300 Channels and Nothing on TV

Okay, I admit, I'm a little slow when it comes to television. I watch a few shows regularly, Weeds, Californication, The Wire, and re-runs of the Gilmore Girls (does anyone else agree that Lorelai Gilmore is the perfect woman? It's too bad that she's only a fictional character). I watch sports, mainly basketball and soccer, and I watch Keith Olberman to get a sense of what the mainstream media is jabbering about, but I get my serious news from a few newspapers. I loath reality TV shows, I find them uninteresting, and just plain mean. Like... who wants to watch a show about out-of-control children, and some nanny who ends up taming the beastly rug rats? And why does ABC, the family channel, run a show called "Wife Swap?" The show takes people you would never, ever, consider marrying, and pairs them up with other equally undesirable people. Is there some point to this show? Is this a cheap substitute for marriage counselling? And the Nanny show, is that supposed to teach parenting skills? Do people take these shows seriously?

If they do, we don't really need to worry about gay couples destroying the institution of marriage, ABC, the "family network", can do the job all on its own.

Anyway, there's this new reality show, by new, I mean it's new to me, which means to nearly everyone else in the country, it's either cancelled, or in re-runs by now. They take 40 kids, none of them older than 15, and leave them unsupervised on this movie set, an old western mining town. They divide the kids up into groups, and in the first episode, the kids actually compete for jobs and pay, some getting into the upper class, and some having to clean the latrines. There is no running water, no electricity, one outhouse for all of them, and they have to cook for themselves. Now, I'm not really a fan of kids. I like them best when they come with parents and are closely supervised. Kids are noisy and messy, and sometimes they're really great, but sometimes they're mean. I know we all have issues with our parents, some issues are valid, some are not, but I'm not sure what I would think of my parents if they left me in rustic conditions with a bunch of unsupervised kids, just so that they could get 20,000 dollars. There are people who have to go through years of therapy because the parents left the kids alone with a camp counselor, or maybe a priest. These parents are leaving the kids alone with other children and TV producers. I'm not ripping on the kids, kids are not supposed to be looking out for their own welfare, or the welfare of their friends, that's what parents are supposed to do. What sort of parent would send their child off to some hellish version of summer camp and permit it to be televised nationally? And is it just me, or does anyone else think it's kind of sad that CBS can't think of another stupid reality show that doesn't involve kids? Why not something like "The Amazing Face", where people do make-overs and make-up artists get voted out of the salon, one by one? Or how about "The Amazing Snakes", a reality show about people locked in a room with diamond backs or rattlers? Oh!! Here's a good one! The Amazing Plates! People get on TV and compete with Grandma's best china.

I hope the writers come back from striking soon, and I hope they get paid a lot more money. There are too many TV channels, and nothing worth watching.

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