Must-flee TV

There are events in most of our lives that offer opportunities for us to change our ways. The strike by television writers affords one such opportunity.

By its very nature, television is mostly illusion. During the golden age of television (that would be the '50s and '60s), real audiences laughed (or didn't laugh) at comedy shows, which were mostly live. If you weren't funny, you didn't get laughs. But most shows were genuinely funny and devoid of bad language. The FCC had more influence then and there were only three television networks. Today, a laugh track laughs for you, whether or not anything is funny and most "comedy" is full of sexual innuendo. On cable, there is no innuendo. The f-word is used like a bludgeon.

Female "scientists" on the crime shows display enough cleavage that if the commercial were for Victoria's Secret, viewers wouldn't notice the transition. Such fantasies don't resemble any female scientist I know, nor would a professional woman dress like a hooker for the office. It's not much better in the news division, especially on cable, where female anchors and reporters resemble Barbie doll cutouts. They mostly look alike: big hair; big lips; big … well, you get the idea. The Website Radar (www.radaronline.com) recently had a quiz that asked people to distinguish between a list of female anchors and porn stars. I scored seven out of 10 correct. That's because I recognized the anchors, not the porn stars, though the two are increasingly difficult to tell apart.

Entertainment scripts are formulaic: plenty of murders, bad language, sex, explosions and gallons of blood and gore. Even when they're not "re-runs," the plots are mostly re-runs. So is the news. On broadcast TV, Bush is evil, the Iraq war is wrong, higher taxes and bigger government are

Who really gives a damn? It’s just TV. I consider it to be little more than animated comic books, personally.

Besides, it’s capitalism at work. The bosses of TV have figured out that to get people to watch, they have to show some boobs, some uber-women, and some guts/blood.

the guys running television are complete morons with no idea what “people” want to watch.

Thank you. That's what I've been trying to say.

It was just by pure chance they were put in charge of a multi-billion dollar industry.

... that they've virtually destroyed with their incompetence.

TV has always tended to amplify the importance of the trivial and minimize the importance of the really important.Maybe that has to do as much as anything with its being a piece of furniture in your living room, like a relative who came to visit, and stayed in the same spot for twenty years. Over the years, it has done a few things really well. Now, it’s gone the way of most casinos, which once had very interesting games of chance, and are increasingly taken over by slot machines, in other words “FORMULA”, whatever has proven to yield the big predictable audience, and hence the ad bucks.Television offers us to enter a basically alternate universe which increasingly bears NO resemblance to the world any of us live in. And the shows that are passed off on us as “hard-hitting” , “gritty”, “real”, etc etc. —usually cop shows-—are usually in fact the stupidest and most “writerly” having nothing to do with Art or Drama. The more modestly scaled a show is, in its conception, and the more the focus is on character, and not straining after “significance”, the better chance it has to succeed , and the better chance that I will ever give up a half hour to tune into it: like “Frasier” and “Everybody loves Raymond”. These shows just wanted to be entertaining/ Hell, on the “important” end of things, even Fox News is starting to disappoint. Meanwhile, talk radio, at least in my NY market, is continually interesting, and we now have Dennis Miller in the afternoon, too.

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