"Bad TV"

I heard the other day someone going on and on about how good the TV show Seinfeld was. I was not part of the conversation but if I had been I would have told them I didn’t like that show. That led me to thinking how many other TV shows so many people thought were great and I thought were dumber than dirt. So here is (in no particular order) my list of 5 all-time head-scratchers:

1.      

Seinfeld: Highly rated, and on for many years. I personally know people that think this was the best TV sit- com ever created. But why? The show is about a group of friends living in the same apartment building in NYC. Some of the characters work some don’t. They get together for mindless chatter, joke lines you can see coming a mile away, and personal issues that are nothing more than narcissist rubbish. It’s all about the star jerry Seinfeld, the best looking of the people the smartest, the coolest and the most Jewish. The men around him are nincompoops that make Jerry look good. That’s the whole point of the pointless show: sell Jerry Seinfeld. His girlfriend Elaine alternates between being sincere, caring and a complete airhead. It’s 30’s something’s showing us why 30 something’s have always been described as being purposeless.

2.     

  Lost: I tried to hang in there with this evening “suspense” drama of castaways on an island “not on most maps”. They got there because their plane “experienced mechanical failure”. Two clichés and we have only gotten to the first 15 minutes. Of course only the quirkiest, shadiest, meanest, most misunderstood survived the crash. We are led to believe some prehistoric monster is on the island, we hear roars, something lumbering through the forest but never actually meet T-Rex. By the end of the first season, the monster on the island all but vanished from the script. Now the stupid people doing stupid stuff take over. It went from Jurassic Park to Lord of the Flies and by the end of the last season, deaths and re-born again people, underground nuclear bombs, flashbacks on flashbacks made it more confusing than your mother’s goulash. It’s like the creator had a clever idea and then took LSD and kept on writing.

3.      

Any Survivor Show: Oh boy, were/are these highly rated. Survivor Trinity Island, Survivor Bemidji, Survivor Del Mar………and all of them so artificially and blatantly stupid I thought: surely this must be a spoof, a joke of how tough times are in the real world……yes? No! The shows were presented as a serious quest to get a million dollars by torturing themselves, each other but mostly the TV watchers. It’s not a reality show if the participants know they are being filmed. It’s not reality when the participants are being coached what to say and do. Eating raw snails, doing stupid challenges, earning points, torches, the melodramatic voting someone off the Island is right out of Japanese Kabuki Theater. If a person thinks this is reality, if they think that these poor people are starving, if they think that the back-stabbing treachery isn’t orchestrated for ratings then that person must also have seen Tom Hanks in the movie Castaway and thought I’m so glad that nice UPS man was finally saved because  he went through hell.

4.      

There’s something about Raymond: So many people just laugh and laugh and laugh. What a funny show. HUH? It was highly rated and on for many seasons. I watched 2-3 episodes and concluded it was just a redo of The Honeymooners (circa 1950’s with Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows) but a bad redo. Gleason as Ralph Kramden was witless, dumb and he knew it. He was a NYC bus driver for God sake and his best friend was a sewer worker. The humor was that Ralph and Ed were always doing stupid things, thinking stupid things and they backfired making them look like the loveable asses they were and the moral to the shows were the suffering wives that saved them from themselves and kept the marriages together. Raymond, on the other hand, is a weasel, always trying to hide something, lie about something, whine about something, and complain as if his life depended on it. Raymond has no back-bone, can’t talk to his suffering wife face to face. In other words he’s not dumb like Ralph he’s a modern wussy husband. It’s all a set up for the Stand Up comedian Ray Romano to do one-liners. Hey Ray just come out and do your stand up. Oh I forgot the money is in the stupid sit-com.

5.      

The Biggest Loser: I totally get what is supposed to be the value of the show. To show people out there in America that you can get it together and lose weight and feel better in every way. MY objection is on two levels only. Number one: it exploits people in their worst place for ratings. Watching these people suffer, bare their souls admit weaknesses, get mad at themselves is just too, too much to watch. I won’t watch people undergo surgery without anesthetic either no matter how good the surgery is for them. My second objection is that it’s a contest. It’s not enough that you are losing weight, trying to regain control of your life but you have to try and beat others out in the process. Shouldn’t the show be called the biggest winner? These poor people even when they win they are called losers. This is just the Jerry Springer Slob Show. Exploitation is exploitation.