i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage

so unemployment? totally conducive to watching lots of tv.

dr. who: you know why i fell in love with this show? because the characters are so fucking real. i mean, aside from the whole time lord TARDIS thing. even the doctor - he's cranky and short-tempered and funny and kind and real, and rose is just. rose is a fantastic sidekick, because she hates a lot of having to tag along after the doctor. and rose is a fantastic woman, because she's not perfect, she fucks things up with mickey constantly, and she and the doctor have the most complicated perfect passive-aggressive co-dependent in a good way.

and once i fell for the characters - which i did, hard, the moment the doctor said, "nice to meet you, rose - run for your life!" - watching the plot unfold was just icing on the cake. all the interactions were so honest and true - "rose, i'm coming to get you." - and the writing is funny and it was just. so well put together, so little time wasted, and what kept getting me through the whole thing is that no matter how fantastical it got (and it being dr. who, it was pretty fantastical) it was still so human.

i watched "fathers' day" and cried like a baby. the relationship between rose and her father is so spectacularly rendered; it was just. all. the whole thing was so perfectly real. i keep trying to explain this to people who haven't seen it yet, and i end up just flailing my hands and saying, "it's just so wonderfully human."

and the doctor/rose relationship. he loves her, loves her so much and she loves him and at the end, when he says, "rose, before i go, i just want to tell you - you were fantastic ... absolutely fantastic ... and d'you know what? ... so was i.", i was so overcome with the love, the perfect rightness of the whole relationship, that i burst into enormous chest-wracking sobs.

the only thing i didn't get: bad wolf. i know, i know, it was all over, it was following them, it made rose go back to the doctor, rose made the words go away - but what was it? did i just miss something in my 48 binge through the episodes? insidian and i are confused! explain, explain!

so. you guys who wanted to know what i thought of dr. who? i thought it was perfect. i wouldn't have changed a thing.

slings & arrows: paul gross is so pretty and so crazy and i was a theater major and this show is the best thing ever in the whole world. um. i mean. HI.

monk: i started watching this in july when i was home, because momcat loves it and there was a marathon on usa on the fourth of july, but the more i see - the tivo gets every new episode for me, plus a handful of reruns every week - the more i'm charmed by it. it's not a very good cop show, per se, and i prefer sharona in the early episodes to natalie in the new season, but tony shaloub is so fucking charming, even when monk is a frustrating, hard-to-like character, and the mysteries are always interesting even when the cop-ness of the show isn't very good. and this past week's episode, when monk got drunk, was one of the hands down funniest things i've ever seen. hilarious. usa, you get big points for this show.