I don't watch "reality" television. Ever. I know a lot of people say that but then they will turn around and say that they watch it sometimes for a laugh. I mean I actively avoid it like it might infect me some horrific disease (which I half fear it might) that will cause me to be unable to stop watching as much of this garbage as I can find.
*shudder*
It's out of control and I just don't understand the attraction. I can barely get through an entire day without hearing someone talk about one of these piles of excrement and often they try to talk to me about them. Some of the ideas seem like they could be cool but then you hear about it from someone that watches it and it all falls apart.
"Wait, you mean there's a show where they drop people on an island and the last one left wins money?"
"Yeah."
"That's fucking awesome!"
"Yeah, every week someone gets voted off and there are challenges and..."
"Stop. Voted off?"
"Yeah."
"Not killed?"
"What? No!"
"I may never recover from this horrible disappointment."
I mean really people, what is the big deal with this stuff? I don't want to watch a bunch of people sing shitty songs off key and then vote for one of them. I don't want to watch people race, in a very controlled way, from point A to point B. I have no desire to watch D list semifamous people skate, dance, live together or lose weight. It's more entertaining to watch my fingernails grow. What I want is well written, well acted tv shows. Doesn't matter what they're about (Though shows about cops, doctors and/or lawyers are seriously getting on my nerves these days. There are other things on this planet!) so long as they're good. And when they are good, give them a chance to succeed. Arrested Development, Firefly and Studio 60 spring instantly to mind.
It might not be so bad if there weren't so many of them crowding the dial. There seem to be more and more of them and less and less of the scripted shows. Fewer scripted shows means fewer quality scripted shows. And the networks wonder why cable is gaining viewers over them. How many reality shows does HBO air? None that I can think of. How many shows would HBO have on the list if I decided to make one of the best shows of the last ten years? Five or six at least, and that's just in the top ten.
Please, please, please network type people, stop spoon feeding the lowest common denominator at the expense of people that can actually follow a plot. For the love of all that is good and pure stop tormenting me.
8 comments:
I actually like The Apprentice. That's the only one though.
I wish i could say i've never watched a reality show, but i can't. There have been a few that drew me in.
Though, I consider Supergroup to be not a reality show. They put Ted Nugent, Sebastian Bach, Scott Ian, Evan Seinfeld and Jason Bonham in a band together. How could that not rule.
See, this is where we have a problem. You complain that I don't read your blog, and that I don't write in mine, and then when I finally log on at home for the first time in days, you've posted about something that is bound to have me agreeing but still wanting to rant to the point that I can't be fucked doing anything afterwards. Apologies in advance, 'cause I know deep down... this is going to be a long one.
I mean it's 1:35 AM on Easter morning here. It's not like I have church or anything to go to but my girlfriend is coming over pretty early, I should be asleep. Funnily enough, I'm watching Arrested Development because between time at her house, my sister coming over and taking control of the TV to watch The Biggest Loser, and the breaks of all my shows on your side of the world... it's been a bad week for getting square eyes the traditional way.
To be honest, I haven't really watched network television since I switched on to BitTorrent and friends, with the programming these days what's the point? I just had to buy two huge shelves to house all my CDs and DVDs, the first three rows are just TV on DVD. I'll admit that some of it is just the collector in me -- they've all been watched at least once, but how many viewings of Tintin will I find time for? Not many -- but for the most part, anything that I've downloaded from Mr. Show to Curb Your Enthusiasm, NewsRadio to 3rd Rock From The Sun has been tracked down in stores near my house, on the other side of the city, on amazon.com, you name it... because as a '90s TV junkie it's not that hard to see how fast network TV has sunk so low.
It's gotten to the point now that I actually own all 10 seasons of Friends. I spent years in highschool arguing with people that Friends was just not that funny, and served no purpose with Seinfeld... any time that could be made for it was better spent re-watching Seinfeld, I always thought. Or NewsRadio. Or Frasier, or Simpsons back in those days. I don't think people realize how spoiled we were then, compared to how starved we are now. Going back to Friends, I bought the first few seasons as something to watch with the missus, I remember at least following the show for a couple of seasons before I tuned out. It wasn't as bad as I remembered. I bought the next season, expecting to be sick of it halfway through, but I got to the end and was still in "Hey, I remember this episode" territory. Eventually I hit seasons that I had only seen commercials for, or maybe heard in the background while I was doing something else... but instead of wrapping it up, I was happy to have something to watch that wasn't "reality", and wasn't the so-called competion of shit like How I Met Your Mother or The War At Home.
The fact is, the '90s was a pretty good shake of sitcoms, one of those "something for everyone" times, and although the laugh track was still as prominent as ever, shows like Seinfeld, Frasier and co. raised above it to break new levels of sitcom writing. I remember I was watching repeats of Frasier one day, around the fifth season, and I was distracted with something on the computer (I'd like to say homework, but it was probably Leisure Suit Larry) and I actually heard a laugh track sound. I was caught off guard, because the show had always used it appropriately enough that I never noticed it... I actually went back to tapes from years gone by to check if it always had one, I really understood the power of good writing at that point.
Now, as you've said, you have people trying to be Idols and Survivors and swapping wives and dancing on ice... it's all too much. Network TV, especially down under, has exhausted all its genuine shots at taking the torch lit by '90s sitcoms and put it on ice while they focus on low cost, big returns crap-fests. It's obviously making them money, so who's to blame, really? I'd like to hate on FOX for cancelling Arrested Development, but how much can a network be expected to do if people don't demand quality? I read somewhere around the time that the shows fate was still in the air that before the big finish they were going to put the show on hiatus for a few weeks and play Wife Swap. "That ought to make the rubes appreciate what they're missing" I figured "Don't know what you've got 'til it's gone" could have made people miss the show early enough to save it. Of course, that didn't happen, and the ratings for the swapping of wives completely shat on the ratings the Bluths could generate. Are we so optimistic to think that the suits are going to say "People clearly want crap shows, but we're going to shell out green to produce something that's clearly not interesting Joe Q. Public... because hey, that's how we roll."
I know I'm not.
Network TV is pretty much a lost cause, because it needs to be broad. I think the '90s were a fluke, I don't know how Seinfeld was kept on long enough to become a ratings winner, if you watch the behind the scenes stuff it's clear the public wasn't loving it from day one but somehow NBC kept it alive. Maybe the laugh tracks did help the people that didn't get it know when they were supposed to, I really can't understand how we progressed to the point of accepting Seinfeld as part of the cultural zeitgest, but reverted back to the same problems with the new generation of sharp comedies.
I can honestly say that I have never watched an episode of American Idol, Australian Idol, Big Brother, Survivor, The Biggest Loser, etc and that makes me proud. I did watch the first two seasons of The Apprentice, but not for the contestants. I didn't give a fuck who won and I couldn't care less about how they got there. Trump and his hair are always good for a laugh, but the shtick got very old very fast. I don't know if The Amazing Race is classified as reality TV, to be honest I've watched a couple of seasons of that... drama-rama aside, I consider that a competition show because boring life stories and starting points aside, there's no voting. Voting pisses me off, it's like the term "celebrity" wasn't vapid enough already with rich fuckers getting their picture in the paper for walking down the street, they had to make no-name people into the same thing... "Idol finalist spotted at Starbucks" who gives a shit?
The only good thing I can think of that's come of this sorry mess, aside from the fact that demand for quality shows on DVD means I'm stocking up for life, is the episode of Curb where Larry David thinks he's meeting a holocaust survivor so he brings another one along, only to find it's a dude from Survivor on TV. Their argument over conditions is pretty much the sweetest plum that could have been pulled from this otherwise stale basket of fruit. Reality TV works as a punch-line, but even then it feels so easy. The only two network TV shows I find time for now are Spicks and Specks and Chaser's War On Everything. Both are on our ABC, they're a musical quiz show (well, there are questions and panels answering them, but they're usually musos or comedians so it's all just a bit of fun and great for playing at home) and political satire, respectively. The latter's actually available online, or it was... it can be downloaded legally from their website, so even that's not something I feel the need to schedule around. There's so much good shit to sift through, why would anyone bother waiting for network execs to get it together?
Ugh, I mispelled zeitgeist and probably some other words, but hey... I was falling asleep when I wrote it
Anyway, I actually just came back to add "Happy Easter". Now off you go to church, go on!
Church makes my skin burn.
As I see it, two good things have come out of the reality TV craze:
The movie, Series 7: The Contenders, which is fucking awesome and the dicumentary American Cannibal which is hysterical.
I yearn for a day when things like Studio 60 don't struggle to find viewers and Arrested Development doesn't get cancelled because people suddenly get a shitload smarter.
So very depressing...
Dicumentary? That's sounds like a behind the scenes porn shoot.
Documentary, perhaps.
Just putting my Dicumentaries on hold for a minute to say that fuck yeah, Series 7 is awesome but fuck no don't hold your breath for change.
I have actually been reading blogs lately for information on the fate of my beloved Studio 60. As you may know now, the show has officially gotten the axe. It angers me because it's true, there is absolutely nothing for mildly intelligent people out there to watch. I despise when someone tells me that they schedule their evenings around American Idol and Survivor. I actually send vibes of hatred through my eyes hoping to burn a hole straight through their hollow skulls. Even people who die for the next episode of Grey's Anatomy are starting to bug me, and I used to be a fan of that show. Everything's become watered down and silly to cater to the masses of people out there with an IQ of 60. I'll still on occasion watch a new episode of CSI because that actually envokes some sort of elementary problem solving skills, who dun it? But even CSI is starting to get really easy to figure out. I wonder if they're just running out of good ides (and by they, I mean every writer of every show out there) or are they really just trying to make more money by catering to the idiots stumbling the country?
I also wonder how clever shows like Seinfeld and Fraiser lasted as long as they did. If it had anything to do with a large audience, where the fuck is that audience now? And why are they not watching Studio 60?
I personally, in order to redeem myself in some way of pure honesty, have to admit that I have broken down and watched several episodes of various reality television shows...NEVER an entire episode of American Idol, unless you count the one where they showed the audition process (thats actually sort of funny) a few episodes of Celebrity Fit Club (because I adore Mia Tyler) and definitely some Surreal Life (b-list celebrities are - albiet a little money hungry- are fun to watch as they lose their minds). Other than that, The Simple Life, Apprentice, Survivor, The bachelor or any spinoff of it (those are my personal top choices for most hated), wife swap, most of them make me vomit at the thought of them, much less tune in to see them.
All I have to say is...at least we do have TV on DVD. Studio 60 will forever live on in my DVD collection, and fuck execs for cancelling it. Fuck em all. Man I'm pissed.
oy rants...that felt really good. i need a drink now.
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