Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Today we have a blog specialty. On today’s program we are talking about another forgotten sitcom. One of the topics we do often here on the blog. Sitcoms that are forgotten enough that no one among the writing staff can find anybody who has heard the TV series in question. Despite being classified as ‘forgotten’ by our anecdotal research, the show we are talking about today is one that should be remembered. And I mean statistically, not just the personal feelings we have for it.

This show won awards during its lifespan in the 1980s. Got multiple seasons year after year, among a media environment with few peer shows that have as many seasons. This show was popular enough to warrant them, and revivals of sorts years after the last season. All those accolades and accomplishments yet this series is still forgotten years after its last fan-requested gasps.

So is life. All sitcoms, even the greatest ones, eventually only get remembered by bored people writing barely read blog posts about their impact on the writer’s life. Not just sitcoms. All things. The most acclaimed movies, books, paintings, songs, fart jokes will only go as far as the people enjoying them. Shows that make a small impact are just forgotten quicker. I think I talked about this with that blog post about Judd Hirsch’s lost sitcom (see blog post #119).

If this TV show had any impact on the life of the progenitor of this blog, the majority of that impact would be very recent, relative...

I tried to finish a 700ish page history book about the European Revolutions of 1848. (For the record, that book is Revolutionary Spring by Christopher Clark. Published in 2023) I had heard such good things about it. So, so many. I can feel guilt weighing down my inner intellectual street cred. Knowing I stopped at page 300 on a juggernaut among recent history non-fiction book critics. The critics are right in giving accolades to this book. It is an excellent book as long as you are very very interested in every single European nation 's history in the years 1848-1849. I thought I might have been but there were more nations that I could fit inside my brain’s bandwidth.

It was my own fault for thinking a 700 page book would give me the survey level view of this event. Or that it would stick mostly to Germany, which was the area where I had the most queries. I did not find a ‘Germany’ chapter. Rather they were chronologically distributed. My own faults in book reading would not matter as much if the writer did a better job at telling a riveting story instead of stating so many facts in a sludgy staccato of names and places.

Instead, what is getting reviewed is ostensibly about political revolution. The target for today is the second volume of the 2000’s Ghost in The Shell anime series Stand Alone Complex. AKA The 2nd Gig. The twenty or so episodes of this 2nd Gig had a political revolution as the big plot that the episodes worked around. This evolving...

New TV series are rare for me. Has been that way for at least one or two decades. There is just too much investment to get involved in a show. Good ones or bad ones. At least with bad ones you don’t sink any memories into them before letting go of them. That is if you are wise enough to quit before you know it's not going to get better. Who has time to take that risk? I just drop a show if more than three episodes hold me through. Often even less. It’s a poisson distribution close to 0.

One season of a bad show, or a few half-baked attempts at watching a whole season, can demonstrate to you what is lacking about them. What the good shows have and what that dreck did not are hard to notice if you exclusively seek out ones that please you instantly. Sometimes you gotta push through television programming that displeases you. Or into mediums that aren’t your favorite yet it offers something up your alley. Big robots fighting big anything is up my alley. Any medium should have an easy task ahead of them if that is the subject they’re working with.

The TV series that I gave an honest effort to enjoy and then wrote about it here will be: Blue Gender. Sounds a little gay doesn’t it? It’s an anime from the late 90s. From an era when gender wasn’t so directly a LGBTQ buzzword. It's hard to tell why it is called gender at all. Blue is used dozens of times per episode (it’s the name of the show’s space bugs). The gender in the title probably has to do with the...