I need suggestions of TV series on DVD to distract me while I’m exercising. But I’m not a TV watcher so I have no idea what might be interesting. It needs to be 40 to 60 minutes per episode. However it also has to satisfy whatever parental lock they use at the gym, so most of the good hour-long premium cable stuff is out (it wouldn’t even allow ‘Firefly’ or ‘Battlestar Galactica’, forget about ‘The Sopranos’.
So I just finished Season 2 of ‘Lost’, I lost interest in ‘24’ early in season 3. Please suggest me something good along those lines, rentable from Netflix, and tell me why you think it’s good. Vintage/retro stuff is also fair game.
MacGyver. Because it teaches valuable lessons: you can save the world from a vast acid spill if you have a chocolate bar; Budapest, Burma and Brazil all look a lot like Southern California; chicks are good to have around, because their purses contain things like mirrors which you can use to reroute lasers; all villains have an accent; and, perhaps most importantly, Richard Dean Anderson has a mullet!
Seriously, though, they’re pretty good for working out since there tends to be less talking and more action. Plus, like I said, Richard Dean Anderson with a mullet!
Law & Order. It’s fun, the dialogue is good, the cast is great, it doesn’t require too much concentration to follow, it’s so formulatic that you can time your workout to the plot developments, and you’ll never, ever run out of episodes.
Can you give us an idea of what kinds of things you’re generally interested in? And can you devote your full concentration while exercising or do you want something fun but not fully engrossing?
“Supernatural” is one of my favorite weekly workout shows. It’s along the lines of the X-Files, which is good too if you haven’t seen it.
Have you seen the British version of “The Office”? If not, then start with that one and move on to the U.S. version after that (they’re half an hour but why not do two at a time?).
*House *and Veronica Mars would probably serve well to distract you during a workout. Both are serialized dramas that have well constructed investigative/detective style plot arcs within each episode, so everything that happens is important to the episode, important to the series, or just for comedic effect.
In terms of retro stuff: American Dreams was about a Catholic family in 1960’s Philadelphia; Freaks and Geeks focused on, well, the freaks and geeks of a high school just outside of Detroit in 1980. I thought both were great shows, but I’m not sure either would be my first choice to watch if I were stuck on treadmill or stationary bike.
If you’ve never been a TV watcher, it’d be worth a look at some of the more popular sitcoms of the past: Cheers, Frasier, Seinfeld, 3rd Rock From The Sun, etc. They’re only 20 minutes each, but if you set the disc to “Play All Episodes” you should be able to get through two without having to reset the DVD player. Best of all, you use so little of your brain watching them you’ll finish your workout feeling both invigorated and as if you just took a 40 minute nap.