The Year of Ambitious TV Watching
My biggest accomplishment of the year was a bloody mess. The project started simply enough, but within weeks, I found myself regularly staring at contorted limbs and gaping wounds. Soon few things marked the end of my workday more clearly than a grisly episode of Dexter, the mid-aughts Showtime series about a forensic analyst who moonlights as a serial killer. Tearing through all eight seasons of the sanguinary drama isn’t something I imagined doing at the outset of 2020, or even in the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic.
Back in March, I turned to old TV favorites for comfort, like countless other Americans who were stuck at home. I revisited the Manhattan of and the Brooklyn of , awash in a curious kind of nostalgia . As the current shows I loved started truncating their seasons, the pop culture of the present felt like a constant reminder of the devastation unfolding around the country.
