Buy Before You Cry

...there are certain people whose fame and success confounds me. When I am flipping channels with no set destination, I can always stop and find a way to settle in if I stumble upon an episode of Seinfeld. Though it is more and more rare these days, I usually find myself laughing if I run across a classic episode of Sanford & Son. Even as I type, the current rerun of the short-lived but criminally underrated Sports Night makes sense in its rare form of syndication. I cannot say the same for Mad About You, and specifically, Paul Reiser.

If I were to poll my entire collection of Facebook friends alone, I am pretty certain that I can find a wide cross-section of television favorites. Some people like Duck Dynasty while others still find intrigue in regular Dynasty. Does anyone truly like Mad About You? Is anyone a fan of Paul Reiser? Who were the secret society operatives that allowed for this series to not only survive, but thrive, alongside Seinfeld? On second thought, don't answer that. If I were to actually post this as a question on Facebook, I would probably have 20 separate personalities lunge at me with Paul Reiser coffee mugs in hand.

...not very often these days do I buy any movies. Between Netflix, cable, friends and a slight stream of disinterest, I look at 80% of the DVD's on store shelves and think "Who the fuck pays actual money to own that?". In my past, I used to buy movies sight unseen. A lot. I am not proud of this at all, but I once paid full price to own Running Scared with Paul Walker. Now there are movies that I legitimately enjoyed more than just a bit that I would never spend money to physically occupy space in my ever-shrinking world (see Lovelace). This stated...I am pretty sure that I plan to buy Dallas Buyers Club based on mere hype.

...I have reached a point where I am such a huge fan of the sequential narrative medium (a.k.a. comics) that I find myself being fairly forgiving. If the artwork is as dull as one's sight can imagine, good writing can make a story soar. If the writing is derivative or impossible to take seriously, awe-inspiring artwork gives me something to feel jealous about. Other times, the mere concept itself is so genius that I might overlook that it was not executed as well as it could have been.

Ghosted arrives amidst a time when Image is publishing one seriously good series after another. Saga, Nowhere Men, East Of West, The Manhattan Projects, Manifest Destiny, Sex...it feels like the house of Todd MacFarlane and Robert Kirkman are incapable of failure. At this point, I would term an Image "failure" as one that doesn't reach the lofty heights that they seem to be hitting on a weekly basis for the past two years. This reason alone made the choice to try Ghosted simple despite my thoughts that the mesh of horror and crime story could fail miserably.

Ghosted doesn't fail, but it doesn't really succeed either. The idea of crossing The Shining with Ocean's Eleven would appear hard to crossbreed. While this series was written with adults in mind, I felt like I was reading a slightly violent episode of Scooby Doo. Even when I was deciding to make the purchase, I was thinking that it felt like a grab of two distant ideas. As a fan of creator-owned works, I want so badly to tell the world to buy this. If the marriage of the two aforementioned films sounds like a winner, Ghosted might be in your wheelhouse. I simply could not find myself interested enough to keep going.

Read: Mind Mgmt: The Manager by Matt Kindt

Watch: Sports Night

Listen: Tears For Fear Change