JUNE 25th - Had One for Game of Thrones Too (and I know Irregardless is not a Word).



Today is a day to pay homage to one of the all-time great television shows. Take one part Scott Bakula, add in a touch of Dean Stockwell, and then mix that up with a soul-teleporting, body-jumping, time-traveling premise and you have one heck of a show. That’s right. Quantum Leap. On this day in 1990, NBC continued its Quantum Leap Week that started on June 24th, officially deciding to air the show for 5 days straight. And why wouldn’t you? It’s quite a legitimate marketing campaign, but it also mirrors the plight of Sam Beckett. He didn’t get a week off of jumping bodies and righting wrongs just because the traditional model of television dictated that shows should only be aired once a week. Yes, they were re-runs, but the show wasn’t syndicated. It was a pretty ingenious idea that also had some artistic reasoning behind it. Which got me thinking of how immersive you could make watching television. For instance, how crazy would watching Friends be if you watched it with the same group of 6 core friends/relatives—if you had fallen in love with and married your college roommate’s sister while at said roomamte’s second marriage in England, which went horribly wrong when he said his ex-girlfriend’s name at the "I-do’s," and that ex-girlfriend also happened to be part of your intimate group along with a ladies’-man best friend who starred as Dr. Drake Ramoray on Days of Our Lives and a spunky, hippy weirdo who sang about smelly cats then you’d really be maximizing the immersion. Granted that might be a bit out of the realm of possibility for some people, but other shows could be easily altered to bring the viewer closer to the characters being portrayed. Cheers? Needs to be watched in local bar where everybody knows your name. Breaking Bad? Watched on meth. Those are fairly easy to accomplish, though I’d advise against the second one—rots your teeth. And your face. Mad Men? Drunk/drinking, smoking and being overtly misogynistic to the women who are also watching and are most likely smarter than you. Okay, some of these would pretty detrimental to your health and to the betterment and advancement of society as a whole. How I Met Your Mother? With your widowed children. Downer much? Seinfeld would be hard. Because it was a show about nothing. You’d have to watch it with a super-observant, neurotic friend who was also very humorous. Larry David or Jerry Seinfeld would be good choices. But I think the best would be if you were in for a round of The Sopranos. You’d have to watch in a roomful of Italian Mobsters packing heat and crucifying the English language irregardless of your desire to correct them. Might leave you a toonsy bit uneasy, but you’d probably understand the high stakes and stress of the characters a little better. And I’d think twice about correcting heat-packing mobsters for using irregardless. Of course the safest bet may just be to watch Quantum Leap every day. But if you find a way to body jump back 1990 and watch Quantum Leap Week as person watching QLW for the first time and that person also needs to you to fix a crucial mistake in their existence that is keeping the universe from being as it should be while Ziggy calculates the probability of you having set everything straight, you better tell me. I’ll be watching The Sopranos with some mob guys. Irregardless of the danger.

This day has been Marked.

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