TV Relapse.

Last week and this week, I've been watching episodes from Felicity, 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. Mountain Time on We. I'm saying it this bluntly, because it's sort of like admitting I have an addiction. I went through this with Sex and the City, a TV bender I've previously acknowledged--I checked out whole seasons at a time from the public library and watched them, three, four, five a night. When I reached a season I couldn't get from the library, I had to go to the video store and rent them one disk at a time--v. expensive. When that was done, I had to go through a withdrawal. I missed the characters and found myself thinking about them, etc.--a whole sordid deal.

Then came Felicity, probably a year and a half ago, also then on We. They were showing episodes most nights, but at increasingly varying times and intervals. I got in at the very first, so I saw the curly haired girl (decoder ring: curly-haired girl = me) go to NYU (U of NY on the show), following a boy from her high school because he wrote something nice in her yearbook. Anyhow, same trajectory as S in the C, although I couldn't watch more than one episode in a night. As the network increasingly, and cavalierly, fooled around with the broadcast times and dates, I found myself in a state--v. annoyed, grouchy, snappish. And then, the coup de grace, they stopped the whole thing altogether, just six episodes short of the series finale. By the way, you can't rent the show, or check it out from my video store (although I hear you can get it on Netflix).

I happened upon the show the other day, and realized that, serendipitously (or even felicitously!), they were showing the second half of the last season's episodes, two a day. Imagine my joy. Two hits in a day.

I got started in the first place on the show because my daughter, who was living on the East Coast with a nouveau riche family as their nanny, watched it late at night. I have experienced quite an unbelievable amount of pop culture in this fashion--one of my kids is watching or listening to something. Here's a short list of shows I'm currently watching, courtesy of my kids: Sex and the City and Felicity, of course; Gilmore Girls; Family Guy and American Dad; Home Movies (on Cartoon Network--Adult Swim--definitely worth searching out); Without a Trace; and finally, The O.C. (I'm pretty embarrassed about this last one, but what can I say? Despite having gone to high school in SoCal with rich kids and having incurred a serious attitude about rich folks thereby, I find myself watching a show about . . . SoCal rich kids--in high school!)