Recently in tv Category
my roommate gave me crap for somewhat glibly saying that i don’t like watching tv shows wherein crimes are solved. that’s, perhaps, a bit too general. i’m just tired of murder. i frankly don’t care who killed who in what grotesque ripped-from-the-headlines manner. i got burnt out on it when my parents watched ‘murder, she wrote’ faithfully for years, and nobody lifted a finger to help the poor denizens of cabot cove, maine (angela lansbury fucking did it, duh!). and while in the 80’s, we had super cars, motorcycles, helicopters and the like to build powerful drama around, now someone basically has to die. there’s a reason i can count non-reality tv shows i watch on one hand, but the numbers are even more damning.
so, sitting around and hypocritically watching a terrible movie on a blustery sunday afternoon, i took a look at yahoo’s tv listings, and counted the shows in which someone dies. i didn’t differentiate, mainly because i really didn’t want to read about transvestite hooker serial killers any more than i wanted to watch them.
on network television, based on the assumption that one person a week dies on each hourlong crime drama (and i’ve groused through enough episodes of ‘law and order’ at my parents’ house to know that that’s probably a little light), we’ve got 23 deaths per week. assuming twenty-six episodes per season, that’s 598 dead bodies. based on readily googleable statistics, that means that the good citizens of tv land account for 3.5% of the murders in the united states every year. of course, we all know that despite the fact that the plots for these shows are hastily plagiarized from the bold-printiest parts of the herald and most salaciously alliterated portions of channel 7’s worst teasers, these people don’t live in the real world, they live in tv land.
so let’s do some more math. so, if there were 29 people listed in the cast of a recent episode of one of these quality programs, and we can consider that to be reasonably indicative, and there are 81 hours of prime time programming per week between the four channels, that makes the population of tv land is somewhere around 49,000 people. for the sake of simplicity, we won’t bother to weed out things that obviously aren’t real, like animated shows and presidential debates. that works out to 1.2 out of every one hundred people in tv land is fucking murdered. compared to 5.7 out of every 100000 in the us in 2006. if that wasn’t bad enough consider what percentage of the population in the tv is a cop, lawyer, judge, or let’s not forget, forensic investigator. hard-bitten, gruff ones, but with a sensitive, caring, dare i say it, sexy side. nevertheless, these people aren’t getting the job done, and that’s just fucking embarrassing. and now i hear that even the people they do catch wind up breaking out of prison. repeatedly, no less. it’s a disgrace.
so, it’s not merely that i don’t like shows that involve the solving of crimes, it’s that i am sick and tired of the crime rampant in the television, it is an embarrassment, and it has to stop.
vote for me for mayor of the tv.
bored or slacking at work?
read this exceptional scholarly analysis-blog of *lost *and you will not be bored, but will definitely be slacking. for the rest of the afternoon. you’re welcome.
it was a rude surprise to me last night to find that the daily show was indefinitely in reruns thanks to the dumb writers’ strike. up until then, i’d seen it as a mixed bag. sure, it might affect good tv, but it had the potential to rekindle the creative spirit behind truly bad tv. where are the ‘boot camps’, whither ‘temptation island’? admittedly, i probably should have watched ‘kid nation’ and ‘pirate master’ to sate that cultural masochistic desire, but i’ve been busy. enough dancing and singing, i wanted beautiful people attacking each other.
but on the other hand, i’m not willing to miss jon stewart (and maybe bill maher, too?) for it.
the la times has a convenient matrix to keep you informed as to the status of your favorite shows.
