It is telling that I spent an hour-and-a-half on Sunday watching a famed German show called Tatort. The show is a long (we're talking decades!) running cop drama that has multiple iterations and protagonists for every major and most minor population centers in Germany. It is what Dick Wolf dreams off, while he huffs paint and masturbates furiously to the fevered nightmare of Law & Order: Small Claims Court Tallahasse. I jest of course, Tatort is actually a fairly decent show. It tends to focus more on the personalities of the Kriminalkommisare trying to solve the really obvious cases. Call it an anti-CSI. While naturally, some series are better than others, in terms of quality the series float between your average episode of JAG and one of the best episodes of the first season of 24. The problem isn't the show. The problem is that the show is the best thing on German television.
The landscape of the German television industry is something from a post-apocalyptic sci-fi comic: blasted, lifeless, bleak and probably incapable of ever again spawning life. Most of it consists of reality shows about dreary "ordinary, everyday" people and their useless, wasted boring lives. What little original programming exists can hardly be called original, let alone good. American television may be scourged unimaginably shit shows that make you want to claw your eyes out, at least the industry is not adverse to risk taking, trying to tell new stories while German television relies on reality and game shows that are so mind numbingly pointless that you want to scream out, begging for God to release your tortured soul from this stygian neverscape.
I miss American Television.
So as part of this new segment I shall be reviewing those series, both new and returning, that I particularly enjoy and find worthwhile on a level for more than just base entertainment. How I Met Your Mother is a very funny show and I enjoy watching it, but it doesn't really enthrall me the way some of the shows do that I shall be presenting here. First up will be one of my all time favorites: Sons of Anarchy!
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