Staying Power

Of all the many television shows I've gotten sucked into over the years, ABC Family's Greek is probably the strangest of them all. On the face of it, it should have bored me. It was a typical soap opera with young people dropped in college and working all the cliches that go along with fraternities and sororities alike. Yet it's a mild guilty pleasure of the most pleasurable kind. It's not the George Michael LP you have to hide under your bed, it's more like the cool, creamy and totally unhealthy drink you get from Caribou Coffee, feeling guilty about both the sugar content and the price as you purchase it.

I think the first thing that drew me was the fact that Greek is on ABC Family. You think of ABC Family in the same breath as reruns of Seventh Heaven and other, well, vanilla shows of the most non-threatening variety. And here's this show about college, fraternities, sororities and all the booze and alcohol that goes along with it- that made me sit up and take notice. But then the story lines emerge and the characters defy cliche (African-American and gay in a frat? Could be a total mess, but it's not...) and the actors are young, fresh and able (including Kelsey Grammar's daughter, Spencer.)

And most importantly of all- it has staying power.

That to me is a true test of a television show. Can you watch it over and over again and get the same level of enjoyment out of it every single time? With Greek, happily, you can. But it's not so with every show. Gilmore Girls faded for me. CSI could never hold me (too procedural) and NCIS and JAG have real potential for becoming new favorite must-haves for me. (Actually, I take that back about Gilmore Girls. The first four seasons were some of the best damn stuff of television. It does start to fade after that and petered out entirely to me after Rory met that blond tool of a frat boy, Logan and I just stopped caring after that.) Battlestar Galactica is going to be the bast damn thing on television EVER and I am going to Netflix every last episode of it! Firefly died too soon and Alias went all trippy in a hurry (but it stands as one of the most outrageous robbings in Emmy history that Lena Olin lost out to Tyne Daly for Season 2 of that show- because she was INCREDIBLE.)

Ok. Television love fest OVER...

Back to Greek. And all I'm saying is that with television, it's all about that magic thing--- staying power.