As I write this, I’m listening to an episode of “The Game” in second and a half bursts thanks to the inadequate streaming service provided by it’s new home, BET. I have an adoration of this show that stems to the pilot that was awkwardly tossed into the “Girlfriends” time slot on the CW. Or the WB. Or whatever the fuck that network was called when the show actually premiered. It’s been too long to remember accurately and I feel like writing, not researching right now, so we’ll just call it not particularly important information.
My love of this show based around a sport that I largely abhor stems more from my adoration and respect of it’s creator than it’s basic premise. That said, as a general sports fan, it is nice to see the locker room from a different perspective, so don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy the occasional bits of the sport thrown into the episodes. Much like “The League”, this show has proven itself able to be less about the somewhat barbaric and probably on it’s way out game of football, and more about the humanity behind the game; a hard thing to master, but this show has managed to do it well from it’s infancy.
I was thrilled to hear the show was picked up on BET after the clusterfuck of it’s old network imploding on itself. Only one issue: at the time I didn’t have cable and for the last two years, I’ve been reliant, with my wily nomadic ways, on hotel and motel cable…which rarely, if ever, comes with BET, or, for that matter, any other Viacom-owned cable networks. Don’t know why and complaints about it go unheard, so whatev.
“The Game” is also not available on iTunes. Well, insofar as it is not available to me on iTunes, not sure if it actually is on there or not.. (I have to play Musical Computers if I want to use iTunes–This really just means I never use iTunes except on my iPhone. To this extent, I have checked iTunes & found a whole lot of “Game of Thrones”, just not “The Game”. Now you know.)
And now we get to where I’m currently at, BET.com. They do stream full episodes of “The Game” which is super awesome, don’t get me wrong, but they have no buffer to speak of, advertising included, and what often results is watching an episode, “Chopped & Screwed”, so to speak, ad time running out and the audio of the episode coming back in while the video is still trying to hawk me some Grey Goose..ooh, cherry!..sorry about that.
Oh, and my favorite–after the third commercial break, consistently, on every single episode, the audio jumps ahead of the video, fairly significantly, making the episode look like a badly dubbed kung fu flick from that point until the end.
I think I know what has happened in this season, but to be honest, I feel like I’ve missed so much that it might have just been a lost cause from the start. The parts that have come through loud & clear and with a mighty decent buffer, weren’t exactly filling me with hope.
From what I have seen, there was a ridiculous amount of time spent with Tasha and Melanie cattily fighting, and honestly, I’m sick of seeing that device used in singular plot lines, much less multi-episode arcs. I understand it has some basis in reality, but god damn it, women can be involved in business/family relationships with best friends and they don’t always, always, always end in prolonged Manolo Blahnik standoffs. It’s cliched, it’s easy and I wish every television show I love didn’t fall prey to it at some point in it’s run. Conflict may be necessary, but it doesn’t always have to come at the cost of the relationship between the main two female characters.
I’ve gotten to a point in the season where this conflict has finally come to an end, but between how long that was drawn out and the fact that I haven’t watched one episode start to finish in less than 90 minutes, I don’t know that I can keep up with this one until the end. This might end up being a “Put in a pin in it ’til the shit hits Netflix” and move on with my life kind of show. Which is something I genuinely never thought I would say about it..
? Psycho killer, Qu’est-ce que c’est.
