Supernatural and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

I am bored. Insomnia is boring. It features too much getting up in the middle of the night and looking for eggs and bacon.

Anyway, to stave it off I am mostly watching TV. I have watched the first three episodes of Supernatural, and while I haven't fallen headlong for it (possibly "yet" is required here), I am enjoying it very much, in a sort of oh-dear-god-so-pretty way. Seriously, Dean but particularly Sam - so pretty. They were on the cover of SFX this month - I meant to give my copy to likethesun2, and completely forgot - and obviously picking up the circulation of the magazine quite a bit. Anyway, in news of the slightly less shallow, I like the plot, too. I finally finished watching the pilot yesterday, and I was actually scared by it. It does the creepy archetype thing very well. It's not an original plot - who hasn't heard that particular sleepover ghost story? - but nicely executed. And I like the basic premise very much. The continuous road-trip thing, the rootless, forever-on-the-road thing is one of my bulletproof narrative kinks. (Whoever I stole the phrase "bulletproof narrative kink" from - thank you very much, it never stops coming in useful.)

I initially wondered if the parallels between this show and The X-Files are intentional - three episodes in, I'm sure they are. Apart from the broad similarity of the premise - ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night, yay! - there are similarities in the details. Both shows have as their lynchpin a lead character who had a defining piece of childhood trauma, an unfinished event that coloured everything that followed. So Dean wanders around looking for whatever it was that killed his mother, and Mulder wanders around looking for whoever it was who abducted his sister, and such is the intensity of the obsession that they need their sidekicks to follow them around, need them in a way which isn't exactly healthy. I'm extrapolating with Supernatural, of course, but I think this is one of the things that'll keep me watching. Yay, fucked-up character dynamics!

( spoilery specifics about the pilot )

The rest of the parallels are more of the lightly-done humourous type. The second episode, "Wendigo", where Dean and Sam search for their father, is a basic rehash of the XF episode "Detour". (Which is, lest we forget, the one where Mulder and Scully escape from an FBI training conference in order to run around the woods in a panic, losing people to centuries-old forest monsters who keep them strung up in a hole in the ground for no immediately apparent reason. Also, Scully sings "Jeremiah Was A Bullfrog", they bicker in very cute fashion about sleeping bags falling from the sky, and really, it's a lot better than I'm making it sound.) The SPN version is quite a lot creepier. Unlike XF, which was always shot as darkly as possible, it has an overexposed, washed-out look that is very effective in conveying that whole Blair Witch feel. I liked it.

Also, something else that me giggle - Dean mentions using the sacred signs, or whatever, of the Anasazi. Heee. I liked the reference, but I didn't realise until later how neat it is - "Anasazi" is the XF episode where Mulder searches for his father. Heee.

The third episode has a title that temporarily escapes me, but it involved scary things in lakes and made me apprehensive about taking a shower. It seems Amy Acker is terribly sweet whatever she's in, and I did like her role in this one. In fact, I don't know exactly why, but I liked a lot about this episode. Dean bonding with small children - awww. I have said "awww" a lot during the course of this entry. I begin to think this may be a recurring theme as I keep watching.

And while I'm reviewing TV, I also wanted to babble a bit about Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I wasn't entirely sure what to make of the pilot for that. I never watched the pre-aired pilot because I decided to watch for the real one, and, um. I'm not sure. I thought the first ten minutes of the show were unmitigatedly marvellous, and very Sorkin - to coin an adjective - but I was sort of unsure about the rest of it. I got the feeling it was about half an hour of material stretched out to the full slot. Which isn't to say there wasn't a lot I liked about it. To start with, E4 are back on the first season of Friends at the moment, and I was just thinking how much I liked, and still do like, Matthew Perry. Chandler as he was remains one of my favourite characters written for television - the humour as defence mechanism! the man as mass of seething neuroses! the "homosexual quality"! - and part of it was the charm of the actor. You can see that with Matt on Studio 60 - putting him on Vicodin was a delightfully surreal touch - and I sort of think he and Danny (whom I liked too) will be the big slash pairing of 2007.

( more spoilery specifics )

So, basically, I think it was good, but could get a lot better.

One last thing while I'm still chatting about Sorkin. Pedar and I are making a thing about watching The West Wing together (last one tonight, woe), and tonight we were watching one called "Enemies", which opens with Leo and his daughter snarking magnificently at each other over breakfast. We were watching without comment, and then he turned to me and said, "In ten years, that's going to be us, isn't it."

It wasn't a question. Sigh.

And now, to bed! Sans eggs and bacon, but you can't have everything.

Limerick

Er, not to be a one-track record or anything, but I love my job. I have been gone for three weeks, and in that time, they have had a wasps' nest, a smashed window, a fire, a lot of water, a total shop rearrangement (okay, nothing new there), the Crosby shop has been demolished, there was that thing where they take all the books out of the toilet and and then put them back again, and then there's the bit where Tony was on national radio this morning. It seems I go away and everything happens, including - gasp - the earning of money. Now summer's over, there are actual customers and less of the situation where there are two people perched on a counter all afternoon because there's nothing to do.

Actually, Tony on the radio this morning was something of a surprise. I was awake for it, because I woke up abruptly at five and couldn't go back to sleep again, and I turned on the radio sleepily and found myself listening to Gordon Brown being given a good grilling. Always fun, so I listened to that for a while - after a bit they got to grilling him less about David Cameron and Tony Blair stepping down and more about what's on his iPod ("everything from Bach to the Beatles!" - groan) - and then I jerked out of a daze at the prospect of "local bookshops" next. And there's Tony, sounding surprisingly nervous and rattled. Apparently Gordon Brown overran and sliced up their time slot. As I said later, there are probably worse people to be overlooked in favour of. That sentence made no sense. Never mind.

(And the fire, too, was much less of a disaster than it could have been. It wasn't in the shop but in the flat upstairs, which is inhabited by a stoner who set his bed on fire with a spliff and didn't realise until a passer-by called the fire brigade. Who got the fire out, but not before water had started seeping through the floor into the bookshop, which is never good.)

Anyway. I had a quiet afternoon, barring the wasps' nest under the broken window - we barricaded half the shop off and quivered on the counter, waiting for the sound of frantic buzzing - and spent most of it on the phone to a small bookshop in Ireland, trying to track down a street map for a tiny town in County Limerick. (Problem - when you search for maps of Limerick, what you get is lots of books of limericks.) I'm a big geek, but I absolutely love this kind of detective work. I've had my job long enough to get fairly good at it, and it's fun - ringing people up, and trawling through websites, and thinking of people who know people who know other people who might know what you're looking for, and so on and so forth. You end up acquiring a lot of general knowledge, and knowing a lot about what other people might know about. Today it all ended when I got onto this tiny bookshop in County Meath, who were delightfully helpful, and wanted to know exactly where in the county was this tiny place we needed a map of, and when I didn't know, I overheard them shanghaiing their customers and demanding to know what knowledge they could contribute to the geography of Limerick. After a minute they stumbled over a man - there was shouting and exclamations of joy - who had grown up there, and eight euros later my quest is over.

I occasionally think that one day I'll have a small bookshop of my own so I can do this all the time. It's a geek thing.

In other news, eternalwings SAW ALEXIS DENISOF. In Liverpool. Shopping, on his own. I wouldn't have dared go up to him and ask, "Are you Alexis Denisof? but I'm filled with geeky squee that she did.