the weekly whinge

So I’m reading all the hoo-hah about the arty ending to The Sopranos and it occurs to me that this is yet another cult American TV series which I don’t get, along with Six Feet Under and The West Wing (off the top of my head).

I don’t know why but everyone goes on about them as if they’re just amazing but when I rented the whole first series of The West Wing I ended up watching about three episodes and going “what?”…

Lost, err, lost itself in the second series (about episode 208 it completely disintegrated into rubbish-ness), Prison Break became a completely different show after they broke out of prison (well, yeah, I guess that was to be expected :)) and ground to a halt for me when they all started digging holes looking for buried treasure.

OK, 24 is still great and Kiefer is still the God of Sunday nights, but even that has become a little tired since season 4. This last season was stuffed with new people who we don’t really care about and ended on such a complete nothing that I had to check that, yes, that was 24 hours and there wasn’t another one to come.

Yes, we used to watch a load of stuff – Frasier has some of the funniest moments of TV ever and Friends was mandatory Friday night viewing, while Sex and the City kept us laughing for all six series – but they’ve ended (in Friends’ case, thankfully, it has to be said)

So the only other American TV we still watch and enjoy in our household is Desperate Housewives, heaven help us.

Maybe the only thing the Americans can do well any more for more than one season is torture and violence or sitcoms about what are essentially gay people played for the camera by heterosexuals…

I’ve kind-of forgotten what I was going to write about here, but, err, I think I got my point across 😉