TV Watching Update: The Good Place, the Doctor Who Marathon & Other Stuff

My quest to watch more TV stole a day from me. And it took my family down with me.

Curse this television monkey on my back!

Over on BBC America, they’ve been running their Doctor Who marathon, counting down to the new series premiere on October 7^th.  On Saturday, the marathon was up to David Tennant’s first season as the Doctor and when I flipped on the telly (I’m in a British frame of mind), the episode just coming on at that point was “School Reunion”.  This is the one where classic series companion Sarah Jane Smith returns (as well as K9) to help the Doctor, Rose and Mickey fight off bat aliens who have invaded a school and are being led  by Rupert Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Seriously , Anthony Head as Mr. Finch is nefarious, creepy and just plain freaking evil.  


“School Reunion” is a family favorite. We still quote K9 from this episode: “We are in a car.” Whenever we are in a car.  It’s a pretty lame thing to do. Mostly it’s my wife Andrea who does that while my daughter Randie just rolls her eyes.

Following “School Reunion”, the next episode is “The Girl in the Fireplace”, a total epic classic from the pen of Steven Moffatt. It takes place in space in the 51^st century and in 18^th century France. There are killer clockwork robots, a smoking hot courtesan to the King of France, the invention of the banana daiquiri and a horse. A horse! On a spaceship!  What is there not to love? Yes, this thing is loaded with plot holes and contrivances but I don’t care. “The Girl in the Fireplace” is to the modern era what “City of Death” is to the classic era. A classic!  

After this episode, we decided we couldn’t spend the day oozing into the living room furniture watching Doctor Who.

Instead, after lunch, we booted up Netflix to burn our way through a few more episodes of season two of The Good Place. Then we reached a point where we realized that whatever we were going to accomplish for that day was well and truly not going to happen now and changed our strategy to burning all the way through season two of The Good Place. And then to put a ring on it, we flipped over to the DVR and watched the season 3 premiere from this past Thursday. 

After that, I had to lie down for a nap.

Seriously. I took a nap.  

OK, it’s not just that my body can’t handle the endurance test of binging a whole bunch of episodes of a TV show at one time. Well, yeah, there is that. But it’s also that The Good Place is quite a challenging experience. It’s funny as all get out and thought provoking.  But the series does challenge a lot of assumptions of how a TV series should work.  Episode 1 of Season 1 establishes a premise: a recently deceased young woman named Eleanor is in a good person afterlife but  her previous life on Earth demonstrates she does not belong there. By the time we get to Episode 1 of Season 3, we’re still following that theme but everything introduced in the beginning of this series has been upended, reversed, inverted and deconstructed. Eleanor is still trying to be a better person but now she’s doing it on Earth. Her eternal soul is still in the balance thanks to machinations of powerful entities who are incredulous of human behavior. It’s all very funny but it can be a bit heavy thematically.

So I took a nap.  

Before we move on from The Good Place, I got to take a moment to sing the praises of how hot Jameela Jamil is.   Her character Tahani Al-Jamil is an irritatingly pretentious name dropping snob who becomes a more tolerable as she realizes she's an irritatingly pretentious name dropping snob. Yeah, I know I shouldn't make a point of focusing on how attractive she is but damn, this girl is hot. 

And Eleanor thinks so too so it's not just a guy thing, OK?   

After dinner, Andrea and I went back to BBC America and picked up on some more Doctor Who: Army of Ghosts, Doomsday (Andrea still insists the Doctor was about to confess he loved Rose; I remain insistent that no, he would not do that) and The Runaway Bride. Russell T Davies was in the zone with this batch of stories.   

One thing I need to comment on: how badly BBC America chops up Doctor Who reruns. For example, there’s a moment at the end of The Runaway Bride where the Doctor invites Donna to join him.  She turns him down but he hopes he does find someone to travel with. Because, she thinks, the Doctor needs someone to stop him. On Saturday night, BBC America completely lopped off that bit. Nope, the Doctor zapped the TARDIS bulb with the sonic screwdriver to make it snow then gets in the TARDIS to fly away. The end.

Really, BBC America. What the hell?  

I did not stay up to watch it live but I did catch up the next day on the season premiere of Saturday Night Live. The cold open was a brilliant piece with Matt Damon appearing as Brett Kavanaugh, bristly with anger and righteous indignation and a love of beer. And Kate McKinnon scores as Sen. Lindsey Graham as a barely constrained rage monster. As for the rest of the show, it was kind of meh. My favorite sketch was a Career Day bit where host Adam Driver completely leans into the role of Abraham H. Parnassus, an ancient oil baron whose advice to the kids is to “crush your enemies into the dirt!” 

Monday night, we got sucked in by BBC America again to watch The Stolen Earth and Journey's End, the epic finale of Series 4 with the most heartbreaking way a companion has ever been written out EVER and with whole chunks of scenes lobbed out by BBC America's indiscriminate editing. 

This bit right here? Wilf's parting words to the Doctor?
BBC America cut that out! 

I watched an episode or two of the 3rd season of Kimmy Schmidt. Once I've caught up on that, I'm debating which series I want to catch up on next, Parks and Recreation or New Girl? 

Meanwhile, new stuff is coming up for my family to watch with the season premiers of Doctor Who (of course!) and Supergirl coming up. The CW has moved Supergirl to Sundays where Doctor Who will also be on BBC America. I'm assuming we'll watch Doctor Who live and catch up on Supergirl on DVR later. 

Watching TV is a lot of work. 

I think I'll go lie down for a bit.