Please notify my next of kin

There's something gratuitously fun about watching Absolutely Fabulous. I'm almost done with the first season, and I swear that I know it's bad, but there's something good about it. Everything is so predictable, so outdated, and yet, yeah. I'll watch it.

So funny that I'm more than happy to watch old BBC programs, but hell if I can get into watching Heroes or Grey's Anatomy or back into watching Lost. Apparently it's all gone haywire and crazy in that department, anyway. And TV dramas never did much for me, at least the network ones. On NBC or ABC or whatever, you're looking for ratings. With comedy shows, this is pretty simple: be funny. And that's excusable, since funniness is the essence of comedy (and social commentary too, blah blah blah, the point is if it's a comedy it should be there to be, well, funny). All you have to do is offer a few jokes for the next episode, and you're in the clear.

With drama programs, though, there's more that you have to keep in mind. There's the issue of continuity, which means that for most programs (save all the Law & Order shows) you want to have at least one unresolved cliffhanger issue at the end of each episode, so that the viewer has to come back and watch the next one. The need to have unresolved issue after unresolved issue means that you need to pile more and more drama onto each and every episode, and after a while the plot starts to get too contrived, the cliffhangers too cliffhangey, and the audience (me and the smart people) realize that they've been had by some dollar-chasing executives. Just look at soap operas to see the worst of it.

Of course in the UK it should be noted that soap operas are completely different animals; instead of being about beautiful millionaires who never grow old but seem exceedingly good at being possessed or incestuously pregnant with their amnesiatic brother's baby, British soap operas are about boring old people sitting in pubs and getting heart attacks.

Nothing has happened here for 50 years except age.

Moving on: I re-watched The Golden Compass with my brother just now, and I'm still enjoying it. The script, however, is starting to grate on my brain. The book was so much smarter.

Tomorrow I'll post an excerpt from Stick Silvertail, which should be done by then. The story is a southern fairy tale, and I'm actually pretty proud of it.