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My Marriage
Will Crumble If We Can’t Find a New Television Show to Watch. BY ANDREW PALMER and BRIAN PLATZER Please help me. My marriage will crumble if we can’t find a new television show. I don’t know how it got to this point. We used to… I don’t know what we used to do after dinner. Read, maybe? Watch Jeopardy? Talk about the kids? But now, until bedtime, Morgan puts her feet up on the couch and I pour myself a short bourbon and we watch episodes of whatever it is we’re watching at the time. And we’ve run out. We loved The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad was perfect until the last episode, and Buffy changed TV, and Mad Men is so beautiful, and the first season of Homeland was riveting (did you know he was originally supposed to die in season one!), and Deadwood was Shakespearean, and The Wire carried us through the death of Morgan’s sister. Sure, Morgan loved Cassie, but The Wire so expertly captured urban blight that it made us forget about Morgan’s loss. Morgan and Cassie always fought over the holidays, anyway — one year Cassie wouldn’t touch the turkey after Morgan spent seven hours brining and basting! And season four of The Wire managed to filter the manner in which race and violence corrupts youth in a way Morgan and I had never seen before in any work of art. After The Wire was over, things were okay for a while. We remembered The West Wing with enough fondness to keep us coming back to The Newsroom, and a good friend subscribed to Netflix so after House of Cards and Orange is the New Black we figured we might as well watch all of The Walking Dead. Same went for Showtime — I paid for it for Homeland, so why not, and Masters of Sex was pretty good. Masters of Sex was like Showtime’s Boardwalk Empire. Totally serviceable. But I lost my job, and I cheated on Morgan. She started paying for sex, we lost a son to tuberculosis, and we went on a kind of disappointing run with Justify and Rome and Smallville and Prison Break and Fringe and Sons of Anarchy and Firefly and Veronica Mars and The Shield and Dexter and In Treatment and The Bridge and The Killing, until our house burned down in what was officially deemed arson (though they never caught the perpetrator) and I really got nervous because I couldn’t find anything new on Netflix or premium cable, but,
thank God, a friend told me about the DVDs of Borgen, the Danish drama that tells the story of charismatic politician Birgitte Nyborg who unexpectedly becomes the first female Prime Minister of Denmark. But now that’s over, too. And I need something new. I’m scared Morgan is going to wander again. HBO pre Sopranos, you’re thinking? Of course I’ve watched Sex in the City. Morgan made me, and I liked it, kind of. I liked drinking bourbon with Morgan’s feet up on my lap. And of course I’ve watched The Larry Sanders Show — it’s a work of genius. But what next? Oz? You expect us to cozy up over Oz? Before Homeland Showtime was just David Duchovony having sex, and Cinemax was just the sex without David Duchovony. Morgan can’t take the HBO sadsack flops like John from Cincinnati and Luck and Carnivale, and for some reason those halfhour comedies — Bored to Death, Hung, How To Make It in America, Entourage — leave us anxious and depressed. So I’m desperate. I know what you’re thinking. And we’ve been saving it. We’ve been saving Game of Thrones. It’s all we have left. We won’t read the books. We won’t watch a single episode. We’re waiting for it to be done. All twelve seasons. Of dragons. It’s a show about dragons who kill the characters you come to love, right? It’s a show that lets you have everything you’ve ever wanted and then takes it all away from you. I know that’s what everyone says, and I’m sure they’re right. But Morgan and I want to wait. Or at least I do. I want to wait until it’s finished, all one hundred hours of it, and then I want to have one hundred hours left to live — or one hundred hours left in our marriage — and I want to put all the episodes of Game of Thrones on in a row, and I want to be completely satisfied, and then I want to be completely devastated.
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