Bryan’s Ramblings

What the fuck is going on with television these days? Has TV always sucked this much and I was just never old enough to understand? I mean, sure, “reality” (read: “non-scripted-but-producer-manipulated”) shows have taken over during the past few years, and we all know how mind-numbingly stupid every single one of them is. Yes, I do mean every single one. This includes The Apprentice, Survivor, and even American Idol. I’d say these stupid shows account for just over half of what’s on TV these days, particularly in prime time. However, these are not the only shows to blame for the demise of quality television. Formulaic crappy shows like Freddie, Stacked, Hope and Faith, According to Jim, and even “dramas” like The O.C., Everwood, and Las Vegas all get to stick around on our airwaves while quality programming like Arrested Development, Family Guy (for a short time) and Sports Night (from a little while ago) all get the axe. Look, I’m guilty of some of this too. One of my favorite shows is Law and Order, and it hasn’t exactly stayed very original lately. Everything on each of those L & O shows is totally formulaic and recycled. I watch Joey with some hope that it will maybe start to one day appear like the Friends I knew of old (or at least the first three or four seasons when Friends was really at the peak of greatness). However, I watch these because there really aren’t any other good shows on any more.

Unfortunately I know all too well why TV is like it is. It’s really easy to blame the networks, but it’s really not their fault. To me, it’s like blaming the gun companies for making guns or the tobacco companies for making cigarettes. You can’t fault the networks for producing shitty television. The networks are merely giving their consumers what they want. If enough people were smart enough to watch Arrested Development because they understand how clever and cool and comical it is, it WOULD NOT have gotten cancelled. If people stopped watching Freddie because they realized how unoriginal, unfunny, and unbelievably stupid is, it WOULD have gotten cancelled. Unfortunately, PEOPLE ARE STUPID. Even worse, people are getting stupider by the day because they continue to watch this shit on television.

Maybe TV really has always sucked. I mean I watch shows like Full House, Family Matters and Saved By The Bell now and wonder what the heck I liked about those shows. (Saved By The Bell is still a nostalgic guilty pleasure of mine however.) But it seems even with all the shit that was out there, the classic shows from my youth like The Wonder Years, The Cosby Show were such higher quality than anything that exists and can survive today. All the critically acclaimed shows of today like Lost and Desperate Housewives are mildly entertaining and may fall slightly above the rest of the pack. However, it seems like they hold no water when compared to some of the classic television shows of all time.

I’m all for mindless television at times. Stick that stuff on VH1 and MTV and FX and E!. There is nothing better than those stupid countdown shows like The Top 100 Pop Culture Icons or The 50 Cutest Child Stars or those dumb dating shows like Blind Date and Elimidate when you are looking for brainless TV at 11:00 at night. Just put them all on separate channels and put quality prime time programming on the major networks. Unfortunately this means that the networks would lose all advertising revenue to these separate channels because everyone would be watching them instead. So sad.

I’ve pondered cancelling my cable subscription so many times in the past month. What am I paying for 500 channels when at any given moment, MAYBE two of them have something worth watching on. If they do it is usually a Seinfeld re-run or another movie that I already own on DVD. I know a lot of people say “HBO has good stuff”, and I guess it does, but in this age of technology where you can download commercial-free shows from the Internet or buy them and put them on your iPod, why have cable? Just watch only what you want to watch when you want to watch it. It’s even better than this DVR mentality of “what you want, when you want”. It’s now “ONLY what you want, when you want, AND NEVER ANY OTHER CRAPPY SHOWS”.

Television sucks.

The past year or so has afforded me quite a few opportunities to contemplate and think about an assortment of deeply psychological topics about my life or life in general. These moments are often catalyzed by discussion with friends, good books and movies, or other thought provoking events. My favorite times are when I can look back on each day of the week and find one of these moments in each of the previous days. This has been one of those weeks.

Early in the week I was able to reflect on relationships, religion and politics. As if that weren’t enough, I went on to ponder ambition, communication and wellness. To top it all off I ended the week by analyzing the importance of family, race, happiness and love. That is one heck of a week. The only thing lacking was the consideration of sleep.

I suppose it all started on the weekend of my birthday and continued on from there. Birthdays inherently force one to think about the past, the present, and the future. Mine was no different this year. I took advantage of the fact that I got to be surrounded by so many of the people that I most care about.

The funny thing about birthdays is that, in a sense, in only a single day, age gets incremented by one whole year. Of course, the reality is that a person uses the entire year for growth and the label is only applied on that one day. I guess it’s that old battle of age vs. experience.

What I’m trying to say is that I owe who I am today to all the people who have influenced me and helped me grow over the past year. This includes everybody who has had some impact on my life since November 6, 2004. I got to spend November 6, 2005 and the rest of this past week with all of the important ones who are still in my life and who continue to help me learn and grow every day. This is my ultimate thank you note to those people, who are really the only people who would probably bother to read this anyway.

In general, I think most people would consider me a fairly cynical person. I don’t think I’d necessarily disagree with this assessment, but it does affect me, and I am actually often offended by it. I don’t strive to be cynical; cynicism just finds me. Even so, every time it is pointed out to me, I think, “I need to be a more positive person.” For the most part, I surround myself with positive people, and most of the time I am about has happy-go-lucky as they come. Unfortunately “easy-going” does not equal “positive”. In fact, I’ve found that being care-free is often what leads to this jaded negativity that I must exude. When you don’t really mind things very much, you tend to let bad things happen without really noticing them. When these things build up over time, they eventually result in some sort of minor explosion that tends to look something like pessimism. Invariably, for me anyway, it isn’t really anything negative as much as it is a form of venting designed to help calm down a series of strong emotions. Still, I’m such a stubborn soul that I’ll take my own ranting to heart and go on believing whatever brash opinions I’ve formed in my state of conjecture. Then they stick around for as long as possible until someone pokes holes in their thin existence and I start questioning myself (after first nobly defending my original position of course).

The flip side of this, however, is the potential of being so overly positive about everything that you end up seeing everything through rose-colored glasses. This is not a place I want to be. I’ve known a lot of people who have lived like this and it never turns out well. This sense of bliss is usually just ignorance in disguise. So I guess the trick is finding the balance between positive and negative attitudes such that the combination equals happiness. I always talk about balance and how it’s what I strive to achieve in all aspects of my life. It’s easily the hardest thing to solve, though, because there are so many variables in the equation that it becomes almost impossible to balance both sides.

Since this positive-negative balance is nearly impossible to achieve, I often end up using compensation as the answer. By this I mean that when things are negative, I try to shove a lot of positive stuff on top of it to compensate. (Rarely do I throw negative stuff on positive things though…what’s the point of that?) The major problem with this method is that the negative aspects do not go away, they just get temporarily hidden, only to be exposed later when the fabricated positive items expire and disappear. I need to start trying to take care of those negatives to balance that side of the equation instead. To keep with the math analogy, I need to work on simplifying.