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Haunted Collector
The Americans on FX.
When it started a couple of months ago, I thought it was going to just be a lame clone of Homeland, but I gave it try because I've always been a fan of Keri Russell (yes, I even watched the bizarre final season of Felicity!) But it's turned out to be a very interesting, well done series with excellent suspense and isolated bouts of surprising violence. It gets its late-Cold War (1980) setting - a world of espionage still all about tape recorders and film cameras - just right. It very cleverly combines the themes of spying, duplicity, and illusionary surfaces with the realities and issues of being married long-term.
Definitely recommended!
Just finished Seson 2 of The Walking Dead. Not bad, but rather uneventful and lacking the action of the first season! I'm also nearing the end of Boardwalk Empire Season 1, slow moving but a good show.
Will
Hell On Wheels
You know, I'm struck by the fact that so much of our tastes, and our parents' tastes, depended on where we grew up. (And when.)
My parents were both born in NYC, and I grew up right over the border in Westchester. My folks were big fans of the live TV dramas in the fifties, and while we watched a wide range of popular shows when I was a kid in the sixties (Bewitched, Gunsmoke, Mission: Impossible, Secret Agent, Carol Burnett, etc.), they really dug "classier" fare like The Defenders and early (pre-PBS network) public broadcasting/BBC shows like The Forsyte Saga and The Six Wives of Henry VIII.
But... they had absolutely zero affinity for country-oriented shows like Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, The Andy Griffith Show, and later, Hee Haw or Dukes of Hazzard. They were urbanites with pretentions to being psuedo-intellectuals, and they felt that the country shows just weren't for us: they were silly, and obviously directed at heartland folks who could relate to those farms, little towns, eccentric characters, country music, and rural humor. So... I never watched any of those shows as a kid. And there was no way that I could get into them later on when I was on my own: they were just totally alien to my experiences (and not in a fascinating way like science fiction, westerns, war stories, period costume dramas, etc.)
Anyway, my point is that the "accidents" of your early locale and mindset have an awful lot to do with what you're exposed to, and what you end up liking...
Just watched the latest Walking Dead. One of the best episodes yet.