Nielsen releases an infographic that lists how much of your life you've wasted watching Sheriff Rick brood in a spotty Southern accent

Nielsen is an evil company. Because broadcast networks still rely on Nielsen's horribly outdated ratings diary system for deciding which shows to cancel instead of measuring a show's popularity on streaming video services (which are where viewers like me prefer to access shows these days), a lot of shows I like that were more popular with viewers at streaming video services than with Nielsen families have been cancelled.

I'm still not over ABC's cancellation of the hilarious but low-rated Happy Endings (which starred Damon Wayans Jr., who might end up edging out Elisha Cuthbert as the most well-known name from that show if his upcoming--and promising-looking--hard-R comedy Let's Be Cops becomes a hit). I resent Nielsen so much for its role in the cancellation of so many great shows that when I attended V3con in L.A. last year and was handed a goodie bag containing a free T-shirt from one of V3con's 2013 sponsors, which happened to be Nielsen, I felt like tossing the Nielsen tee into the garbage. It's currently lying in a pile of clothes I've set aside for Goodwill.

Orphan Black

Occasionally, Nielsen does something that's actually beneficial to the public, like posting an infographic that displays how much time viewers would spend watching the entire runs of shows like The Walking Dead, 24 and "¡Escandalo!" (Sherlock takes up the least amount of time, of course, because it produces only three 90-minute episodes per season or series). It's an interesting chart--although I wish it would include Orphan Black, the most recent show I Netflixed from start to finish--and it's quite useful for someone like me who hasn't watched a single episode of House of Cards and wants to know how much time it would take to stream both seasons of House of Cards on Netflix.

But I still dislike Nielsen. For example, in the infographic, they use the term "binge-watch" to try to be hip. I hate that term. Along with terms like "shippers," "squee," "bromance," "amazeballs," "the feels" and "reverse racism," "binge-watching" should be taken out back and shot and then buried in a ditch. "Binge-watching" makes watching TV sound like an eating disorder. I prefer the term "marathoning" because it sounds more proactive, and it makes you feel like you've accomplished something special, like sitting through three days and two hours of Ted Mosby's obnoxiousness without strangling somebody.

Who are these nutcases who like to "binge-watch" things? Ingesting an entire season in one sitting is crazy. Even after two episodes, I start to get antsy. Three is my limit for a marathon, whether those three episodes are from a half-hour comedy or an hour-long drama. To get caught up on Orphan Black in time for its season premiere, I marathoned its first season on a disc-by-disc basis over the course of one week, and I found the three-or-four-eps-per-disc marathoning pattern to be perfect and not-so-exhausting.

Next, I'd like Nielsen to post an infographic on marathoning really old ABC sitcoms like Family Matters and Mr. Belvedere, an atrocious show that comedian Ken Reid reveals himself to be an expert on--I never knew about the Belvedere writing staff's bizarre fixation on rape--during Hari Kondabolu's entertaining guest shot on Reid's podcast TV Guidance Counselor. Would sitting through Belvedere's overly preachy Very Special Episodes about date rape or AIDS be a two-day ordeal or a three-day ordeal? (And who knew that one of the most progressive stand-ups of color around is also a Perfect Strangers/Family Matters nerd? There are side characters from Family Matters whom Kondabolu brings up that I never knew existed. I didn't realize that there are layers to the Urkelverse that rival the layers of the Tommy Westphall Universe.)

I'd also like to see an infographic that looks at when viewers start to lose their patience while marathoning the one-hour Republican Party commercial for the torture of suspected criminals that was 24. I've been wondering if more viewers start yawning when the cougar shows up or when the show runs out of people for Jack to torture and decides that "Hey, let's have him torture his own younger brother! That should be amazeballs!"

Original score cues from Arrested Development, Game of Thrones, 30 Rock, Battlestar Galactica and The Wire, which are among the shows listed in the Nielsen infographic, can be heard during "AFOS Prime" on AFOS. Two of those cues are "Balls in the Air," an original David Schwartz/Gabriel Mann song from Arrested Development, and "The Fall," Blake Leyh's end title theme from The Wire.

Does Walter Murch ever watch The Wire?

(Originally published on Metroactive's Movie & Television Arts blog.)

One particular element of The Wire--my favorite show--that I love as much as the writing, the acting and music supervisor Blake Leyh's choices of diegetic music is the textured sound design. It's an often unheralded element that's as integral to the show as the novelistic writing (authors like Richard Price and George Pelecanos are part of the writing staff) and the continuity callbacks (the recovering addict at the Narcotics Anonymous meeting who spoke about turning tricks for a fix during the teaser of this week's episode is the same wealthy white lady who was briefly seen buying drugs in Hamsterdam two seasons ago and then showed up again as a hooker at a convenience store/stash house in season 4--and in another nifty bit of Wire trivia, she's played by Price's actress daughter, Genevieve Hudson-Price).

The Wire's attention to detail also involves the selection of background noises (police sirens, dog barks, stereos blaring DJs from "92Q," an actual Baltimore hip-hop/R&B radio station). I hate to use the "it's like you are there" cliché, but those five words best sum up how the series captures the sounds of city life. Walter Murch's groundbreaking sound design for Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation clearly influenced The Wire's sound department, especially during season 1, when the show was at its most Conversation-esque (the first year focused on the Baltimore Major Crimes Unit's surveillance of the Barksdale crime family).

To borrow the tagline from the show's season 1 promos, "listen carefully" to the background chatter during the scenes on West Balto's corners. A clever running joke on the show is the ripped-from-the-headlines names the Bodymore pushers (a.k.a. "hoppers") give to the drugs they sell. During season 3--when the Hamsterdam storyline served as a critique of Bush's war on terror--the hoppers in Hamsterdam could be heard hollering, "I gotcha WMDs!" (Other examples of background hopper lines from the season 3 corner scenes: "Pandemic!" and "I got them red-tops! Red-tops!" "Red-tops" is lingo for cocaine vials--anyone who's got Ghostface Killah's "Kilo" in their iPod knows that--while "WMDs" means heroin. I don't know what "pandemic" refers to.) In the season 5 premiere that aired two weeks ago, the WMDs have been replaced by "greenhouse gas."

The sound designers went crazy during this pivotal sequence from season 3:

The Wire has already spawned two soundtrack CDs. Too bad there won't be a Wire sound effects CD. I'd buy that too in a heartbeat.