Linked Up – What’s Alan Watching

Welcome to the Linked Up feature of the week, also know as the I-read-too-many-blogs-let-me-tell-you-about-them segment. (Wow. I'm actually maintaining a segment here two weeks running! Sometimes I amaze even myself.)

Every single weekday, I read What's Alan Watching?, the daily television blog of Alan Sepinwall, television critic for The Star Ledger.

I like to talk about television (you may have noticed) almost as much as I like to talk about movies. Only last night I bent the ear of a coworker at a cocktail party for 20+ minutes going on about LOST, Justified, Keen Eddie, Human Target, and Community. My young, disappointed aspirations for Hollywood dominance have become an inferior Sailieri-like recognition of dramatic/comedic genius (or things appropriating that) and its lack. I like what I like and I like to talk about it and convince other people to like it too.

Alan Sepinwall like a lot of what I like, but he talks about oh so much better than I. I try a lot of programs I might not have thanks to Alan (lately Justified. No, I cannot stop talking about it. Really.) We're of the same age or thereabouts, so we have many of the same childhood reference points and more times than not, I know exactly what he's referring to. I don't like everything he proposes – I will never understand the worship he and other critics have for The Wire and I have no desire to join the Breaking Bad fan wagon – but it's easy to skip those reviews.

More than just a recap of an episode or a thumbs up/thumbs down review, Alan goes into the mythos of a show and discuss the characterizations, implications, themes, and performances of the shows he has in regular rotation. What shows are these? Mad Men, Justified, Burn Notice, White Collar, In Plain Sight, Community, Cougar Town, Modern Family, Chuck, How I Met Your Mother, Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, Human Target, LOST, and others. Each summer he takes a season of a show on DVD that he likes/love but never reviewed before and gives it the Sepinwall review treatment episode by episode. My favorite of these was the Sports Night summer because from its very beginning, I have had a deep and abiding love for Sports Night.

Having been in the television critic business his entire career, Alan is also tapped into the industry. This means he has more than a bead on what's going on and often gets interviews with major showrunners (like those of LOST and Chuck) as well as up to the minute info of what's happening in the "biz". I like this too because I'm nosy and like to know as much as I can about the things I like. Plus, it gives great background to the shows and makes my appreciation of them even greater. Alan was also a major contributor to saving my beloved Chuck, using his column and blog to give public, detailed support to this fantastic show.

It's fitting I mention his blog now because it has recently changed homes and is now part of the HitFlix.com family. I have a feeling I'm going to have to start looking at HitFlix more regularly as this is the second reviewer I mesh with who's relocated there (the first was Moriarty i.e. Drew McWeeny once of AintitCoolNews.com, now part of HitFlix). As he's in new digs, Alan's introducing himself to new readers, so this is a great time to become one and get the skinny from him at the outset.

I don't always agree with him but I almost always check out what he recommends. For informed, intelligent (imagine that!), and appreciative commentary of the best TV has to offer today (and some of the worst), check out What's Alan Watching.

Disclaimer: I received absolutely no incentive for this review besides the juvenile joy I get laughing over the share enjoyment of a well-delivered line reading. Actually, that happens a lot.

Linked Up Thursdays

Welcome to the inauguration of my newest feature: Linked Up Thursdays.

I have a lot of blogs/sites in my RSS feeder. I mean a lot. Many of them I've come to through recommendations from others – the natural ouroboros of blog reading. Some I put in the feeder because they looked interesting or apropos to my writing and eventually publishing dominance (a-hem) and I wanted to be able to go back to them for reference in the future. And some are just damn fun.

I reordered the list so that those I wished to see every day were at the top. Thing is, my tastes change. I used to read Television Without Pity (TWoP) religiously, clicking onto the site several times an hour to refresh the info in the years before I knew of the feeder option. This fed my T.V. obsession with snarky recaps and an online society that loved good and bad television enough to talk about it. Then NBC bought it from its clever and witty founders (good for them!) and it changed, became more commercial, targeting the NBC and affiliates shows more than anything else. Also, those snarky founders took their cash and moved on to other challenges, so the voices I loved were gone. Thus, so went my addiction to the site. Oddly enough, this happened around the end of my 20s, making it seem more of a natural progression than anything else.

I felt a similar loyalty to Tomato Nation, loving Sarah B.'s snarky voice, cat love, and Jersey girl upbringing so like and unlike my own. Not coincidentally, she was also a founder of TWoP. But then it changed, becoming more advice and poll oriented and less journal/story oriented. And that's OK – her career and life moved and changed and her creative output changed with it. And so did I.

A few months ago, I realized the sheer impossibility of keeping up with all of them and the sucking wastage of time I was investing in trying to do just that. Right now, I have 667 unread posts in my RSS feeder and that's AFTER I've gone through my dailies. Yikes.

Clearly, I must parse.

But since I am inherently lazy and frequent revel in excess, instead, I'm going to highlight one blog every Thursday. Perhaps in reviewing the blog, I'll discover those I can do without. More likely, I'll discover more to add to the list, but such are the dangers one faces in the Internet realm.

Who's the lucky inaugural blog? Crazy Aunt Purl.

Initially I came to this blog through the Smart Bitches site. Immediately, I liked her voice and the LA-vibe, so it got added to the feeder. Plus - writer! (Crazy is right, she gets up at 4am most mornings to write. All I can say is, Ugh.) Also, while I most definitely do not knit (not a domestic goddess, remember?) my sister and my father's wife do, and I wanted to remember the site to refer them to it.

And now I'm hooked.

Laurie Perry aka Crazy Aunt Purl saw the unexpected end of her young marriage and self imploded. And then crawled her way out. She loves to knit and travel (well, that's one of two for me), has several cats, and just sounds like someone I could enjoy a good bottle of wine with – probably several. She has published two books Drunk, Divorced, and Covered in Cat Hair and Home Is Where the Wine Is and if those titles don't give you a good sense of her humor, you're just not paying attention. Recently everything electronic in her life blew up in one week – hair dryer, work computer, Jeep all kablooey one day after the other. I would be homicidal. Somehow, she wasn't.

Laurie is a must read of my day. Admittedly, I skip over the knitting stuff because it's a language I don't and likely will never get. I do like the finished product pictures though because ooohhhh, pretty. I enjoy reading the day to day musings of a woman who got whacked over the head by life and not only picked herself up, but fashioned a new and better life from the detritus that fulfills her like nothing that came before. Life doesn't end if you're not married at 35. Really it doesn't. Sometimes, it gets better. I can relate to some of that. Some of the rest, I'm still working on.

In the end, don't pay attention to me. Check out Crazy Aunt Purl for yourself..

Disclaimer: I took no enticements to review this blog site though I can be appreciated (in many ways) with good wine (take note Laurie!).