MAY 2025 - I DON'T WATCH TV ANYMORE

At least not like I used to. I grew up watching TV. As a child, I was enamored with my Saturday morning and weekday afternoon cartoons, as you might expect. Everything from HE-MAN AND THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, THUNDERCATS, and TRANSFORMERS to SUPER FRIENDS to THE SMURFS and GARFIELD AND FRIENDS. I also followed the adventures of THE DUKES OF HAZZARD and THE A-TEAM in live action. I watched TV all the time through elementary school, high school, and college. I took in the TV shows my parents grew up with via "Nick at Nite" and weekday syndication (I have very specific memories of watching THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW anytime I was home sick during elementary school). There were the TGIF sitcoms on ABC (PERFECT STRANGERS was always my favorite). Must-See TV on NBC. STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION and DEEP SPACE NINE during the nineties "Golden Age" of first-run syndication. In terms of animation, you had BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, X-MEN, and SPIDER-MAN on Fox Kids when I was in middle school and high school. Then DRAGON BALL Z and GUNDAM WING, among many others, on Toonami during college and beyond.

Then the early twenty-first century brought me THE OFFICE, PARKS AND RECREATION, 30 ROCK, MODERN FAMILY, and more in the comedy genre, as well as 24, PRISON BREAK, LOST, and a slew of other network dramas with a similar serialized feel. In a way, these were -- to me, at least, someone who didn't watch the pay cable channels like HBO and Showtime -- the precursors to "prestige" or "peak" television. Which I'm not sure why we call it that; it was never all good -- but by the later part of the 2000s, I was watching it. I was engrossed with MAD MEN, BREAKING BAD, and THE WALKING DEAD on AMC, and JUSTIFIED on FX, as well as -- having finally gotten an HBO subscription -- BOARDWALK EMPIRE and GAME OF THRONES.

I watched a lot of TV around that time, in the aughts and into the teens. And I liked most all of it. MAD MEN is one of my all-time favorite television experiences ever. I love that show; at the risk of a little hyperbole, I'd even say that I cherish it (or at least I do the first three seasons; I find that my interest plummets the further the narrative moves into the sixties). Likewise, JUSTIFIED, which I adored. GAME OF THRONES was great for the first several years. BREAKING BAD was amazing, but not something I'm particulary attached to; I can't really ever see myself watching it again. And I will never understand how THE WALKING DEAD became the cultural juggernaut that it remains to this day. I gave up on that one a few seasons in; it was too dark and depressing for me. The final scene I ever watched was when a certain baseball bat connected with a certain beloved character's face, and I never looked back (though I did often question why I had even stuck with it for that long, in hindsight).

But anyway -- now we're in the age of streaming. There's so much to choose from. STAR TREK is back in a big way, with multiple series on Paramount+ over the past several years. YELLOWSTONE is apparently the MAD MEN of the current era in terms of popularity and influence. But just as I skipped Netflix's HOUSE OF CARDS when everyone was raving about it a decade-plus back, I haven't touched any of these streaming shows. I kind of lost interest in keeping up with the streaming model around the time my son was born. Certainly, in part it was due to more limited time. I had been watching all the Marvel Netflix shows, but stopped. To this day I've never seen the final seasons of most of them. I've tried to watch the new STAR WARS and Marvel series on Disney+, but have only managed to get to a few.

And the funny thing is, I don't mind. At some point I realized that all this stuff was overwhelming and I just sort of washed my hands of it -- and for me personally, that feels good. I watch reality competition shows like SURVIVOR and THE AMAZING RACE with my wife. She also still watches -- gasp -- network television in the form of shows like LAW & ORDER and NCIS, as well as the new MATLOCK reboot, WILL TRENT, and similar programs -- things I had never had an interest in years ago, but now I'm more than happy to settle down and watch them with her. And I really like them; I find that they're much more palatable to me than all the flashy, profanity-laden and sometimes overly violent streaming shows.

Oh, we're also both addicted to DATELINE on NBC. (I'm not really a "true crime" person, but there's something about that particular show that I really like; I think it's largely due to the correspondents and how they frame their narratives. We've tried watching the occasional true crime documentary on NetFlix or what-have-you, and I can never get into them because there's usually no on-camera storyteller dramatically narrating events and directly interviewing the various talking heads.)

Maybe my tastes are becoming tamer as a I get older; I don't know. That can't be all there is to it. My dad and my mother-in-law, both in their seventies, watch a bunch of those afore-mentioned profane and violent streamers. But I find that I take after my mom, who pretty much only watches old movies and listens to old radio shows from the 1930s, forties, and fifties -- I would simply much rather rewatch an old show I know I like, or even watch an old show from the eighties or nineties that I know I will probably like, than try to keep up with the countless streaming series -- or even to pick a few streamers and watch only them. And I find that nowadays I vastly prefer plain ordinary FCC-approved network procedurals with light inter-episode contuity over deeply serialized, overly complex dramatic epics unrestrained by conventional broadcast standards.

I also have to say -- and I know this is gonna make me sound old -- I feel like it's a lot harder to find shows to watch as a family nowadays. When I was a kid, there were certainly some primtime dramas not suitable for kids, but there were also shows like, say, the original MAGNUM P.I., which were entertaining for adults, but tame enough that kids (by which I mean maybe ages 10+) could watch them as well. I feel like that sort of programming is much harder to find nowadays. In terms of TV, most everything seems either aimed directly at children, or is "intended for mature audiences." The few shows you find that are family appropriate are often the more, shall we say, poorly conceived and/or written ones. I miss when there was a middle ground with quality content.

Now! Moving on...

HOW'S THAT BANNER COMING ALONG?

Well... at the moment, it isn't. Like I said last time, I've really only been working on the project when I have time, and I haven't had much of that lately (and to be honest, when I have had some free moments, I've dedicated them to other personal projects). Indeed, the reason I missed posting in April was because I was holding this space open for an update on the banner that never came to be. This entire post was written except for one paragraph, and I let that hold me up from posting at all last month!

Maybe there will be an update next time, but for now...

WHAT ARE WE READING THIS MONTH?

Well, as with the past couple months, it's actually something I read a while back. But we'll catch up to my present-day reading list eventually. For now I want to discuss yet another classic comic strip, RIP KIRBY by Alex Raymond. Legend (not to mention actual history) has it that Raymond left his creation, FLASH GORDON, to enlist in the Marines during World War II, and the FLASH strip was turned over to his assistant, Austin Briggs. When Raymond was discharged, he returned to the King Features Syndicate, ready to resume drawing FLASH, which he felt had suffered some under Briggs. But King liked Briggs on the strip, and eventually after some back-and-forth negotations, it was decided that Raymond would launch a new strip -- a private eye feature about a modern, sophisticated "gentleman detective" named Remington "Rip" Kirby.

Some time back -- like, probably seven or eight years now! -- I picked up the full run of Raymond's RIP KIRBY, as published by The Library of American Comics via IDW. This covers the series' launch in 1946 up to Raymond's untimely death a decade later. And in late 2024, I finally sat down to read the first volume! As with many of the newspaper strips I've looked at over the years, my primary interest was due to the artwork. In the foreword to one of the RIP KIRBY books, Howard Chaykin says that Alex Raymond essentially invented the "photorealistic comic strip" which became the standard borne by so many other great artists in the years that followed -- Stan Drake on JULIET JONES, Leonard Starr on MARY PERKINS, Al Williamson on SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN and STAR WARS, and many others -- all followed, per Chaykin, in Raymond's massive footsteps.

And I have to say, the artwork is very good in these first few years of RIP KIRBY, though sometimes not quite up to snuff, in my opinion, when compared with Raymond's work years earlier on FLASH GORDON. But at the same time, we must realize that on FLASH, Raymond was drawing one strip every Sunday. on KIRBY, he's doing six strips a week, Monday through Saturday! He would naturally need to drop some detail from his style in order to maintain such a workload. And, looking forward at some of the later KIRBY books, it's clear that Raymond does eventually adapt and reach a point where his work looks just as good as the old FLASH material, in its own different way.

So yes, it was the artwork that drew me in on RIP KIRBY, but it's the writing that kept me reading. Kirby investigates everything from mobsters and racketeers to kidnapped children. The inaugural story arc introduces a villain -- set to be recurring, though he hasn't yet come back up to the point I've read (and I'm currently at this moment partway into volume 2) -- named the Mangler; a scarred mob boss who is ultimately undone via the betrayal of his moll, Pagan Lee. Pagan reforms and becomes a recurring character, popping up every few storylines to flirt with Rip and throw a wrench into his relationship with his girlfriend, a model named Honey Dorian. But Honey has her own suitors as well, though they typically wind up involved in some sort of murder scheme that brings Rip onto the case.

As you can see, it's a soap opera -- but unlike JULIET JONES, which I discussed last month, the soapiness plays second fiddle to the detective stories. And while I will be first to admit that the mysteries are typically easy to figure out and we readers will often arrive at the solution prior to Rip, that is in part because the narrative sometimes gives us information or insight that he doesn't yet have within the story.

Unlike JULIET JONES, which I felt ready to set aside after one volume, Rip Kirby was hard to put down! I finished the first volume with the intention of moving along to something else -- an dso I did, however briefly -- but then I dove straight back into it with the second book. I'm curious to see if it will continue to maintain its spell when I finish volume 2, or if at that point I will be able to set it aside!