Better Late Than Never!

A day late and a dollar short, but here ya go.

If I had only one television show to ever watch, I do believe that show would be . . .

DRUMROLL, PLEASE!!

. . . Deadwood. Or Firefly. Or Deadwood. Or Sopranos. Maybe Firefly.

The language in Deadwood is so dense, and the delivery so natural (read: swift,) that I can watch it fifty times and pick up things I’ve missed. The visuals, also dense. Plots. Dense. Moral conundrums. You guessed it – dense. You can pick a thread and follow it down a rabbit hole, and the next time you watch you can follow another one. This would be a series I could watch a hundred times. But there aren’t enough episodes! And it doesn’t end!

Firefly has characters that I love spending time with. And it is so optimistic and upbeat, even when it gets serious. Its backstory is as dense as Deadwood’s (I’m sensing a theme in my tastes here,) though Joss Whedon did not get a chance to explore the winding paths he laid out, as the thing was also cancelled well before its time. The “tapestry” of script, set, story, etc. is nowhere near as rich as Deadwood, but its humor, lack of pretense, and general good cheer would make it a good lifelong tv companion.

And then we have The Sopranos. I love the delicious feeling of knowing we still have 3 1/2 seasons of unwatched Sopranos chillin’ in our Netflix queue. I don’t know that on an even playing field I would pick this one necessarily – it has less to recommend it, re-viewing wise. However, it wins the prize for being the new series to which we still look forward each weekend. That alone – the fact that I haven’t already watched it fifty times, as I have the previous two – keeps it in the running.

Don’t make me choose. Don’t. You’re too cruel. Don’t!

All right. Deadwood it is.

(Firefly.)