Topic: Media

I’ve always enjoyed watching television while knitting, knitting itself is easy and doesn’t take much thought most of the time, and I’ve never needed to watch it for every stitch, so it makes sense. I’ve never really felt as engaged with audio-only media while knitting for long stretches, though I do try sometimes.

My tastes, in this context, tend toward procedurals: not particularly because I love crime and/or medical shows, but because the cadence of the story telling is a good fit for my attentional needs while knitting, and the overall predictability means my attention can drift in and out as need be. It’s also helpful that a lot of procedurals have had long runs which means there’s a lot of material to keep me busy. Things that I’ve watched recently:

• Bones has been quite fun to watch because it sort of fits the bill correctly, there are a lot of episodes. It’s also very interesting because I remember watching some of the early seasons more or less when they aired, and it totally feels dated now.
• Stargate Universe, which couldn’t stick with, despite a lot of affection for earlier Stargate shows, I couldn’t stick it out. I think that some combination of the show being very dark and isolating, with a few of the characters being deeply unlikeable.
• The last few years of Star Trek TNG and Voyager. Which were nice, but it’s super weird to watch television that’s this episodic, and while I’ve watched a lot of Star Trek here and there, I must confess that I didn’t really watch them systematically before.
• Eureka is totally absurd, but was fun to watch, and was the right kind of “delightful, but mostly lighthearted.”
• White Collar has been fun. I’m particularly partial to shows set in New York City, and it’s fun to be able to pick out the settings from familiar places. Sometimes the characters are great, and sometimes some of the “character growth” stories are a little bit ham-fisted. I also wonder what’d be like if there was a buddy-cop show where there characters were actually gay and not just incredibly homoerotic all the time.

I’m not super sure where to go after this, and would gladly take suggestions if people have favorites. I haven’t tended to enjoy things like CSI very much, for whatever that’s worth.