I'm going to break off from my usual deep musings and talk about something a little more superficial: Television.
I'm not going to lie. I spend 2-3 nights a week plugged in front of the TV for an hour watching a show I'm addicted to. What are my faves?
1. Lost
2. Dexter
3. Heroes
4. Fringe
5. Prison Break
Well...I'm really just waiting for Prison Break to be over. That show stopped being cool two seasons ago. And don't even get me started about the ups and downs I've endured watching Heroes. I've heard things called "love it or hate it", but I've never experienced both in such alternating doses over a show. Get a writer and stick with them!
Anyway, I want to point out that my top 5 are all popular shows. But popular or not, every week they're getting pounded in the ratings. By what, you ask?
1. American Idol
2. Dancing With the Stars
3. CSI: Miami
4. Law and Order
5. NCIS
That's right. Those are America's top 5. That's variable in the ratings week to week, but those shows usually dominate the top 10, with my faves only occasionally peeking their heads in. Grey's Anatomy pops in pretty frequently too, but that show is really little more than a prime time soap opera.
So what's the difference between my top 5 and America's? At the risk of sounding elitist...oh to hell with it, it is elitist: Intelligence.
Reality contest programming and crime procedurals are the whopper and fries of entertainment compared to the fillet mignon of serialized drama.
For those not in the know, let me define those terms
A serialized drama used to be the norm in television back in the early days of TV. Evolved from radio dramas, these are shows that carry ongoing stories with a building mythology. Lost is the perfect example. The premise is simple: people get stranded on an island. But as the story goes on, you discover new layers of plot and new layers of mystery. The island has a monster (or does it?) There were people here before! Dead people sometimes come back to life! Injuries are healed! Every character is unknowingly connected!
Like a good mystery novel, the story keeps building and building, adding suspense and interest every week while moving towards an inevitable and exciting conclusion. Except in the case of Heroes, where the writers seem to change their minds every single season. But hey, at least they've got the idea of building tension.
Reality contest shows are defined as such: A guy or girl gets in front of an audience and performs. He's then belittled by a British judge and then America votes on him based on how cute he is. The end.
A crime procedural is a tricky beast. These shows give you the illusion of intelligent writing. The same characters are back every week, just like a serialized drama. The difference? Typically the only character development we get from them is whether their wisecracks are a little more wise and their scowls are a little...scowlier. And the crimes themselves? Easily cobbled together from pieces of classic crime stories from the past 50 years, items currently on the news, or outright rip-offs from past episodes. Just change some character names around, insert your current cast, rinse and repeat.
Very little intelligence in that second kind of show. Absolutely none in the first.
And yet America eats them up like Skittles.
Why? Simple. Because the average American doesn't like to be challenged. They don't want to think about a mystery for more than half an hour, and when they do, they want to have the answer immediately. They can't be bothered to wait an entire season to find out why The Others took Claire. They have to know now. If not...its not worth their time.
In fact, the most mystery a lot of people care for is whether the skinny blonde girl or the skinny Indian kid will be voted off American Idol. Ooh! How thrilling!
Let me paint you a picture of these "average Americans" flocking to unintelligent programming. Let's start with a woman, say a nurse. She works her butt off all day dealing with ungrateful people and coworkers that are just as pissed off as she is. When she finally gets home, she immediately orders take-out for dinner or tells her husband to go get her something, and then proceeds to sit down in front of the television.
This is her TV ritual. She immediately finds CIS or Law and Order. It doesn't matter if its a rerun. She'll barely remember if it is. When her husband gets back and after she eats, she'll do one of two things: either fall asleep within minutes or talk through the entire program. While Grissom is scowling and following the trail of some boring killer, she's ranting to her husband about how shitty her day went, how she told off her coworkers, and how much she hates her job. Occasionally she will stop, look at the TV, and say, "The janitor's the killer. I can just tell." She then goes right back to ranting about her job, her children, or her husband.
To her, television is background noise. And yet she HAS TO HAVE IT! Like people who listen to iPods while working out or those who can't stand to be in the car without music playing, she'll go nuts if she doesn't have TV to keep her from having to do the one thing she doesn't want to have to do: think.
That's right. If Lost comes on after CSI, she'll look at the TV and say something like, "I don't like this show. It doesn't make any sense," and then change the channel, perhaps to American Idol so she can occasionally comment on how much one of the contestants looks like a hussy. And she'll probably use the word "hussy" too.
Is there anything wrong with this person? Aside from being obsessed with how much her life sucks but completely unwilling to change it, no. She's a good person just like you or me. She's just more comfortable being pacified than stimulated. That's really all American Idol or CSI is. Pacification. If not, how do you think their viewers could stand to see the same damn thing for several years and several seasons of watching them?
Typically, the crappier your life is, the less you care about intellectual persuits. Serialized drama and evolving storylines have nothing to offer you because they actually demand you pay attention. Mindless tv, on the otherhand, let's you barely watch it while doing the thing you love doing most, dwelling on how much your life sucks and how it's everybody's fault but your own.
Are there those that pay rapt attention to American Idol or CSI? Absolutely. But again, these are people more interested in a bite-sized slice of entertainment than a sprawling epic. There's nothing wrong with that at all. I love the cartoons on Adult Swim. There's not a damn thing epic about those, other than how ridiculous they are.
My issue is with our networks making all of their decisions based on the gigantic chunk of TV viewers who really only use their TVs as background noise or music to lull them to sleep on their easy chairs. Every year, shows with intelligent thought or production fall by the wayside. Pushing Daisies, Jericho, Firefly, Carnivale, the list is almost endless. I'm not saying those were all masterpieces, but they did inspire their viewers to stay excited about their evolving stories long past the hour in which they viewed them.
While those shows fall, more and more reality tv creeps onto the schedule. There's not a damn bit of creativity in these shows. They really only exist to show us that we're not the only ones who's lives suck. If we can laugh at some tone-deaf teenage girl dressed in hot pink, we won't feel so bad about our own meaningless lives.
The lack of a willingness to explore creativity and philosophy (which yes, I will say shows like Lost help stimulate) is part of a much larger epidemic than I'll get into at the moment, but really, part of the reason that America is falling apart right now is because we have been coddled and our vices have been catered to for so long.
The network execs are rolling around like pigs in shit right now, gleefully signing one stupidly conceived reality show after another into primetime while cancelling one drama after another a mere six episodes after it begins. Yes, in a year or two we may be looking at nothing but American Idol and CSI on tv at night.
Is TV a lost cause? At this point, yeah, kinda. When Lost ends its run, I'll have every reason to say goodbye to my cable bill and be fine with reading and Netflix. Hell, I find today's video games to be ten times more intellectually stimulating than American Idol.
Will it be a great loss? Nah, not really. The smart ones of us truly outgrew tv years ago.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Friday, March 27, 2009
Dear God, it's been months since I've set words down on this thing. Oh I've been writing, to be sure. I think I've just been increasingly skeptical that anyone wants to hear it.
My novel is published on Kindle and has sold a couple of copies already. I've also got a free version out on fictionpress. I've off-and-on been working on a self-help book. Unfortunately my problem with that is that each day I feel different about what the world needs help with.
Right now, it seems inescapable that the economy is the worst of our woes. Funny considering that a year or two ago we all thought that nothing could possibly be worse than the war in Iraq. And before that we thought...what? That the most important concern was whether or not Ross and Rachael would end up together on Friends?
I think that's the problem, and why we're having such a hard time now. None of us were prepared for this. Few of us even knew we would ever need to be. America was invincible. Terrorists didn't take us down, and that meant nothing ever really could. And then...we began falling apart like a house of cards from the inside.
Bush and Cheney wanted us to believe that men in turbans with M-16s were the only arrow that could possibly pierce America's armor. In the meantime, we were already entering the worst housing crisis in decades, Wall Street and our banks were spending frivulously and enjoying a downward spiral that anyone with eyes in their head should have seen would end in disaster. Yeah, that party was great until the keg ran out of beer.
Obama is now in the White House. A step in the right direction, I think. I voted for the man because I've always believed that America could only truly better itself if it embraced new ideas and fresh ideology instead of hunkering down with tradition and fundementalist religion. Like an old box of corn flakes, modern American Christianity expired decades ago. Now the only people it typically benefits are those that want to ignore their responsibility to change their own world instead of let a bearded man from space do it for them, and those who want an excuse to hate their fellow man. Why are we still catering and cow-towing to a religion that finds it perfectly acceptable to passionately hate gays?
Back on topic, we ate and ate and ate until we were too fat to get off the couch. Now we're feeling a massive coronary coming on, but we're too damn big to get up and make it to the phone to call 911. America, plain and simple, is just a little too stupid to know how to save itself.
That doesn't mean we won't be saved. I think we're going to be "scared straight" by this, if only for a while. Obama does have the right idea of pushing for a cleaner, greener infrastructure. Unfortunately, he's going about it in a way that's a bit ass backwards. He's looking ahead ten years and spending money that will help us then, but what good is building a life raft that will be ready in ten years if people are already drowning?
I could be in one of two places in ten years. Contentidly working in sales and making enough money to support myself, perhaps even enough to save towards my dreams. Or...I could be homeless living in a box on Ponce De Leon. But at least I'll be watching a new generation of eco-friendly cars drive by my cardboard box!
Sad thing is, our push to "greenify" our economy may be just a bit too late. With the current state of technology, green costs money, and money is kind of a hard thing to come by now. So where is this multi-billion dollar stimulus coming from, you ask? Contrary to what the Republicans would have you believe, it's actually coming from other countries. We're borrowing from mom's purse. In this case, China's purse in particular. At our current rate of debt, our great red neighbor basically owns us, with half the other countries in the world shaing stock. Amercia is becoming everyone else's deadbeat brother that promises to pay you back but never really will.
And here comes the Catch 22. Where does China's money come from? Guess who! Yeah...trade with us. And since our industry is going under....
So basically the world is printing money with absolutely no basis in concrete assets. And our government is spending that money on roads and colleges and state parks. Good to provide a few John Does with a job, but bad for the rest of us because we can't afford to go to school and learn how to install a solar panel.
So what's really going to save us? Notice I say what, not who. Change is the only thing that can save us. Reinvention. We have to be ok with the possibility that everything we thought we could have may just have been a pipe dream. A pipe dream that was actually distracting us from the truly important things in life.
You wanted a million dollar car? You may have to learn that putting a roof over your family's head is a bit more important.
You wanted to be a rock star? You may have to readjust your viewpoint and realize that building houses for your neighbors in need is a much more admirable goal.
People need to realize that you don't have to aim for the sky. Sometimes there are better rewards right there at eye level, staring you in the face. Community, compassion and simple human need has to replace greed, entitlement and gluttony. If it doesn't...we won't be saved. This might just be it.
Rome fell. The greatest civilization in the world. We're ignorant to think that America can't too.
We're also ignorant to think that a beer and a big-screen tv playing American Idol is a better way to spend our time than an evening at the local homeless shelter dishing out soup to the needy.
Get your priorities straight America! And you just might be allright.
My novel is published on Kindle and has sold a couple of copies already. I've also got a free version out on fictionpress. I've off-and-on been working on a self-help book. Unfortunately my problem with that is that each day I feel different about what the world needs help with.
Right now, it seems inescapable that the economy is the worst of our woes. Funny considering that a year or two ago we all thought that nothing could possibly be worse than the war in Iraq. And before that we thought...what? That the most important concern was whether or not Ross and Rachael would end up together on Friends?
I think that's the problem, and why we're having such a hard time now. None of us were prepared for this. Few of us even knew we would ever need to be. America was invincible. Terrorists didn't take us down, and that meant nothing ever really could. And then...we began falling apart like a house of cards from the inside.
Bush and Cheney wanted us to believe that men in turbans with M-16s were the only arrow that could possibly pierce America's armor. In the meantime, we were already entering the worst housing crisis in decades, Wall Street and our banks were spending frivulously and enjoying a downward spiral that anyone with eyes in their head should have seen would end in disaster. Yeah, that party was great until the keg ran out of beer.
Obama is now in the White House. A step in the right direction, I think. I voted for the man because I've always believed that America could only truly better itself if it embraced new ideas and fresh ideology instead of hunkering down with tradition and fundementalist religion. Like an old box of corn flakes, modern American Christianity expired decades ago. Now the only people it typically benefits are those that want to ignore their responsibility to change their own world instead of let a bearded man from space do it for them, and those who want an excuse to hate their fellow man. Why are we still catering and cow-towing to a religion that finds it perfectly acceptable to passionately hate gays?
Back on topic, we ate and ate and ate until we were too fat to get off the couch. Now we're feeling a massive coronary coming on, but we're too damn big to get up and make it to the phone to call 911. America, plain and simple, is just a little too stupid to know how to save itself.
That doesn't mean we won't be saved. I think we're going to be "scared straight" by this, if only for a while. Obama does have the right idea of pushing for a cleaner, greener infrastructure. Unfortunately, he's going about it in a way that's a bit ass backwards. He's looking ahead ten years and spending money that will help us then, but what good is building a life raft that will be ready in ten years if people are already drowning?
I could be in one of two places in ten years. Contentidly working in sales and making enough money to support myself, perhaps even enough to save towards my dreams. Or...I could be homeless living in a box on Ponce De Leon. But at least I'll be watching a new generation of eco-friendly cars drive by my cardboard box!
Sad thing is, our push to "greenify" our economy may be just a bit too late. With the current state of technology, green costs money, and money is kind of a hard thing to come by now. So where is this multi-billion dollar stimulus coming from, you ask? Contrary to what the Republicans would have you believe, it's actually coming from other countries. We're borrowing from mom's purse. In this case, China's purse in particular. At our current rate of debt, our great red neighbor basically owns us, with half the other countries in the world shaing stock. Amercia is becoming everyone else's deadbeat brother that promises to pay you back but never really will.
And here comes the Catch 22. Where does China's money come from? Guess who! Yeah...trade with us. And since our industry is going under....
So basically the world is printing money with absolutely no basis in concrete assets. And our government is spending that money on roads and colleges and state parks. Good to provide a few John Does with a job, but bad for the rest of us because we can't afford to go to school and learn how to install a solar panel.
So what's really going to save us? Notice I say what, not who. Change is the only thing that can save us. Reinvention. We have to be ok with the possibility that everything we thought we could have may just have been a pipe dream. A pipe dream that was actually distracting us from the truly important things in life.
You wanted a million dollar car? You may have to learn that putting a roof over your family's head is a bit more important.
You wanted to be a rock star? You may have to readjust your viewpoint and realize that building houses for your neighbors in need is a much more admirable goal.
People need to realize that you don't have to aim for the sky. Sometimes there are better rewards right there at eye level, staring you in the face. Community, compassion and simple human need has to replace greed, entitlement and gluttony. If it doesn't...we won't be saved. This might just be it.
Rome fell. The greatest civilization in the world. We're ignorant to think that America can't too.
We're also ignorant to think that a beer and a big-screen tv playing American Idol is a better way to spend our time than an evening at the local homeless shelter dishing out soup to the needy.
Get your priorities straight America! And you just might be allright.
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