Zombie-fighting ninja-librarian: Top ten TV shows

This is just on the end of Tuesday, but it counts. This week’s top ten Tuesday prompt from the Broke and the bookish is other stories, like TV shows or movies. I picked my top ten TV shows. The top ten Tuesday is a weekly meme from the Broke and the Bookish.

Leverage – “Damn it, Hardison.”

I think it’s my favorite show ever. It’s not only funny and just really good it’s also just a very solid TV show. The writing is really good and it’s amazingly put together. It’s about a crew of criminals who run cons on the rich and powerful who have ruined the lives of normal people. For example a priest who is attacked before he can lobby the city to save his church. The Leverage team come in and con the rich business man who is planning to tear down the church to buy a mall. The team is made up of Sophie, a grifter, or con artist, Parker, a cat burglar, Hardison, a hacker, Eliot, a former mercenary who works as muscle, and Nate, an honest man who works as the mastermind. I first started watching this because Eliot is played by Christian Kane and I thought that was good enough. It’s an amazing show though and when cancelled it I was a bit devastated.

Firefly – “I aim to misbehave”

Firefly is a Joss Whedon show that only lasted for one season because Fox is the devil and they cancelled it. It is set in the future, I think around the 2500s. Again about criminals. This is not a recurring theme by the way. Anyway it’s sort of a western set in space (Joss Whedon is a genius) and focuses on Malcolm Reynolds who fought on the losing side in the war and then became a smuggler when the war ended. He teamed up with his lieutenant Zoe, a pilot named Hoban “Wash” Washburne (who marries Zoe), a mechanic named Kaylee and a mercenary named Jayne Cobb. They also have a sort of associate in Inara Serra, a companion (high class prostitute, pretty much a geisha), who rents one of the shuttles on their space ship. They spend their time smuggling and stealing and sometimes they bring along paying guests, like Shepherd Book (a priest), and Simon and River Tam (a brother and sister fugitive team). It’s really good, the dialogue is really clever and quotable, it has so much heart and so much amazing humor and Malcolm struggles with the fact that he is a good man who tries to help even though he also just wants to earn enough to feed his crew. It’s so good!

Buffy – “Into every generation a slayer is born.”

Another Joss Whedon show, surprising? No. Buffy the Vampire Slayer pretty much dominated my teen years. I have watched it a bajillion times and it’s amazing. Not all of it obviously, season four is sort of awful and season one, and also season six, but apart from that it’s just the best thing ever. It’s about a girl named Buffy who moves to Sunnydale, California because she burned down the gym in her old school and was expelled, and her parents split up. The reason she burned down the gym was vampires, because Buffy is a vampire slayer, the last girl in a long line of women who have been given supernatural powers to fight vampires and demons and it’s amazing. Buffy is sassy and cool and she’s surrounded by an amazing cast of characters; Giles, her watcher and the school librarian, Willow, a soon to be amazing witch, Xander, goofy and nerdy non-supernatural friend who still fights as hard as anyone else, Cordelia the snooty rich girl who ends up fighting with Buffy even though she doesn’t really want to. It’s just a really good show.

Sherlock – “I’m a high functioning sociopath”

It’s one of the more recent incarnations of Sherlock Holmes and it’s made by Moffat and Gatiss, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Holmes and Watson. And it is amazing! It’s set in modern-day London and Sherlock Holmes is a very modern man who texts and uses the internet. The show is still very true to the books, I read some of the earlier ones and the dialogue is pretty much spot on from the books. The acting is sublimely good, Cumberbatch is outstanding, and he can speak at about 100 km/hour. I read an interview recently where Moffat or someone said they would show Martin Freeman scripts and he would say that they can cut certain lines because he’ll just do that with a look, and he does, he’s incredible. The episodes go on for like 90 minutes and it’s incredible. The guest stars are amazing, Andrew Scott is an incredible Moriarty, Louise Brealey is amazing as Molly. I know a lot of people didn’t like Irene Adler’s portrayal, I liked her. Russell Tovey is amazing in the Baskerville story. I am continually impressed with how they update the stories, how they make them work in the modern setting, it’s impressive. Yeah, it’s great.

How I Met Your Mother – “I’m going to tell you the story of how I met your mother.”

This is a TV-show about Ted Mosby who starts off the show by telling his kids in the future (2030) that he’s about to tell them how he met their mother. He then spends nine seasons telling them the story of every girl he’s ever dated, or banged, leading up to him meeting this perfect creature that is their mother. It ended this year and I loved it. Obviously, because I’m a true fan, I am angry at a lot of it, because I’m weird. It is told with flash-backs and flash-forwards, and we don’t actually meet the Mother until the last episode of season eight. It’s really good. Anyways. It’s about Ted, Barney, Robin, Lily and Marshall. The cast is good, the writing is at times amazing. I loved it and I can always rewatch episodes.

Game of Thrones – “Winter is coming”

It’s just really good. I have some issues with it, because, and I know this makes me sound a bit like an ass, but I’ve read the books. I always read books and then I get with the expectations and then disappointment. It’s really good as just a television show, the writing is solid, the casting is pretty spectacular. The acting is good. The plots are good, usually the diversions from the books are good. Like how they change Robb’s wife and who the Red lady uses as a sacrifice, I like those. There are things they changed at the end of season four that are unforgivable unless they somehow manage to invent time travel by the time season five rolls around. It’s still pretty great though.

The Office – “I love inside jokes. I’d love to be a part of one someday.”

It’s fucking amazing! It took me a while before I managed to start seeing this show, because I have trouble watching other people embarrass themselves, even if they don’t find it embarrassing themselves. I’m a weird person. So I find the Office and Modern family sort of uncomfortable to watch so it took me a while, but it’s so good. It’s just very good. And I am still not completely done, but I love it.

Doctor Who – “Allons-y”

I love Doctor Who. I’m having some trouble with it right now. I feel like Moffatt has created really sad, boring girls. They’re just preppy, weak girls and I hate it. They’ve just made the show about the Doctor, not about the people. The first seasons with Russell T. Davies in charge were focused on people and then the Doctor would just sort of fall in and save the day. The people in the Doctor Who stories are a lot more interesting than just the Doctor showing off. He’s clever and interesting, but showing off is only interesting to a certain extent, what’s interesting is connection and interaction and someone he can be clever in front of. I love that part. I loved the Ninth Doctor, I loved the Tenth Doctor, Matt Smith was a bit more asexual, which I found interesting, but he’s too show-off-y and whiny and flappy, which annoyed me. I’m curious about Capaldi.

Supernatural – “Driver picks the music; shotgun shuts his cake hole.”

More specifically the first three seasons. After the first three seasons it became too full of itself and pleased with itself. The first three seasons were a sort of believable Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I loved it for that. It was about urban legends and myths. Then it became the Buffy that Buffy always was, and always knew it was. Buffy knows it’s sort of camp-y and weird, Supernatural seemed to think it was a normal show, and it wasn’t. There are ANGELS! Angels. And God, and metatron, and hell, it’s too weird. I still love it for some reason.