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August 21, 2005

Six Feet Under Finale

Tonight is the series finale of Six Feet Under and I'm bracing myself for the end. I know it's silly to become attached to a tv show, but this wasn't just any show. SFU gave us something we had rarely seen before on television: death portrayed in a real way. Other shows just gloss over it. Even a show like ER, which features people dying on a regular basis, does not really portray death. Six Feet Under did that.

My favorite characters were Claire, Billy, and David. All of the characters on the show were so incredibly messed up but they all had redeeming qualities. It would be easy to hate any one of the characters on the show, but the writers made it so that we all saw a little bit of ourselves in each of them.

Salon has published an interview with Alan Ball to mark the end of the series. ("An Alan Ball postmortem") It's a great read. I love that as a writer and producer he's taking chances and trying new things. He isn't afraid to jump from movies to television to theater. If only more writers today could be like him, we'd have so much less crap in movie theaters and on tv. On second thought, maybe it's better there aren't more writers like him, because then we'd have too many things to distract us from real life. I never felt like I was wasting my time watching Six Feet Under because I knew I was watching great art, and you can't just turn your back on that.

So rest in peace, Six Feet Under. Thankfully, you'll be entombed on DVD where we can visit you whenever we like.

Posted by Tracy at 06:10 AM | Comments (0)

August 09, 2005

News with Personality

I was stunned, as so many were, to hear of the passing of Peter Jennings. Only four months ago he announced he had lung cancer but no mention was made of how advanced it was. Though his voice was hoarse when he made the announcement that he had inoperable lung cancer, I hoped he would somehow pull through.

As someone else mentioned, people of my age, those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s, can't remember a time before Jennings, Brokaw, and Rather. Their voices and faces on the nightly news punctuate the memories of my childhood. Every evening my parents would turn on the network news and it would seem as if all were right in the world, even if what they reported was at times depressing and disturbing. My parents were not devoted to any one anchor or network. They flipped between them depending on their mood, so I learned to like them all. They were familiar faces in our living room in a time before cable news and the Internet. We only had a few choices and a few channels.

The idea of network news seems so quaint now, much like other relics from my childhood like record players and after-school specials. But there's a reason the nightly network news still exists, even though we can get our news elsewhere: it gives us the false but comforting sense that the world is manageable, that all the news we need to know can fit into a half-hour chunk, whereas the 24-hour news channels remind us that we're on a non-stop rollercoaster of a planet.

With the retirement of Brokaw and Rather and the death of Jennings, I hope the media world doesn't become a non-stop, chaotic barrage of news and information without any solid personalities to anchor it. Because that's what Peter Jennings did and why he was so beloved and welcomed into our homes: he anchored us. He made us feel that even though the world was a mess, tomorrow would be another day, that he'd be there again tomorrow to report the news. Without that sense of grounding, we're left bobbing aimlessly in a sea of information.

It's one of the reasons I started this site and why the slogan Health information with personality is more than just a slogan to me. Call me old-fashioned, but I feel that without a human face behind it, a constant stream of news and information is disturbing. Pretty soon, as every newscast turns into the same mind-numbing, flashing, ticker-streaming blitz with robotic, airbrushed "anchors", the news will start to have no meaning. It's like what happens when you're standing in the middle of a cloud: when you're in the middle of it, you can't see it. Somehow, the old school news anchors helped us to stand outside of that cloud and view the world with some degree of objectivity.

Peter Jennings gave us news with personality. And then some. In these terrifying and uncertain times, we needed him more than ever.

Posted by Tracy at 12:49 AM | Comments (0)

April 13, 2005

Dr. House Is in the House

You've gotta love Fox's "House." I do. One of the characters in Tuesday night's episode suffered from sexsomnia. She was having sex with her ex in her sleep. We linked to a news story on sexsomnia a couple weeks ago. For about 5 hours last night after the show aired, people were searching Google for "sexsomnia" and they found Health Diaries. Who knew Fox was an educational network? Or will people just rush to Google to search on anything with the word sex in it? I can't wait to see what rare diseases Dr. House diagnoses next week.

Posted by Tracy at 11:32 PM | Comments (2)