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.