I can guess that series-watching has been - and probably still is - one of your favourite pastimes during this everlasting lockdown. We should be grateful knowing that we will be able to continue catching up with our favourite series and movies for quite a while longer since the charming coronavirus seems to feel quite comfortable among us. Must be the sunny weather and the fish & chips.
Not long ago, movies were at the very top of the best cultural choice list for most of us, until film scripts started to fall into an awful bunch of crap, resulting in a long chain of terrible movies released one after another. Back when movies were good, watching serious series-not the typical sitcom- was kinda common but there were not so many good ones. Twin Peaks, The A-Team, Knight Rider, X-Files, Buffy and some more come to my mind when doing a wee flashback trip to the ’80s and ’90s. But then, between 2000 and 2008, great series like The Sopranos, House and Breaking Bad appeared like a fresh breeze under the spotlight of TV Shows. They were really good series offering many seasons for us to follow the adventures - or misadventures - of their leading characters.
During those years Marvel movies started ‘marvelling’ us with the release of Ironman in 2008, which would be the first of many brilliant and most entertaining films for teens and adults alike, that would be released the following years until the excellent Avengers: Endgame in 2019.
In that decade we could witness how the film industry was travelling at high speed down towards hell, while tv series were rising like foam, reaching the goodness of the entertainment heaven. We started to see very good stories written by great writers under the command of a new batch of promising directors. Well-known Hollywood actors and actresses saw this funny twist in their fate so they started to work in series, which offered them very interesting projects while leaving the film industry to rot under a thick layer of remakes and bland movies with cheap titles ending with a number. Because if you make a good movie, why the hell not making a sequel or two? And after those, why the hell not making a prequel? But wait, did somebody said a spin-off?
The factory of dreams from Hollywood became the factory of nightmares within ten years, leaving Marvel and Disney as the only ones keeping up the good quality of their movies.
Today things haven’t changed a bit but rather the opposite. Most of the best actors and actresses keep showing up in different series while we can only enjoy some good indie movies, discovering potential great performers on the way.
That been said, I must confess that I have always been a movie person. When I was a kid I could very much enjoy watching The A-Team, Knight Rider, MacGyver and The X-Files among others every once in a while, but the big joy was coming from the movies. I could mention some very good examples of amazing films released between 1980 and 2000 but I guess you can ask Google for that. My point is, I always thought that watching series was a bit of a waste of time. To me, I find many of them to be too long, ending up extending the plot with no point just for the sake of adding more and more seasons, resulting in a tedious experience for the watchers who will eventually move on into different series.
The Walking Dead is a good example of that. I think series are usually too long to follow and mostly looking like soap operas, where love affairs are always in the way interfering with the main plot in every new episode. I can nowadays still find some series with the same flaw and that’s a shame. I’m aware that most of the people like this kind of things. They keep wondering what the hell is going to happen with the male leading character and that sexy woman flirting with him, while there’s always a lover on the background jeopardizing a happy ending.
And talking about ending...if you are among those to be greatly disappointed – to say the least – about Game Of Thrones ending, (NO SPOILERS) let me tell you something: I think it’s brilliant and I wouldn’t change a bit.
People place themselves in a position where they feel free to share their opinion on social media about anything and everything, which I think is fine as long as you do that with respect and with at least a bit of knowledge on the matter. When I heard that there were thousands of people asking for a re-write of that Game Of Thrones ending I was expecting something awful. But I just couldn’t understand so much hassle once I watched it. Some people are really losing it! And let me say something else; it’s not nice to ask somebody to change his/her creation. Bear in mind that they are artists creating entertainment for us to enjoy.
You can’t go and say: ‘Yeah well, your story is cool and all but the ending sucks so we want you to change it’. You wouldn’t go asking Michelangelo to amend his David famous sculpture because you think it has a too-small penis, right? What the hell! You have to respect the artist’s creation. If you think you can do better, please feel free to try.
Anyway, coming back to this ferocious debate between series and movies, I have to confess that my preferences have shifted towards the former. During the lockdown I’m taking the advantage of discovering some very good series and, even though I still believe in the magic of movies with its short and punchy stories, right now tv series is the king of the jungle. Not only because most of them are very good, but because no matter which genre you like the most, you will find the right series for your liking.
Please feel free you check the section ‘My Hobbies’ within this blog to see the movies and series I recommend to watch.
While the world out there walks baby steps back to normal, some fortunate like me -and perhaps like you - still have plenty of time to enjoy some marvellous stories online. So I will leave you to it while I keep my mind busy wondering how my the series I’m currently watching is going to finish. As my father used to say: ‘wonder no more; the guy dies and the woman marries his horse’.
That would be a shocking as hell ending indeed.
So what do you think? Are you more a series person or you prefer movies?
Leave your comments down below.
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