The Frustrated Family Hour

The new fall season of television has begun. Oh, joy. What creative license has Hollywood taken now? How will this industry top -- because it always must top -- last year's shock? You're a parent. You come home, open the TV book and see listings like this:

"BONES (Season Premiere): A skull smashes through the windshield of a car driven by a group of teenagers on the freeway; a trail of suspects leads Brennan and Booth to a strange cannibalistic society."

A late-night offering for adults? Think again. Fox airs this gruesome twosome tracking the cannibals at 8 p.m. eastern time, 7 p.m. central, otherwise long known as the "family hour" of prime-time television. Once upon a time, network programmers applied the brakes of restraint during the first hour, because children were watching. Today, they're slamming on the accelerator -- shamelessly offering the forbidden fruits of raunchy sex and ultraviolence to kids.

For crude sex jokes, there's the brand-new CBS comedy "The Big Bang Theory." No, this has nothing to do with science. The "big bang" is ... yuk, yuk, yuk. The show is about two physics geeks living across the hallway from a beautiful waitress who is way out of their league. The entire series begins with an awkward trip to a sperm bank, which sets up this family-hour punch line:

My wife and I killed our television about 5 years ago and have never looked back. Neflix supplies about 6 hours of movies and shows per week, we get more accurate news from the internet, we have absolute control over what comes into our home, and we have no commercials and no cable bill. We did this largely in response to a run of prime time CSI episodes involving an S&M dominatrix / love interest for the lead character, bubble sex parties, and sexual excapades with people wearing fuzzy animal costumes. After 5 years, I find I don’t have enough patience to put up with TV when I go to other people’s houses or travel.

In some ways, it’s analogous (although infinitely less important) to becoming a Christian—from the outside it looks irritating, annoying, boring, etc. but once you cross that line it’s actually a profound sense of freedom.

Pretty Neighbor: "So, what do you guys do for fun around here?"

Science Geek: "Well, today we tried masturbating for money."

They expect people to watch this? It's sounds painful.

And this is what passes for entertainment in the liberal mind. What a twisted, depraved vacuum-like environment that must be.

My fun "single" science geek moments?

1) Brasilian Carnaval in '97 and '99...after the first 15 straight hours of dancing with 500,000 close friends we noticed this red thing at the top of the stadium. We later determined it was the sun coming back up again.

Scientific conclusion: East is still "that way"...

2) Waking up on the beach during another day of Carnaval. Didn't know where I was, still a little buzzed. Lifted my spinning head and heard people speaking Portuguese.

Scientific Conclusion (spoken by little voice in head): "Dude, you're in Brasil". Response: "That's nice, I'm going back to sleep now..."

3) 2nd date with my wife. We are at a trendy party-house club in Fort Lauderdale. She's wearing this green polka-dot dress and driving me crazy. We've been dancing for two hours or so and we're taking a break trying to communicate in Spanish in a corner. I'm savagely slaughtering the language with bits of Portuguese but getting my points across. Something happens and our lips meet and it turns into a very nice kiss. She pulls back gently and smiles, then excuses herself and walks away from the table temporarily. After she's out of site, 3 wasted guys at a table next to us all raise their hands and "high-five" me.

Scientific Conclusion: 3 drunk guys at a trendy night club can make a fairly accurate barometer for the success of a relationship. I still laugh whenever I think about that night. Dang, that woman made me chase her. : )

Anyway, the content of these shows seriously sounds depressing. Must be a reflection of the liberal mind. Likely the end results of all of those "a mind is a terrible thing to waste" commercials we saw in the 70's or 80's.

Does anyone actually watch these things directly anymore? We watch any material from DVD, commercial free, and usually when we've got more than 1 season readily available.

Network executives wash their hands of this by claiming that they are only giving viewers the kind of programs that they want to see. But the truth, of course, is that there never was any grass roots demand among viewers to have more sex and violence in TV shows. It was the network executives who decided to push the envelope or, as Bozell points out, to torch the envelope, by producing these kinds of shows.

But what is worse is now that they have polluted the airways with violent, raunchy programming, if anyone complains about the effect that this programming has on children, they reply that it is the parents’ responsibility to monitor what their kids watch. Well, that is true but they sure aren’t making the parents’ job any easier, are they? I guess the only solution for this is for parents not to allow their children to watch prime time programming on the broadcast networks. There are many programs on the basic cable stations that are suitable for all viewers.

I agree with everything you said, but it’s a hard sell to the addicted...

‘But...but..but what about cable?!’
‘You’re just an elitist snob!’
‘You self-righteous Luddite, get your hands off my TV!’
‘So, don’t watch it if you don’t like it.’
‘There’s plenty of good programming and nobody forces anyone to watch anything they don’t like.’
‘Blah, blah, blah...’

This is one of those things that you either get, or you don’t. Sooner or later, though, most of the bell curve will get it.

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