Hooked on Series

Posted on 28/03/2023 by Grumpa Joe

Two TV programs have sunk their hooks into me and won’t let go. The most recent one I began watching is House of Cards with Kevin Spacey. The story line intrigues me as I want to believe that our Congressmen are not as stupid and conniving as depicted. Because I love conspiracy theories this program gets my attention because it deals with behind the scene activity of our Congress. It highlights the politics of getting bills passed. More than that it highlights the amount of back stabbing and favor trading that goes on between congressmen. Spacey uses the trick of giving “asides” where he looks directly at the audience and explains what is going on in his mind during dialogues with colleagues in negotiations.

The second most watched series is New Amsterdam a story about New York City’s first hospital which treats all people. The theme is definitely pro-socialist medicine. What saves the show is the main character who is played by actor Ryan Eggold. He plays the part of Max Reynolds the hospital Director not as a stiff suited administrator but as a scrub attired doctor whose main mission is to help people.

I must admit that I have a penchant for medical drama dating back to Dr. Ben Casey in black and white television days. Maybe it is because I spent a big chunk of my life in hospitals as a patient, a parent, and a spouse.

Max is the perfect example of a positive thinking problem solver, and the writers do an exemplary job coming up with solutions to his many difficult situations. The only thing I don’t like about this series is the emphasis on socialized medicine. The stories are usually balanced between the staff wanting to help everybody against the Board of Directors who seem to only care about cost and payment.

Also, within the characters there seems to be an inordinate population of home-sexual medical staff whose personal relationships become the story. The program also highlights the difficulties encountered by hospitals during the COVID pandemic. The entire staff suffers from PTSD, and battle fatigue. Another theme that they do an excellent job with is addiction.

At third place is a program called “The Blacklist” with James Spader as notorious most wanted by the FBI character Raymond Reddington. The entire premise of this series is preposterous and unbelievable. First the most wanted criminal lives within the country yet never gets caught, second because the same criminal is partnered with the FBI in a special mission to catch criminals. Usually, the criminals on the black list are creative entrepreneurs who exist to aide other criminals. The series lacks imagination when it comes to story telling. Each episode is played off a standard outline and the entire story seems to be solved in minutes. The cast has some interesting characters such as the computer, internet expert Aram Mojtabai who can find information on anybody seemingly within seconds.

Filed under: Arts, Biography, Fiction, health care | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

Day 71-SIP-Pandemic Or TV Series?

Posted on 28/05/2020 by Grumpa Joe

Adventure stories turn me on, and I am reading one that is probably the hardest journey ever undertaken by man, the trip to the South Pole. Maybe I am wrong, perhaps the trip to the moon was just as hard. The idea of living in the cold for two years does not appeal to me at all. Not to be able to see the color green as in vegetation would be a living hell. Yet the men who undertook this journey lived in conditions totally unbearable to normal people. These were not normal people, they were extraordinary men.

Reading this account during the warm spring-summer months is recommended. When it is ninety outside and you are reading about living in minus fifty it has a cooling effect on the body. Sir Ernest Shackleton led this exploration in 1914. His trip was to be the first to cross the continent of Antarctica via the South pole. The sad story is that this first attempt failed, and it became an adventure to survive. I think I would rather live with COVID-19 than to take on such a trip as Shackleton did.

The book is over seven hundred pages long, and I have just crossed the four hundred page mark. I have finally reached a point where I can’t seem to put it down. Even as I write this, I am longing to finish so I can resume reading.

At my Tuesday Night At the Stray Bar Club via Zoom meeting one of the members suggested I watch a new series titled Billions. Since, I have watched two episodes and I am hooked on another story. I heard about this series months ago, but steered clear because the principal character is played by actor Damian Lewis who played Brody in Homeland. I truly believed I would continue to visualize this man as Brody in the new series. I didn’t want to ruin the image of Brody the marine who was captured and imprisoned by radical Islamist terrorists for eight years.

It didn’t happen, I didn’t see this new character as Brody. After ten minutes of the new story, I saw him as the totally new person playing the part of a billionaire hedge fund manager. The plot of this new story is wrapped in the mystery of how hedge fund managers avoid prosecution. The main conflict is between big money business and big power government. I’ll watch all the episodes and look forward to the next season too.

Watching a series is like watching a movie that doesn’t end. The story keeps developing throughout all the episodes and getting more and more complicated as it does. Usually, there is an end which wraps up the season, with a teaser to pull you in to the next season’s story. One benefit of modern TV is that when a season is over the entire set of episodes is available anytime you want twitch it. It is a very popular pastime to binge watch thirteen episode stories at one sitting (all day). I only hope the series called COVID-19 doesn’t mimic one of these tv series. I hate the idea of COVID being a story that doesn’t quit.

Filed under: Biography, family, Technology | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »