Day #27 of the 30 Day Television Challenge.

[shadowkat]

This is Day #27 of 30 Days of Television Meme

The prompt is A series that changed your life or affected your life in some way or is personal to you.

No rules, outside of the prompt. It's impossible to do otherwise - for me at least.

I picked the Sixth Season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - why? Well, we most likely would never have met otherwise. It got me through a difficult time in my life - but mostly the fandom did - and S6 was my entry point into the fandom (even though I'd been watching the series since it aired in 1997, I just didn't get involved in the fandom until 2002.)

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Comments

[wendelah1]

There are a few series I could choose but I'm picking Stargate SG-1. I didn't begin watching SG-1 until season six when it moved from Showtime to the Scifi Channel. We watched the reruns of season six, and season seven as it aired, ordered the DVDs, watched the entire series as a family activity. During my son's senior year of high school, I learned how to turn on the desk top computer--we only had one, and I was terrified I would break it--and found SG-1 fandom. Gate World was the first site where I read fanfic. Eventually I found Heliopolis, which led me to nanda, which led me to her livejournal. Long story, short, in 2007, I made my own journal.

I was a fannish late bloomer.

[shadowkat]

I thought Star-Gate started on Sci-Fi? I remember they had Season 1, way back when. In fact it was cheaper for Sy-Fy to carry, because it was a Canadian series. There was a big controversy back in 2002, when Syfy cancelled Farscape in favor of keeping and expanding on the Star-Gate series.

[wendelah1]

No, seasons one–five originally aired on Showtime, beginning in 1997. Showtime didn't renew it and Scifi picked it up in...2002 sounds about right. It was filmed in Canada.

[shadowkat]

I thought it showed the reruns at some point?

[wendelah1]

My memory isn't the best, as I'm sure you've noticed. Well, we weren't watching much TV--my son had enormous amounts of homework in HS and we only had the one computer and one TV, and they were both in the den. (Though I think I was watching Farscape reruns in the daytime when it was airing on Scifi?) Whenever the reruns began on Scifi, I'm pretty sure SG-1 didn't hit my radar until the spring/summer of 2002.

Argh. I know that doesn't answer your question but it's the best I can come up with.

[atpo_onm]

Well, obviously without Buffy the Vampire Slayer I wouldn't be here on Dreamwidth, or LJ before it, or ATPo before that. Did it change my life? It must have, being that I was insane enough to drive from southeastern PA to NYC, my old Isuzu Trooper crammed with not merely my personal luggage but a literal car-full of AV equipment I had agreed to provide for the Big Damn Board Meet there. I met you, and Masq, and cjl, Littlebit, Midnights Jane, d'herblay, Arethusa, Scroll, Rob, Toby, the many others, and truly a great time seemed had by all.

One needs to understand that I simply don't do things like that. I don't travel well, I never have. I made one other very long trip to rural Kentucky to visit a friend who moved there to take a teaching job when I was in my 20's, and that's about it. I might occasionally drive to Delaware to go to the beaches there. Last time I did that? About 14 years ago now.

But, being that Buffy is the way obvious choice, and I'd prefer to pick something less so, I'm going to officially choose a program that was less life-changing, but more personal.

And! It's not a TV show from the 1950's or 60's!

The time is December 2015, and I had just been diagnosed with diabetes. Fortunately, it's the more common Type 2, which is manageable with diet, exercise, and sometimes medication. But it was also the negatively perfect finish for a really lousy year, the details of which I will avoid except to state that here in 2020 I'm still recovering from it financially.

In the spring of 2016, I had accidentally stumbled across this show while surfing channels one evening, and stopped to viddy it for a while since there wasn't anything else on that interested me even sightly.

I am not a sports guy. While this may be due to my severe asthma as a child, my natural lack of physical coordination, machts nichts. I occasionally watch some golf or tennis, and I watch some of the Olympics,
but that's about it. So, while I had beard of American Ninja Warrior
there was no inherent draw present for me to tune it in.

But I started watching that evening, and did like the basic idea of man against obstacles. (I strongly prefer sports or games that involve skill and precision over brute strength.) Then a contestant emerged that surprised me-- because she was female.

What? Men and women competing in the same sport? On the same course??

It got better yet. There were young people and there were people in their 40's and even 50's. And they all were supportive of one another! Okay, this is not like other sports, for sure. I started to watch every week, and became really drawn in.

Yeah, yeah, but what's the personal thing? Well... I had just started doing exercise walks to help with the diabetes, and it did help, but it was a struggle at first for me to walk even a single mile. But what kept coming into my mind as I kept at it was the inspiration Ninja Warrior provided with its inclusiveness and its encouragement of all of the competitors to do the best they could... and keep trying, keep coming back, don't give up.

In a couple of months, I managed to do 2 miles. And a month later, 3. In 2017, I could do 4 miles. Last year, I managed 6, and did 7 one time this year. Me, this totally un-athletic nerd.

You know, maybe Ninja Warrior did change my life after all.

There's no shortage of clips from the show on youtube, but I'm going to pick this one because when it took place on the original broadcast in 2016, I recall doing something else I never do-- I jumped up out of my chair, shoved my fist in the air, and yelled YES! YES!! YESSS!!!

Seriously, I never do that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TofAXjkbIDI

(Approximately 15 or more people had gone before her, most of them men. No one had gotten through that Wedge obstacle, if they made it even half that far.)

Oh, then there's this guy, who's a mere 49 years old when this took place. And he is very much not a professional stunt person, ya'all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdAle_GhKLE

*** CAUTION! Very excitable announcers on this show! Stay calm! ***

:-)

[cjlasky7]

Star Trek. The original. Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Gene Roddenberry's utopian vision of--

No. That's not quite right.

When the original ended, I was still only eight years old, and the true significance of the series, the true weight of its ideas, hadn't fully sunk into my brain. So what solidified my Trekkie credentials, and sparked my love of science fiction in general? When did I realize what Trek really meant?

Star Trek: The Animated Series is kind of the lost relative of the Trek family. Produced by Filmation Studios with unbearably cheap looking animation, the series nonetheless crackled with ideas. It brought back the voices of most of the original cast, with scripts from David Gerrold, D.C. Fontana and Larry Niven(!). The Enterprise met and befriended the Devil, and traveled to a universe where time ran backwards and black stars shone in a white sky; Spock revisited his childhood on Vulcan and discussed life and death with his own titanic clone.

It was all weird and wonderful and helped set me off on the path of exploration:

https://youtu.be/t0vl1mPwgqk