I have a season of 3rd Rock From the Sun out from the library right now. I haven’t watched it in years. I didn’t watch it all that regularly at the time, catching episodes when nothing better was on either in its original run or when it was on syndication—it played alongside The Simpsons on one of my local stations for years, as I recall. And that’s another show I’ve gotten a few of the better seasons of from the library and have been pleasantly surprised by on a new viewing. It’s nice to be reminded sometimes.
Because it turns out that 3rd Rock From the Sun can be an awfully funny show. It’s not exactly news that The Simpsons can be as well. Several times as I’ve been working on The Great Library Project, I have come across a show that I used to watch all the time and haven’t seen in years, and it has brought me great joy to watch through it again and realize that, yeah, it’s still that good. Movies, too, but I think the investment of time means that the pleasure of a TV show that holds up is greater; you theoretically would have wasted considerably more time on a bad show than a bad movie, after all.
But I do think it takes some distance to get the proper pleasure in that reminder. It’s not the same if you last watched it only a few months ago. I’m kind of embarrassed to say how long it’s been since I actually sat down and watched The Simpsons, given how many quotes from it I still have memorized a decade or more after I saw the episode in which they appear. Coincidentally, a line I used to quote from 3rd Rock was on the very first disc I put in, and I was so delighted to see it come up again that my son asked me what I was so happy about.
Not that I told him, you understand, because how do you explain to a four-year-old that you’ve just been reminded about a super dumb joke you had with some people you haven’t been on speaking terms with in more than fifteen years? I’m not sure I can explain that to adults. Especially since it involves the mugging of French Stewart. There are two great actors in the Solomon “family” on that show, and he isn’t either of them. Not that I could explain to Simon how much pleasure it was giving me to see that, yes, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was a pretty good actor in those days, too.
The same thing happened with Zorro last week, and Northern Exposure earlier in the catalog, and so forth. Every once in a while, I’m reminded that some show I loved, I loved for a reason. It’s nice when that happens. Certainly it’s better than the alternative. And there are worse ways to spend an evening than getting reacquainted with a genuinely good show.
