Stupid TV shows
Not too long ago, my little sister introduced me to Hulu (www.hulu.com/.) Hulu is a website that posts recent episodes of TV shows. I'm not exactly sure how it works, but I think they have some sort of agreement with the major networks. The networks compromise by letting us see the newest episodes, getting us hooked. Hulu makes money by airing ads. Must be a win-win for both parties.
I don't think it was a good thing that I found out about Hulu. I don't have a TV in my apartment, so I hardly ever watched anything. Now I can do it on my computer. My parents tried to teach me that TV is bad. And I remember my elementary school having a little challenge: Whoever could stay away from TV for a month got to ride to school in a limousine. If they were a girl, they also got to wear a big pouffy Cinderella-ish dress. I guess they'll do anything to pry us away from the tube. Thanks to that indoctrination, I still feel slightly guilty whenever I watch TV.
Haha, but not guilty enough to stay away from it altogether! Lately I've watched episodes of House, Bones, Family Guy, and ER. ER is my favorite. I think it's super well-written. It keeps me in suspense, and I can actually believe what's going on (to some extent, anyway). The setting is so intriguing. I've always been interested in what goes on in ERs. I like how they make each medical case its own subplot. Unlike the situation on Grey's Anatomy, the doctors aren't constantly flirting with each other. You could bleed out on the table, and the doctors would be happily flirting away. As this article about dumb TV shows points out (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27201602/), the doctors are astonishingly stupid about their personal lives. But I haven't watched a lot of Grey's Anatomy, so I won't go on at length about it.
House, however, is another story altogether. That show is so horrible, I'm not sure if the folks who do the Emmys are watching the same thing I see. How on Earth did it get a nomination? To me, the dialogue seems really fake. It's just a constant stream of witticisms that no one could sustain in real life. Yeah, I get that TV is supposed to be slightly more entertaining than real life, but I still appreciate realism in my TV shows. It has to be believable. House isn't.
In the first episode I watched, a little girl started having heart trouble. Guess what they traced it down to? Some ED medication, a topical cream, that her father used every time he had sex with his girlfriend. Gross. They said it released hormones into the air, causing the girl's heart attack. He must have been using a hell of a lot of it for that to happen. In another episode I saw, "Ugly," House's diagnostic team was being filmed. The patient had a facial deformity and was going to be featured in a documentary. House decided he didn't like the camera people, so in order to avoid them, he took his entire team into hospital rooms where various examinations were going on. One of them was the kind of exam that nobody would want to have an audience for. And yet there were House and the other doctors, casually violating all kinds of privacy laws. I thought it was stupid and in poor taste. Never mind the fact that House is just a jerk. I'm not going to watch that show anymore.
For me, Bones was also a disappointment. I watched one of the recent episodes, "The Skull in the Sculpture." In that one, a young artist was murdered. His body was put inside an old car that was sent through the trash compactor in the junkyard. It's later revealed that the artist used smashed cars as part of his sculptures. The murderer is an art buyer who owns several of the sculptures and knew their value would skyrocket if the artist was dead. Plus, she makes him a part of his own artwork. Bones (the main character) suspects that a fire axe was the murder weapon. She speculates out loud about it. In the very next scene, one of the suspects comes into the room and shouts "Where's my fire axe?" What a subtle way to cue us into the fact that this person was the murderer.
The murderer has been wearing white face paint throughout the entire episode. In the "you-did-it" scene, we find out that she has cancer and is getting a kind of chemo that makes the skin red. The face paint was supposed to hide it. She starts crying and then wipes the face paint off with a tissue. It's a transparent plot device just to show us the skin discoloration they'd been talking about. Bones sat the murderer down and said this: "We know you're not who you say you are. And you're dying." How horrible! "Guess what? I just wanted to let you know that you're dying. Let me rub it in your face a little bit." Anyway, I thought it was an insult to my intelligence. And that's not to say I'm smart. It's an insult to everyone, really.
I'm sorry if I'm offending people who like these shows. If you want to defend one of the shows, be my guest. We'll have a little debate about it. For now, I'm not watching any of them except ER.