find hardest to let go of for four months, I theorize that next season we’ll begin to get the back-stories of Henry and crew (are they rebels of Dharma’s failed experiments?), confront a bitter John Locke, now re-paralyzed by the blast and lack of magnetic power that originally cured him (his “I was wrong” to Mr. Eko before the blast was a heartbreaking admission), and finally get some inclusion of the outside world, be it through Michael’s rescue or Penny Widmore’s attempts to track down her lost love Desmond, the Odysseus to her sad and lonely Penelope. Once you get past something as moving and complex as “Lost” (at least until the season comes out on DVD), than you’re almost finished; proceed to the final step to find your ultimately withdrawal salvation.
Okay, by now you’ve aired your criticisms and formulated your analysis of your favorite shows and their much anticipated finales, itching to move on once and for all to the summer, but you can’t quite get there, for just thinking about the shows makes you long for new episodes even more. I know what you mean, because in conducting these extensive experiments on my fragile psyche, trying desperately to figure out a way to get through not having new episodes of “Lost” and “House” for four months, I came to the conclusion that, to finally get over the end of the dense fall season you have to, you guessed it, watch more TV, thus Step Three weans you off the fall with a slate of new summer programming designed specifically to get you by without so much as one panic attack or sweaty palm. You don’t need to watch as much, mind you, as you did during the May Sweeps period, but you need to take up a summer series (“Deadwood” and “Entourage” are my picks), watch some of the Stanley Cup (which of course you’d be doing anyway if the Sabres had advanced), take in Shaq, Dirk, and the amazing Dwayne Wade in the NBA finals, jump on the bandwagon of the first place New York Mets, witness the final episodes of the fourth season of the World Poker Tour (this is a personal suggestion, not mandatory to your completing the program), or finally, just catch up on repeats of the shows you couldn’t watch during the season due to conflict in time slots. Mix this new dose of viewing with a healthy smattering of extracurricular activities (golf, gambling, romance, etc…), and a frequent trip to the movie house to catch up on the big-screen offerings (which does, in these days, pail to stuff like “24” and “Lost”, I know, but it’s still essential), and before you know it it’ll be September, football will be starting, the Emmy Awards will be here to frustrate television critics nationwide, and the countdown to the ’06-’07 fall season will be ticking down to zero. Let’s just hope, for the betterment of the TV landscape, such a countdown will end with another exciting batch of new series and the continuing evolution of old favorites, and not, as was the case in the Swan hatch, with a great white flash of magnetic nothingness.
by Adam Suraf