Origins.

Ok, I'm not exaggerating when I say that TV saved my life.  I've been in some personally very dark places that I'm not sure I would have been able to pull myself out of without some of the role models I found on TV.  The first show I watched, pilot to finale, was Alias.  That was a turning point in my love for TV, but it wasn't my first exposure to TV dramas.  I had followed shows before (most intently Dawson's Creek), but I was a bandwaggon jumper on those, mostly watching them so that I could be "in" on something socially when I switched schools in 7th grade.  Before I came to Sidwell, I knew nothing about pop culture.  I listened to Oldies 100.3, my favorite musical artists were Bob Dylan and Paul Simon.  I loved movies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Ghostbusters.  I played Stoddard Soccer on a co-ed team, boys were my friends and my teammates.  Apparently, for a 13 year old at a prestigious Washington, DC Private School, that was not so normal.  I went home and cried when a classmate made fun of me for never hearing a Sublime song before, and started listening to 101.1 and 99.1 to try to fit in more.   It was on one of these morning shows on the way to school that I heard my first ads for Dawson's Creek.  Then I heard people at school talking about it, and I knew this was something I had to get in on.

My parents were never big on TV.  I am the oldest of two, and I grew up watching PBS kids shows, old Zorro and Batman reruns, and movies on VHS.  My sister grew up more in the era of Barney and the Power Rangers, but still the only shows we really watched on a weekly basis were Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!.  Needless to say, it came as quite a shock to them when I asked to start watching a teen soap opera on basic cable.  It was a type of blasphemy I could not have predicted, and it took a couple weeks to wear them down, but I finally got to watch my precious socially boosting Dawson's Creek a couple of weeks into season 1. Unfortunately, it didn't really help me socially, but it did give me an angsty teen to identify with in Joey Potter.  In hindsight, the overwritten neurosis of Joey Potter is embarrassing; But at the time, with the confusion and hormones of puberty raging through my brain, it was like looking in a mirror.  She was awkward, she was smart, she was one of the guys until suddenly that wasn't cool anymore and her best friend was looking at other girls the way she looked at him.  But there was hope for her, she forged on through all of it and came out with Dawson by her side at least for a little while, and that gave me hope for myself.  With no older siblings to compare life to, TV was going to have to do.

I want to make sure I don't discount the actual role models I found in my life during my middle and high school years, there were some very important real people in my life, both my age and older, but my family life left a lot to be desired.  With few exceptions, my close relations were and are very unpleasant, negative people on both sides, and many people I looked up to in my youth turned out to be very ugly people later on in life, so I took most relationships I had with people with a grain of salt, always expecting them to end unexpectedly, with no warning.  And for the most part I continuously got what I expected.  The barn where I grew up riding and basically living at over the summers went bankrupt.  The owners had to sell all the horses and move away.   My aunt who I idolized and spent a lot of time with as a child turned out to be a petty, hateful person who couldn't get over whatever went wrong in her life to be a decent sister to my mom.   The only track coach who ever motivated me to run well was a potentially drug-addicted nutbag, and only coached for one season before losing his job.  My freshman season was the only season I placed in the finals, and ran so well that I was named All-ISL.  After that, I never lived up to the expectations of myself or my coaches.  My spirit was broken, and clinical depression and anxiety disorder lead to serious eating issues that definitely impacted my athletic performance.  My first boyfriend broke up with me without warning.  It was several days after September 11, 2001 and a couple weeks before our one year anniversary.  The next month he went to Homecoming with the girl I had been suspicious he was cheating on me with over the summer and kissed her on the dance floor right in front of me.

In the midst of all of this, I convinced my parents to let us watch more and more network TV: The X-Files, reruns of Beverly Hills 90210, MTV, VH1, I went nuts.  I basically just wanted to escape from the world around me however I could.  When I was in 9th grade, Alias premiered.  I remember seeing the promos during Jeopardy! and hearing them on the radio and thinking, "this looks awesome"!  I watched every single episode, and that was when I realized that TV could not only be good, it could be amazing.  It could be an art form, a universe created out of nothing with fully developed, believable characters and a deep and meaningful mythology.  My obsession with movies and TV led me to my first real job at the Potomac Video down the street.  While I never felt like I fit in at school, I felt at home with the older guys who worked there.  The appreciated the stuff I did, they liked the movies I did and introduced me to more awesome movies and TV shows.  It was my sister who introduced me to Buffy.  After months of bugging, and catching a couple reruns over the summer before college, I decided to take home season one and give it a chance.  And that was the beginning:  I was OBSESSED.   The strength Buffy showed in the face of true horror and tragedy gave me strength in the face of an emotionally abusive relationship that was basically just a recreation of my relationship with my mother.  It took a long time and I allowed myself to endure a lot of shit before I could break free, but when I did I felt like a new person, and I truly feel like Joss Whedon is to thank.  Buffy led to Angel, friends from high school who learned I liked Buffy told me about Firefly.  Between these three shows, I found that I could take the fortitude and morality that I saw onscreen and apply it to my own life.  I don't know how else I would have pulled myself out of the cloud of depression and anxiety and inappropriate amounts of medication the University doctors and my psychiatrist decided I needed.  Despite this haze of hell, I identified that I deserved to be treated well, that nothing in my past meant I deserved to feel pain.  I rose above, stood up for myself and my well-being and came out the other side relatively intact.

I can safely say that the time between when I was 14 and 19 are the worst and most painful years of my life, and you couldn't pay me enough money or offer me anything to go back and relive those years.  But still, I wouldn't change anything.  In the end it has all made me who I am today and I can say for the first time in my life that who I am today is pretty cool.

So let me say it once and for all: TV saved my life, and made me who I am today.  I am an unabashed TV addict, a scholar of TV studies, and a believer that not all TV is evil if you use it for good.  I read TV books, I follow TV blogs and websites, and now I feel like it's my turn to weigh in on today's media.  I'll share reviews, random thoughts, and essays that I have written about my favorite and least favorite TV Shows.  Without further ado, here it is.  My Big Fat TV Blog...