Enjoy "Game of Thrones;" I Have My Own Obsessions

5/19/2019

Fearless Kate McKinnon as bizarre public figures

I've never seen “Game of Thrones.” Never saw “Dallas” or “Empire” or “Sex and the City” or "The Wire," for that matter.

This is not a value judgment. I do understand.

I’ve watched exactly one series since our children were home and we watched “M*A*S*H” and “All in the Family.”

I can relate to people who watch their compelling series because I fell hard for “The Sopranos,” oh, a few years back.

I schemed and plotted so I could be home in front of the tube on Sunday night to feel my blood grow cold and my breath constricted as Tony Soprano killed and lied and cheated -- and I rooted for him to survive.

My entire week was built around Tony and Carmela. I remember once on a drive through the Appalachians, stopping at motels until, on a converted strip mine above Hazard, Ky., I found one place that had “HBO.”

(In my fevered mind, Tony and Carmela moved to Boca Raton, had their identities and fingerprints altered, and are sitting by the pool, safe, grandparents and churchgoers.)

Enjoy your obsession. I have a few of my own – The Mets are the only team I watch (may have to reconsider this season), and I also watch high-end soccer (The Women’s World Cup from France, this summer.)

I have also watched more hours of The Bureau of Wishful Thinking (i.e. MSNBC) than was good for me. Every morning I wake up and find the Times on my doorstep and realize that guy and his cohorts were still here.

Lately, I've been reading more, and listening to classical music. Just to stay sane. And for the past few years we have forced ourselves to stay awake until the cold opening of “Saturday Night Live.”

After decades, I have gone back to “SNL” because….because….it is still there, having just concluded its 44th season last night.

Entire careers on “SNL” came and went while I was on the road or staying up late with friends, but lately I have revived memories of our kids being home and watching Gilda and Steve and Bill and Dan and Chevy (and in some blip of time more recently, the brilliant Tina Fey.)

I understand TV obsessions because lately I have had mine – watching Alec Baldwin or Ben Stiller or Robert DeNiro do guest riffs, impersonating people in the news.

“SNL” is terribly uneven – a lot of spoofs of game shows or social situations I do not claim to understand, and “musicians” who mostly hop around and point their fingers.

But sometimes it catches fire. One of the best shows – maybe ever – was in early March when John Mulaney took over the 90 minutes, with his own monologues and even busting some moves and cool as a white guy at a black music party.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mSGwndFMp8

The overdue arrival of black performers and black perspective has sustained me in recent years. I loved Chance the Rapper and cast members doing a soul song called “Come Back, Barack,” with a bittersweet take.
q=youtube+snl+come+back+barack&rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS751US751&oq=youtube+snl+come+back+barack&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64.4749j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

If my wife or I doze off during the show, we wake each other for the “Weekend Update” with Colin Jost and Michael Che because they often serve as straight men, letting talented cast members go wild.

My real obsession is Kate McKinnon, who fearlessly shifts from foul-mouthed, cigarette-puffing harpies to evil garden trolls with sparse hair and menacing grins like Jeff Sessions and Rudy Giuliani.

Other times she is absolutely beautiful. For me, she is advancing into Gilda-and-Tina territory. I fear the day she moves on, as most of them do.

Anyway, enjoy the finale of “Game of Thrones.” I understand.

bruce

5/19/2019 05:55:13 pm

george,

g'day.

i watched dallas once. the others not at all.

cbs had a very good saturday night lineup during mash and all in the family's time. bob newhart was very enjoyable. one of my favourite 3-4 comedians when he was performing regularly along with pryor and carlin.

you're right about the sopranos. i was a devoted fan.still not sure what i think happened in the final episode. i lean toward they wouldn't do it in front of his family or kill the lot of them. however, things were nastier than usual toward the end.

i never watched mad men until they ran all the episodes to set up the last season.

i haven't watched SNL for years. got state.

big canadian influence originally. michaels, shuster, aykryoyd, short, hartman.....

off topic, but the blue jays' vlad jr is starting to hit homers. #1 prospect in baseball so they had high expectations.

bruce

Marty Appel

5/19/2019 07:09:48 pm

I’m pretty sure the guy who looked like Carl Yastrzemski got Tony and maybe Carmela and Meadow and A.J. at the restaurant. Just sayin’.

bruce

5/19/2019 07:15:00 pm

marty,

I guess that's why they wrote it the way they did so we'd wonder wonder who.....

didn't notice the yaz look.

bruce

Josh Rubin

5/20/2019 10:04:37 am

My obsession for a while was Mad Men. I am jut now getting around to the Sopranos. Excellent writing and plotting.

Here's an old person trick re: SNL. The best bits are always streamable the next day. You don't have to stay up late, or alter plans, to see them, and you don't have to sit through the commercials or the bad skits. .

Now, if only someone would invent a Mets app through which you can watch only the wins.

Altenir

5/21/2019 08:34:22 am

Dear George:
Thanks for sharing these nice TV moments. I love many TV shows, but you are right: The Sopranos and SNL are incredible. My list also has Mad Men and Seinfeld. I saw (read), I see (read), and I will see (read) these shows forever.
Best - Altenir

Alan Rubin link

5/22/2019 10:25:31 pm

Movies have been a major joy in my life since I first began going at the age of eight. My family was living at 190th Street and Fort Washington Avenue in Manhattan’s Washington Heights. There were about six movie theaters on 181st Street from Broadway to about three blocks east. There was also one from a major chain on 175th Street and Broadway.

It was a much safer time in the 1940’s and my parents never worried when my friends and I went there on our own.

You also received a lot for your money; an A and a B movie, cartoon, newsreel, and sometimes a short documentary. Although it would be sacrilegious today, it was common to arrive after the movie had begun and stay until the part where you came in.

The movie theaters in Bethlehem, PA only showed one movie, so my fellow Lehigh University New York friends and I would often go from one theater to another as a substitute for a double feature. It was difficult for us to adjust to only one movie.

Sandi and I receive our TV programming from the Dish satellite company. Since I can greatly expand my viewing choices through streaming on Amazon Stick and Apple TV, I could do away with Dish except that we also watch Jeopardy and PBS.

Although I enjoyed the entire Game of Thrones series on HBO, it was also a big disappointment. I had listened to all of the books on Audible in my car, a total of 200 hours and the writing was brilliant.
I spend a minimum of 1-2 hours daily in the car as the nearest market is 3 miles away and the recreation center where I swim is 8 miles away.

Yes, there has been some really great entertainment on TV over the years. These are some of our old and newer favorites:

Cheers,Taxi,Playhouse 90, Breaking Bad, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Wanted-an Australian tale of two female strangers on the run who witness a mob rub-out at a bus stop,Big Little Lies, Better Call Saul and Seinfeld to name a few.

Saturday Night Live is not what it used to be, but maybe the humor is meant for a younger audience. Similarly, Comedy Central falls short.

Johnny Carson was a joy to watch, but my favorites late night shows were the Steve Allen and Ernie Kovaks shows. Today, if I’m up that late, I’m reading books by historians.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Enjoy "Game of Thrones;" I Have My Own Obsessions

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