I'm pretty much a "pick one show to watch entirely on DVD" person nowadays; I haven't bothered attempting to keep up with airdates in ages.
Just finished up all of
Avatar: The Last Airbender; borrowed all 3 seasons from a friend of mine about a month ago. Damn what an awesome show. Just plain fun almost all the time, and I agree with the messages of the more serious parts. Almost all my "complaints" are artifacts of the fact that you can only do so much in 22 minute plots, and even then the creators stuffed in a bunch of two-parter episodes (and a four-part finale) to get around this. Managed to sneak a reasonably decent haul of death and destruction in the background past the "It's a kid show" censors too. Incredibly strong cast all-around, though the "22 minute episodes" thing and need to generally focus on Our Heroes means that the show usually has to cook up excuses for only featuring a few members of the secondary characters in any episode. Everyone should watch it. (Also then you can appreciate OK's previous Azula avatar & El Cid's earlier Eiro avatar).
Pretty coincidental I caught up before the movie comes out, though glad I did. Moderately worried about some of the things I've heard about the movie - M. Night Shamalyan is an erratic director - but could be awesome. We'll see, I guess. (Famously, the casting drew a giant outcry in that for a series based largely around Chinese martial arts with a splash of militarist Japan, Night managed to cast... a bunch of White-Americans and Indian-Americans. Well, I'm willing to give some benefit of the doubt, but it's still bizarre, especially for Aang, who is blatantly the Dalai Lama with kung fu.)
Also for whatever it's worth, the show I watched before Avatar:
The Wire. Everyone who is moderately interested in cop shows should definitely watch this. Actually anyone moderately interested in social policy and inner city poor should watch it. Okay, basically everyone should watch it. Seriously. You will not be able to watch bad cop shows the same way again.
For those not familiar with it, The Wire, rather than focusing on big splashy society murders, instead notes where police do most of their actual work: the drug trade. It also shows both sides of the coin in having plenty of scenes involving the drug dealers, the kingpins, the people caught in the middle, and by the later seasons a whole bunch of other stuff (Season 2 has the dockworkers union, Season 3 and beyond politics, Season 4 the schools, and Season 5 the newspaper). Just great, gritty stuff. David Simon the creator is definitely swinging his political ax in parts - he thinks the drug war is a giant expensive failure and bureaucracy will chew up your soul - but since he pretty effectively shows WHY, I can't complain. Lots of great characters and good plotting.
If I have a complaint, it's that Season 5 is notably worse than the other seasons, probably because it hit too close to home - David Simon is a former journalist (who spent a year hanging out with cops researching a book) and Season 5's newspaper focus is obviously too close to home. For a show with lots of nuance - villains with good sides, good guys motivated by the wrong reasons, etc. - the newsroom has HEROES and VILLAINS and never the twain shall meet and also THE BOSSES ARE DESTROYING REAL JOURNALISM. Season 5 also features some drastic 180s in character arcs to make the plot sort of work, and it still holds together less than the earlier seasons. Still really good, to be clear, but not as exceptional as the earlier seasons!
Also, as a semi-random comment, The Wire shows just how much things change in a mere 5 years (especially when other cop shows are still featuring, say, 70s ideas of mobsters as villains). In Season 1, drug lookouts still use public phones. By season 2, they're on cells. By season 3, they're on anonymous pre-paid cells bought with cash out-of-state. In season 5, they're sending coded photos to each other.
So yeah. Go watch The Wire.
Also NECRO REPLY PRETEND IT IS 2009 SPOOKY MUSIC IS PLAYING
I'm also rewatching all of Babylon 5 because it's been a decade since it finished and I was 10 years old when it started, so I figured I probably missed or have forgotten some of the finer points. All of season 1, for instance. Just heard Delenn say "If you value your lives, be somewhere else," which is still one of the best Big Damn Heroes moments (speaking of which) in all of television.
Other stuff....the writing's as sharp, and the characters as good, as I remember. Ivanova is particularly awesome, and they handled the Sinclair/Sheridan transition pretty damn well, given the retarded constraints the network put on them. The weakest part of the third season, which is otherwise a superb arc, is the lack of development for Clark. I'm perfectly willing to believe a person like that exists, but give me a reason why. Is he a xenophobe who really believes what he's saying? A megalomaniac? Machiavellian? Just plain nuts? He's had maybe three minutes of screen time in the entire series and they didn't even try to answer those questions before making him a major villain.
Yeah, I was very surprised at how Babylon 5 handled that plotline. I figured from the start that Clark was just a figurehead of the Real Bad Guys, and once he started getting smeared for various Bad Things and President Clark Eats Babies, and when Babylon 5 foolishly made Clark the figurehead of their protests, that, well... Clark would "step down." Or be assassinated by his own supporters. Or something else that would reveal the REAL BAD GUY and also make the Earth Force war more problematic since you just lost your big evil figurehead. But no, they decided that Clark was indeed the Big Bad Guy himself, which was just lame because what little we see of him doesn't seem very impressive.
