I remember when I watched the X-Files, waiting for the late hour of 10 o’clock. Trying to stay awake while watching the night news “Dunia dalam Berita”, which of course sometimes got prolonged with the extra special report “Laporan Khusus”. But the urge to watch Mulder and Scully, the black oil, the X sign on Mulder’s window, the Lone Gunmen gang, and to hear the very typical X-Files theme song, all of them kept me awake, most of the time anyway.
It was one of what I call “one-hour-TV-shows” that made me searching other TV shows. Several worth mentioning are:
Of course Lost! I’m now literally sitting at the edge of my seat waiting for next season (due on January).
The ever popular Heroes. But now I think the show is going down, the large cast needs more character and a stronger plot but not plot where a turtle is involved, people time travels and change the future every other episode, where an adoptive father of an illegitimate daughter gets partnered with the biological mother and the biological father has a thing with a character that should have been dead but revived only as the third twin. I think I can say that Heroes is a super-heroic version of The Dynasty for the Petrellis.
The Office (US edition), the most recent TV shows that makes me smile and laugh lots of times, embarrassedly alone. It’s funny in a strange way, at least “That’s what she said”.
Prison Break in a nutshell: breaking out of a prison, becoming fugitives and running away to Panama, got busted and breaking out again from (this time) a Panamanian prison, and now doing outsource field work for an FBI agent to find a six-headed monster (probably a data centre). Tips from this show to get a heavier plot (probably will be useful for Heroes, see above): kill some of the sidekicks. Although for the lover of the main character, revive her from the other side, at any cost (a side plot on how she’s still alive after all this time is a bonus).
What do you get when a member of a Miami Metro Police Department, specifically a blood splatter analyst, moonlights as a serial killer hunting bad guys unseen by the law? An interesting plot (it’s from a book) and Dexter.
True Blood. Vampires are now eager to live side-by-side with human, at night anyway, due to recent Japanese invention of “True Blood”, a kind of soft drink that has all of what’s in the human blood. They say those vampires are “going mainstream”. But one is in love with a waiter that apparently can read others’ minds. In Bon Temps, Louisiana, nothing is what it seems to be. Guess what? It’s also from a book! Beware of some rather explicit sexual scenes on this show, though. Probably, this vampire theme is also fuelled by the upcoming, highly anticipated movie “Twilight” (also from a book, popular among the girls). If you haven’t managed to see the trailer of a particular Swedish vampire movie, then you should make some time to do so (again from a book!).
Fringe. Amongst all the show I’ve mentioned, this show is the one that has the most resemblance with The X-Files. “Monster of the week” gets a face lift to “weird events that can be solved by even-weirder experiments of the week”. The larger story arc “do alien exists?” is translated to “mysterious ‘Pattern’ of strange events”.
What’s your favourite TV shows today? I still have more, but I’ll save them for the next post 
