Great Moments in Television: Skins Series 1, Episode 8, Effy

Effy

Before you get all huffy, I’m talking about the UK Skins, not that thing that was on MTV and shall never be spoken of again.

For those who are not familiar, Skins is a UK show about a group of sixth-form (essentially the last two years of high school in the British education system, where students are prepared for A-level exams, which are used in university admissions) friends who party, fall in and out of love with one another, and try to figure out the meaning of it all. Each episode focuses on one of the core characters (and sometimes one of the fringe characters), presenting the world from their point of view, so that individual episodes can be stylistically distinct.

The show takes huge artistic risks, which sometimes pay off beautifully and other times fail spectacularly, but it always manages to capture the desperate intangible yearning of being an almost adult.

Great Moments in Television: The Vampire Diaries

The Vampire Diaries season 1, episode 22, "Founder’s Day"

My decision to watch The Vampire Diaries was primarily based on nostalgia. Having read and loved L.J. Smith's books when I was in junior high, I was thrilled to see them having a rebirth both on the NY Times bestseller list and on the small screen. And only partially because it gave me many opportunities to exorcise my nerd rage in a health way by informing people who called TVD a Twilight ripoff, “Actually, these books were originally published in 1991, well before Twilight.”

The first episode was fine. Nothing I was too excited about, but good enough to keep me watching. But then it happened; sometime during the middle of the first season, I stopped telling people I watched TVD because I used to love the books and started telling them that this was THE BEST SHOW ON TELEVISION and if they thought they were too cool to watch it then they were MISSING OUT. All of this came to a head in the season 1 finale, when the show became so awesome, that even satirically self-described bastion of “critics/hipsters/snobs/douchebags,” the AV Club (aka, one of my favorite web sites) had to sit up and take notice.

Major spoilers ahead! (Although if you haven’t watched this yet, what are you doing? It’s on Netflix Instant and in case you didn’t hear me before, it’s SO good.)