Another important ingredient are  the characters. Fiction can get away with some really weird storytelling if the characters respond to it in a realistic manner. Characters on television start out flat, but if they change in time then that counts as a third dimension and gives them depth. Then you add a good measure of humour and also some nice dialogue – and make it fresh dialogue and not the dried stuff they sell in bottles. Voila, a decent television series, best served with a side dish of advertisement blocks.

As an example of how it’s done I’d like to introduce you to the series Chuck. As is customary with the photographs next to recipes, my example is quite a bit tastier then anything you could achieve by using the above instructions. Still, all the things I like about good television series are there.

The series is named after the lead character, Chuck Bartowski, who is accidentally implanted with a CIA-NSA intelligence database in his brain. From that point forward Chuck, helped by two secret agents that have been sent to protect him, thwarts the plans of criminals all operating conveniently close to his home. Yes, the premise is mad enough to facilitate some excellent storytelling and character development.

On top of that, Chuck is pretty damn funny. Not the bad kind of television humour, the kind that involves locking the cast in a room for twenty minutes of joke-tapping each week, but the good kind of humour, where it flows naturally with the story and dialogue.

The music is of the show is done particularly well too. Part of it is previously existing songs, part of it music composed for the series. Both are fun, but I particularly enjoy the latter part because of the way in which it continuously references all kinds of spy films.

What actually amazes me most about this series is that as much as I enjoy watching it, I wasn’t aware of its existence before the second season had already been broadcasted. In fact, finding out I liked it required some serious transatlantic internetting on my part. Where is this Big Brother society when you need it? Universal, next time you produce something that resembles the above recipe, please send me an advertisement!

Firstly, the film can focus too much on the main plot of the book. These films follow the plot around every corner, and as a result don’t get around spending a lot of time on that which is most fun; the day to day happenings at Hogwarts, school for witchcraft and wizardry. We get a very nice summary of the book, but summaries tend to less good then the works they are based on.

The opposite can also happen. The film spends the bare minimum of attention on key plot points, and invests the rest of its running time in some excellent visual recreations of our favourite scenes from the book. Thus we get a very nice soap opera, enjoyable due to familiarity to those who read the book, but others might wonder what exactly they should be watching for.

The sixth Harry Potter film falls firmly in the latter category. I enjoyed it a lot because, having read the book, I prefer spending an hour or two in the company of those lovely characters over a rehash of a plot I already know. On the other hand, though the books do a pretty good job steering around clichés, the films seem positively determined to hit every single one. Overall though, we were presented some of the very best and funniest scenes from the book, in a way that stayed true to the book, which made me a very happy fan.

That said, the plot could hardly have carried less weight, and this is best illustrated by some key plot points. The audience doesn’t get a lot of time to be shocked by Harry seriously injuring a classmate, for a minute later he is rewarded with a kiss from his new girlfriend. The seriousness of Draco bringing deadly Death Eaters into Hogwarts doesn’t leave too much of an impression either, when these known killers merely inflict some minor vandalism to the great hall, the magical equivalent of trashing a bus stop.

Then there is a pointless intermission in the Burrow. Ginny ties Harry’s shoes as a testament of her love for him, and the Weasly’s house gets blown to pieces. That didn’t happen in the book (both the shoelaces and the explosion), but it was shocking (only the explosion), so that was nicely done. Now how does this tragic event affect the characters in the rest of the film? Not at all is how.

However, the ultimate example of a marginalized plot line is the one concerning the Half-Blood Prince. Considering that the character of the half-blood prince doesn’t enjoy the obsession in the film it does in the book, Snape telling Harry at the end of the film, that it is in fact him who is the Half-Blood prince can hardly be called a revelation. No; taking into account that Snape just killed Dumbledore, a proper term for that piece of dialogue would be ‘spectacular anticlimax’ or ‘shitty ending’. A braver person than I would have ignored the title of the book, cut the entire Half-Blood Prince plot strand out and apply for government protection from millions of angry fans. The film would have been better for it.

And to top it off that simply horrific ending line; I myself could have done a better job than “I never realized how beautiful this place was.”

One reviewer wrote: “This last season was mostly a repetition of what we have already seen in earlier seasons. The producers seem unable to either take the series to a new level, or bring it to an end. Though I hope I’m wrong, this series seems to turn out another one of the variety that keeps on going until the audience has lost interest.”

He goes on to note that the plot line is, at times, hard to follow: “Even though it was used to fuel some great political drama, the concept of the Israeli now killing more civilians than Hamas was a little far-fetched. Lets consider here, that Hamas had already been established as a terrorist organization, one that actively seeks out to cause as much civilian casualties as possible.”

Fans were also disappointed. Among other things, large numbers complained that the absence of the popular Lebanese in this season was a turn for the worse.

Therein however lies the problem. Watching all these series will take an awful lot of time. And by an awful lot I mean approximately 240 hours. That’s two weeks of watching television, where you can either take the weekends of or get 5 hours of sleep a day. I understand that most people don’t have that much time on their hands. Taking a week of might be possible, but two weeks is really pushing it.

So that confronts us with the following question: In the company of which moving pictures should you spend your time? That’s where I come in. After approximately 240 hours of industrious researching I’m now able to decide for you! In two rounds, I’m going to bring the amount of series you have to watch down from four to two. Your homework for the next entry: Watch two television series.

Round 1: That ’70s Show versus Firefly

It’s the first round and we’re starting strong. In one corner of the ring we have the popular That ’70s Show. A show centered on a group of teenagers living in, you would never have guessed, the ’70s. These teenagers are constantly making jokes, presumably for the entertainment of the large group of people that follow them around and laugh at these jokes. By what can only be called a miraculous coincidence, this group of people, supposedly a significant part of the cast, continuously manages to stay just out of frame.

In the other corner of ring we have the mighty Firefly, an entry in the Science-Fiction-Western genre. Staying close to the roots of the genre it features the usual ‘people being thrown out of holographic bar windows’, ‘levitating train robberies by spaceships’ and ‘horse-hovercraft chases’. The cast of this series too, spends a lot of time being funny. However, unlike That ’70s Show, there is no group of out-of-frame-people providing visual or audible cues to mark the points where a joke is made. Recognizing these points in an episode is thus left an exercise for the viewer.

These two series have a couple of things in common. Both series have a lot of humor and both series consist of small episode-long stories playing in front of their aforementioned backdrops. There isn’t a lot of season-arching storytelling going on, no big picture unless you’re referring to the logo.

So who wins? I admit that it’s a difficult choice. Malcolm Reynolds in Firefly captains a spaceship, which is of course cool. But Eric, the main character in That ’70s Show, has his own car, which is pretty awesome too. Captain Reynolds and his crew don’t back away from the occasional shady jobs, like smuggling or stealing. Then again Eric and his friends drink beer. Furthermore both Firefly and That ’70s Show feature alien monsters (called ‘Reavers’ and ‘Parents’ respectively), so no help there either.

My advice: divide your time between the series and watch a season each. If afterwards you want to see more Firefly you’re out of luck: The series only lasted a single season. A follow-up movie called Serenity was made though, which gives some closure to the series. If you’re interested in a higher dose of That ’70s Show, then there is no less than 7 more seasons left; enough to feed a long and probably not so healthy addiction.

Round 2: Buffy the Vampire Slayer versus Battlestar Galactica

To our left: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The title is a pretty succinct description of the show: It’s about a girl, called Buffy, who slays vampires. Closer inspection reveals that there are more characters involved with the slaying, most prominent among them a computer-geek-witch, a British librarian and an ordinary boy who mostly provides moral support. On the ‘being slayed’ side we can also add some elements. Although a colourful collection of vampires does provide most of the evil Buffy and her friends have to fight, the audience learns early on that vampires are merely one type of demon, many others exist. The show features some ‘apocalyptic drama’, mixed with ‘teenage high school drama’.

To our right: Battlestar Galactica! In short: Evil robots wipe out all of humanity. One small fleet of refugees under the command of Commander William Adama manages to escape. This fleet sets course for the mythical planet Earth, hoping to finally find some rest, nice weather and, one supposes, favourable immigration policies. Both the lack of sunshine on board the fleet’s ships and the plot give this piece of television a very dark tone. Furthermore, in contrast to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the show features only ‘apocalyptic drama’, no ‘teenage high school drama’. It is however constantly supported by Taiko drums.

Both these series have names that make a lot of people want to run the other way. The title Buffy the Vampire Slayer can only be appreciated with a strong dose of irony, irony you should keep within arm’s reach whenever you watch an episode. Battlestar Galactica inherited its title from its predecessor, a series that quite unlike this new Battlestar Galactica does provide the cheesy science fiction one would expect from the title. Furthermore both series offer storylines unfolding over several episodes or even seasons; in this respect Battlestar Galactica in particular delivers some dramatic origami.

As for the winner? Well, in the ring Buffy would beat the crap out of Adama I’m afraid. But the odds are that after the fight is over, a crippled Adama would step forward to address the masses with a cool speech. It’s your choice.

There isn’t a lot of AB to go around, only one in two hundred people in America has it, so all seems lost. Then the son steps forward. He doesn’t care about the odds, and insists that he be tested. And by a small miracle he has the right blood-type. The patient survives.

Great fiction? Possibly. Well, not really to be honest, there is better television out there. The Science? Disastrous; because a small miracle is not nearly enough for a woman with blood-type O to have a child with blood-type AB. It simply can’t happen.

What amazes me is that apparently no one, from the scriptwriters all the way to the actors, caught up on the mistake. A fix would have been easy; simply give both patient and son blood-type A or B, and everything works out again.

Science gone wrong is a recurring theme on television, and I’m not referring to the popular plot device here, but the way more popular plot ignorance. For all you scriptwriters out there; here follow two areas of science where you make a particularly large number of mistakes, with a focus on how to avoid them.

Electricity

You would think that, given the age we live in, everyone has a basic understanding of electricity. You would be wrong. According to Hollywood, electricity is something that lives in metal. Touching metal filled with electricity will cause pain and sparks. Touching metal filled with a lot of electricity will give you a sparkly death. Even when you don’t touch the metal, enough electricity can still cause sparks. In summary one can conclude electricity has a lot to do with sparks.

Science agrees with the Hollywood stance that electricity ‘lives’ in metal, but takes issue with the view that sparks are the central concept behind it. Rather, so science claims, electricity is something called ‘charge’ that moves from one point to another. If this charge cannot use your body to get in contact with the opposite charge, it won’t go through it. Birds have adopted this view as well, as it allows them to sit comfortably on power cables, without experiencing physical agony and death.

One last note to the scriptwriters: you may want to familiarize yourself with the concept of a ‘fuse’. All houses come equipped with them, but in the designs for your fictional houses they are often conveniently forgotten. Convenient for you that is, not so much for your characters – unless they want to use power outlets to kill bad guys (with sparks!).

Momentum

Everyone, even Hollywood, knows that if a fist, foot or bullet goes fast enough, it can blow an enemy through a wall. There is, however, a loophole that is often forgotten: your macho-display with throw you back with the same force, possibly through another wall. This might cause the building to collapse.

Assume for a moment that the building still stands, and that a new, stronger bad guy steps through either hole into the arena. Hollywood dictates that the force that threw the previous bad guy (and you) through a wall, might not be enough to do the same to the new bad guy. This is because this new bad guy is stronger you see, and uses all his strength to stick to the ground.

Science is looking hard for ‘stick-to-the-ground-muscles’ to back up this theory, but so far extensive research has yielded nothing.

However, a third camp, called nerds, offers an alternative explanation: Considering the possibility of a cyborg, genetically mutated to have all the different blood types at once and bio-engineered to use the electric field of the earth as a power source for its quantum-muscles, and accepting the wave-particle duality as true, it should be possible to draw enough power through the flux capacitors to create potential field equal but opposite to the incoming blow!

The nerds eagerly call for experimentation to back up their theory.