TV blog.

Short blog for this evening, only because it’s been a busy day, and the fact that I watched a couple of hours of television this evening. A lot of people give lip service to not watching much TV, but I actually don’t watch much any more, and haven’t since about 1980. Other than “Law & Order,” (original version) I watch nothing regularly, and very little else besides. Because Lilly watches a combination of Japanese cartoons on tape and American children’s shows, I’m much more familiar with that kind of programming than anything else these days (except “Law & Order"), though I don’t really pay them too much attention either.

Mostly, it’s apathy. It’s because I believe that I’ve seen enough television already — enough to last me the rest of my life. If it was on broadcast TV in the 1970s, I probably watched it. Now, if all the broadcasters and cable channels and satellite TV suddenly vanished, I would hardly miss it (and, in fact, I think that would be the case for most people, once they got over the shock).

However, I had read that the “miniseries” about Hitler’s rise to power was pretty good, and so I watched most of the first part of Sunday. In fact, considering that the limitations of the medium — and the necessary conflations and omissions of drama based on history — it was pretty good. So I watched the rest today. Certainly the fellow who played Hitler, a British actor whose name escapes me, turned in an exceptional performance in a hard role, as did the man who played Ernst Röhm, though his character isn’t particularly well known and so the audience wouldn't expect much. The rest of the cast was creditable or better.