What I’ll miss about 2013:
The day the music died. When the tragic series “Treme” takes its final bow Sunday at 9 p.m., Mama isn’t expecting a lot of happy endings, but she is hoping for a few more fantastic songs before the musically-driven HBO series exits the stage. Although this slow-burn story was never a blockbuster success, Mama will miss how it blurred the lines between fictional characters and real-life situations in post-Katrina New Orleans in a way so believable that Mama still has to remind herself singer Steve Earle is alive and was not shot during a holdup (as his character, Harley, was back in season two). That cross-over into reality also made the fictional characters so much more dear to Mama, so she truly feels like she’ll be losing a friend — and won’t get hit up for cab fare again -— when Antoine (Wendell Pierce) puts down his trombone for good.
Walter White. It’s not that we really needed to sit through another season of this man’s fall from mild-mannered chemistry teacher to drug kingpin, but Bryan Cranston’s meth dad had joined the pantheon of indelible TV characters that made a show worth watching every week. “Breaking Bad” produced possibly the only character in TV history who, one episode at a time, destroyed the rooting interest and sympathy that the audience first felt for a man dying of cancer as he tried to provide for his family. And yet somehow he remained the villain everyone wanted to watch just a little longer.
The end of my love affair with “Arrested Development.” You know how you can enjoy a show so much, you mourn its loss when it is prematurely canceled? You tell everyone how great the series was, and what a missed opportunity it was, and if only the show could come back. The quirky, short-lived Fox comedy was one of those series for Mama … right up until it came back. In an attempt to revive a series whose main cast had already moved on to other projects, the Netflix reincarnation gave each individual character his or her own dragged-out episode until eventually, Mama lost interest in what used to be the funniest show on TV.
Mojitos. Was “Burn Notice” the greatest series ever? No. But it did something that no series had done for Mama since that first season of “Beverly Hills, 90210”: The spy caper gave her a fun scripted drama to look forward to every summer. With fairly predictable stories delivered by a likable cast of characters, Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan) and his merry band provided weekly escapes to a tropical locale where romance and danger were always a possibility. It doesn’t seem fair that the series wrapped with the always-cool super-spy Michael ending up in the cold of Ireland, even if he wanted it that way.
Getting my soap fix at night. In true daytime drama fashion, SoapNet outlived its own death more than once, as it was previously announced that this cable channel was being replaced by Disney Junior in most markets. But it trudged on, bringing Mama her catch-up time with the few remaining daytime dramas left to fight for viewers’ eyeballs, as well as regular “The O.C.” and “Veronica Mars” marathons. It’s one of the few networks that never really caught the reality buzz, sealing its fate.
The demise of watching TV on TV. Netflix, Amazon, and the myriad of other options now offering original series means Mama can’t just mindlessly switch on the TV and switch off her brain to get some entertainment. Now she has to figure out how to operate the Blu-ray player or steal the iPad back from the 4-year-old, and wade through the many options, in addition to the hundreds of channels on her actual TV. Why must entertainment take this much work?
The horror of it all. When we look back on 2013 years from now, Mama wonders if the biggest question will be: “Why were we so obsessed with eating human flesh?” Whether it be the zombies of the massive hit “The Walking Dead” and the ultra creepy “The Returned,” the vampiric hunger of “Dracula” and “The Vampire Diaries” spinoff “The Originals,” or just the garden-variety serial killers like “Hannibal” and the second installment of “American Horror Story,” 2013 was all about the horrors of human beings and the undead.