
Tessa Gratton and The One With the Murder Family
On the intentional beauty of a show about serial killers.
The One With is a regular feature on Back of the Box where folks talk about their favorite episode–of anything. Could be from a TV show, a serialized story, R Kelly’s In the Closet, a podcast, or whatever first comes to mind. Feel free to submit your own!
On the intentional beauty of a show about serial killers.
She loves magic, time, and this one really awesome episode of Avatar: the Last Airbender. Meet Tara Sim now!
I love the X-Files with the fire of a thousand suns. My college roommates and I watched it religiously every week and taped them for long binge rewatch sessions. Sometimes, we would also drink alcoholic beverages out of test tubes, but that’s a different story altogether.
As you know - we love all things episodic and have a particularly special and warm place in our heart for things of the nerdy variety. That's why we were so happy when Stephanie wanted to tell us about her favorite things of the episodic variety and they were all wonderfully geeky!
I love TV, and I’ve watched a lot of it, so it’s hard to pick my favorite episode of any given series, let alone all of them. Most people would expect me to pick something from The Twilight Zone or DuckTales, and I won’t disappoint.
Let me spread to you the good word of Six Flying Dragons, my new obsession-slash-fandom. It's all of the personal drama and spine-shivers of "Wow, this really happened," except that, for me, it opened up realms of compelling history that I'd never heard a whisper about before.
So here’s my terrible secret: I don’t watch much television. But when I had surgery last year, I was pretty much tied to the apartment and a little loopy on painkillers and I watched a lot of TV, mostly period mysteries because I like the clothes.
I love medical history, medical drama, Untold Stories of the ER. The more medical the better--and the first few seasons of ER, before they jumped the shark, are my jam. But even among those seasons, "Love's Labor's Lost" is indelible. I remember watching it and thinking "I didn't know you could do that on TV."
One of the best things about serials is how they set up expectations and repeat those expectations and then subvert them, completely breaking down the door of the story so that a new kind of story can come pouring in. One of the finest examples Sarah Smith has ever seen was on—"Game of Thrones?" No. "Downton Abbey?" No. "Antiques Roadshow."
I admit that I’m a screen fanatic, a binge-watcher before it was a thing, because I have a deep and life-consuming addiction to Story.
It’s strange to think that a black-and-white TV show produced fifty years ago could have had some small part in forming my interest in and understanding of body politics. And yet that’s exactly what happened.
I love a good period drama -- think the kind of thing HBO has done so much of -- but a year or so ago, I found myself craving stuff that was brighter, more energetic, more . . . cheerful.