That 30 Day TV meme, Day 10.

Day 10 - A show you thought you wouldn't like but ended up loving.

MASH. When I was living with my last live-in boyfriend, MASH reruns were airing on weeknights before the news, and he insisted on having the TV on. (Bear in mind that I'd never seen MASH before as we were a largely TV-free household as I was growing up.) Despite the fact that I watch a lot of shows, I actually hate most TV, and I hate having the TV on; I hate ad breaks, and the way ads are louder than the shows, and I hate the mindless self-promotion of the commercial networks, and I can't stand having the TV on as background noise (which this particular boyfriend did all the time) and I was basically incredibly resistant to watching this stupid show.

And then, y'know, I saw a scene here and a scene there, and I gradually got sucked in, and - as so often happens when it comes to MASH - I fell in love with the characters and the show, and I basically loved everything about it. I haven't seen MASH in years, but I loved it then, and I keep meaning to watch it again - and all this for a show I was resolved to hate.

That 30 Day TV meme, Day 11.

Late again, mostly because WebKit has been sulking every time I ask a browser to do something useful. Go, WebKit! \o/

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Day 11 - A show that disappointed you.

Oh, so many of them. Oh TV, why can't I quit you? I could mention BSG here, or Dark Angel, or Alias, or The Mentalist, or Lie to Me, or any of the Stargates, or FlashForward, or even, if you want to be nitpicky, all the shows I love, because they've all let me down in various ways too. (Like NCIS with its destructive humour, especially of the Mock-the-Geek variety, like Firefly with its erasure of people of colour in a future where everyone speaks Mandarin.)

But I think here I'll talk about White Collar, because it wasn't the deepest disappointment, but one of the most recent, and one that I can clearly articulate.

When I first heard about White Collar, I was interested by the premise, which played up Neal Caffrey's criminality and the Rat Pack retro theme running through the show. Fannishly, people were talking about it in the same breath as Leverage or Burn Notice, or even Ocean's Eleven. So I was expecting a sharp, bantery heist/caper show -- and what I got was, in fact, a buddy cop show, arguably of the Genius Wrangler variety. And I already have plenty of Buddy Cop shows and Genius Wrangler shows that interest me a lot more than White Collar does. And, to be honest, I don't have much interest in partnership-based shows where the partners are both middle-class white guys. It's not White Collar's fault that it wasn't what I wanted, but it was definitely the biggest letdown of the season for me.