Television Sucks
The title says it all. Maybe I’m more mature, maybe I’m more intelligent, but chances are that it’s neither…my wife lets me know such “facts” on a regular basis (I kid).
I’m not going to take the Brent Bozwell decline of the media because I don’t think violence/sex on TV is the sign of the decline of United States culture…besides, I like sex and violence (the later exclusive to television), and I like the grotesque CSI closeups…my stance is if parents have a problem with TV…don’t let you kids watch it. Start being a parent. If you don’t want your kids to watch violent shows…don’t let them. But I digress.
Excuse the profanity…TV writing is Shit. Shit shit shit.
I watched the premier of “Shark” last night after “CSI”. It’s a show that features James Woods as a “reformed” defense lawyer who works for the prosecution after a client he just got off for attempted murder, kills his wife. As a fan of James Woods (for his cheesy horror work in John Carpenter’s Vampires) and Legal Dramas (Jerry Orbach still has a place in my heart), I thought it would be a nice little stew of TV goodness, with a relatively solid structure for dramatic creativity. I was wrong. Some of the most over the top ridiculous writing I’ve seen in a show to date…including a monologue at a custody hearing by Stark’s daughter that any 16 year old not only would never have come up with, but any judge would have cut off. It was a yes/no style question…thank you for wasting the courts time. It’s just a series of one liners with the intent of catching an audience’s shock factor radar…but it does little else. Racial and sex stereotypes are all there to keep the core audience happy, yet unoffended, throw in a political reference to please the critics, and done…
Television producers are dumbing down sitcoms too. Show after show has resorted to dick and fart jokes, which while they have their place, just aren’t that clever. The only truly creative shows with any real audience (though not that huge audience that networks want) have been forced off the air. Shows like Arrested Development are being replaced with the formulaic stupid husband, clever wife, rebellious kids, and canned laughter as they discard steady audiences in the search for the next Seinfeld of Everyone Loves Raymond. Truly creative sitcoms (as far as the evolution of sitcoms is concerned) are moving to cable networks (the delightfully crass Lucky Louie, irreverent Family Guy) before they realize that these shows have a legitimate audience base, sometimes to be brought back in the case of Family Guy, but usually shrugged, and forgotten.
Stop rehashing old shows. Is Hollywood just creatively bankrupt? Writers unions have a stranglehold on the TV and Movie industry, and there’s no room for new.
It’s time for a shakeup…the TV is going off, and I’m reading more books.
One word,
I-Tunes
I have not watched regular TV for years now. I miss some of the content (cable, TLC, History Channel) but for the most part I just get the shows I want to watch from I-Tunes, sans commercials. Yep I have to pay now money instead of potential and time money but it is worth it. Lost, Survivor, 4400 and the new Battle Star Galatica to name a few. Just downloaded some movies for the first time this week, way cool as far as I’m concerned.
Yes “free” or in Stern-speak testicular TV sux!
GoingThere
iTunes is a great way to keep from watching TV.
My big problem with TV is the thinking factor. If you can sit down, and for a half an hour, not have a single thought in your head, there’s got to be something wrong with that.
Don’t get me wrong; a bit of mindless entertainment is great to unwind at the end of the day, but I really can’t justify too much of it when I realize that I’m not doing much of anything. I’ll sit for a few hours on Sunday nights to watch Fox’s lineup, but every other day, I try to avoid TV like the plague… (except for House) :)
I like House too…good fun.
House isn’t over the top, ridiculous writing? Discovery Channel, TLC and Animal Planet is where it’s at. If you must talk sitcoms then you can’t deny that The Office(stolen, but still good), My Name is Earl (original premise), and Weeds give hope to creative and entertaining writing. I know Weeds isn’t free, but it’s worth the price and deserves kudos.
And yes, that’s if you’re talking about sitcoms in general. But you said television itself sucked, and then defined it by that list of sorry sitcoms. What about “dramas”? Only one episode is out so far, but based on it, Studio 60 appears very promising and it’s creator Aaron Sorkin has never really failed an audience with his writing. Yes, Lost is another that I’ve been enjoying for a while, but then I realized that 24 has almost everything Lost has and some comfortable differences from it.
I’m not saying that the best non-documentaries on television are going to make you feel intelligent, but I am saying that a person shouldn’t need a source other than themselves to feel that way. If they did, then there’s no help for that person anyway. I could read War and Peace and remain an idiot. I can read the Bible and, well you know…
Television is meant for one thing: Entertainment. Ideally, it’s a release valve meant to keep you from “thinking a single thought throughout the show,” about your own life. But even the worst television doesn’t keep you from thinking. It’s a shallow but actual form of art, and art is there to inspire when one’s available to it, and that inspiration is there to help you learn what’s best to think about your own life. So, to blame the forum itself is an aimless search for a scapegoat for something else that’s missing. But to blame such crap as Shark as representing television poorly…THEN you’ve got yourself a point worth taking seriously.
My point is they keep dropping “good” shows in the search for “excellent” shows…but in that search, they keep throwing us the cliche…I think the audience is smarter than the product.
I can’t get beyond the fact that all these plastic orifices are “acting”. I find reality entertaining, which is apparently a real twisted thought by everyone else’s measure. Network fantasy television makes me look for something useful to do.
“Is Hollywood just creatively bankrupt?”
Yup.