And here we have Mary Shurtz. Her hair color may (and will) change, but the Diet Coke firmly clasped in her hand will never die. That Diet Coke, by the way, will always be beading with icy condensation, because while parameters of what is moral behavior for Walter White are up for compromise, the near-freezing temperature of one's soda is not negotiable.
Mary grew up in an environment filled to the brim with Disney movies and classic films made before 1965, bleeding into her writing style until she often resembles a crotchety old lady. Growing up in a household where the TV was deliberately disconnected to keep the children from wasting their time, Mary entered college with two dreams: to become a professor of (insert snooty obscure academic title here) at the age of 24, and to finally watch all ten seasons of this show Friends everyone has been talking about. Mary has happily succeeded in the more important of those two goals. "How you doin'?"
But really, the three shows that captured Mary's heart and started her thinking about television as something more than what happens when you're too lazy to find the remote were The X-Files, The West Wing, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Those still remain the bedrock of her now varied taste in television, but wickedly quick dialogue and soliloquies about the potential of mankind still get her every time. Plus, aliens. Because, dude. Aliens.
Mary now lives in Milwaukee and is slogging through the last year of her Masters in art history, where she's focusing her thesis on the punk aesthetic. Basically, she's been spending her time convincing experts in Velásquez, medieval manuscripts, and English portraiture that the pop culture of today is just as rich a field for studying the human soul as anything else. At least, that's what she tells herself when she puts off her class reading or paper grading for just one more episode of The Following.
Mary grew up in an environment filled to the brim with Disney movies and classic films made before 1965, bleeding into her writing style until she often resembles a crotchety old lady. Growing up in a household where the TV was deliberately disconnected to keep the children from wasting their time, Mary entered college with two dreams: to become a professor of (insert snooty obscure academic title here) at the age of 24, and to finally watch all ten seasons of this show Friends everyone has been talking about. Mary has happily succeeded in the more important of those two goals. "How you doin'?"
But really, the three shows that captured Mary's heart and started her thinking about television as something more than what happens when you're too lazy to find the remote were The X-Files, The West Wing, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Those still remain the bedrock of her now varied taste in television, but wickedly quick dialogue and soliloquies about the potential of mankind still get her every time. Plus, aliens. Because, dude. Aliens.
Mary now lives in Milwaukee and is slogging through the last year of her Masters in art history, where she's focusing her thesis on the punk aesthetic. Basically, she's been spending her time convincing experts in Velásquez, medieval manuscripts, and English portraiture that the pop culture of today is just as rich a field for studying the human soul as anything else. At least, that's what she tells herself when she puts off her class reading or paper grading for just one more episode of The Following.