Stranger Nights

Years have passed, but I finally found television show with people I wouldn't mind hanging out with. 

Is there something pathetic to that notion? Must all questions become rhetorical? Yes and no. Sometimes, humanity just won't cut it, and I need a night alone. When watching television, I have to indulge a few instincts - base humor, major emotion, and following the foibles of like-minded people.

The beautiful people from Friends weren't friends at all. No one would make the real version, where they'd need multiple jobs to afford those expensive apartments, and David Schwimmer would be crushed by the financial weight of all that child support. 

As a kid, I thought the bar at Cheers would be a fun hangout. As an adult, I would enjoy it even more - no douchebag army crowding the bar, no vomit, and very little drinking, if watched closely enough. I never thought about the physics of hauling Norm home at the last call, but I rarely saw him drunk.  Who couldn't imagine taking the piss out of Cliff Clavin whenever he embarked on one of his bullshit digressions? 

I got 11 more years of aftershock thanks to Frasier, friends only for the fact that they never talked down to me, even when some plots grew stale. 

Then tried to sustain myself on Fox's Sunday night cartoon lineup. I failed, thanks to King of the Hill's rotted corpse, the Simpsons' mediocre groove, Family Guy's rapid descent into straight movie parody and its generally terrible spinoffs.

By leaning on bad cartoons, I lost touch with television. A brief fling with My Name is Earl ended with the writers' strike. Despite Earl's admirable quest for redemption, I couldn't shake the vibe that I only watched to feel superior.

Drama didn't help. Sure Mad Men and The Sopranos might be the apex of TV drama, but befriend this crew at your own peril. A shallow Jersey marsh might lie in your future. 

I don't get to catch it on CBS, because the switch to digital signals wiped it out in Nashville (yeah, that move wasn't intended to push the last rabbit-ear holdouts onto cable). 

Now, it has become easier to separate laughs from the like-minded. I get laughs from Liz Lemon and the cast of The Girlie Show on 30 Rock, but I wouldn't want any as friends. 

Even with my late introduction to It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, I couldn't hang with that crew; by the time you finish reading this Mac would have karate-chopped me, Charlie would have struck me with a beer bottle, and I would have seen Danny DeVito's ass twice (and not by choice). I laugh myself to the floor with their antics, but I wouldn't let them through my apartment door. Then again, they'd probably just smash a window while I slept. 

But the Big Bang Theory put the recent crop to shame. These guys could have been ripped from my headlines. Leonard and Sheldon seem somehow related to my real-world friends. They're unrepentant geeks, not simple caricatures. Their adventures are streaked with failure, meatheads beat them down, their conversations undecipherable to outsiders, and they endure it all. 

Sure, they have their exaggerations that push them beyond the auspices of 'real', but ultimately, that's as close as television will go toward my sensibilities. Except for Howard; he's pure sleaze, Raj's inability to speak to women he's attracted unless drunk hits way too close to home, however.

I'm sure I could make friends with the How I Met Your Mother crew, but they'll wait ... for the moment, I will stick with my physicist friends for now. Like a certain gang on Beacon Street, they have yet to let me down.