Why Does TV Suck?

Don't worry, I'm still not watching TV, but I'm also not doing much else either. I just haven't felt like blogging because I'm still in a mental funk. Until someone sends me some really good drugs, or until I snap out of it on my own, you'll just have to deal.

I was surfing around tonight and found these really good reasons why TV sucks and I figured someone else might enjoy them as much as I did:

1. It's totally passive. One of the biggest problems with T.V. is that it doesn't take much brainwork to operate it. You turn it on, sit down, and watch. And watch...and for millions of people, it takes up 2/3 of their lives. They come home from work, turn on the T.V., and just glaze over until bedtime. They sit their kids down in front of it and let it baby-sit for hours on end. Kids are subjected to all kinds of worthless programming just so their parents can take a break from parenting for a few hours every day.

2. It spoonfeeds useless garbage to the public. Brainless sitcoms, sleazy tabloid news shows, worthless talk shows, cheesy infomercials, biased & negative reporting, and advertisements that insult the intelligence of the average titmouse. But when the public is trained to love this stuff, how can it fail to please? When T.V. is your third parent while growing up, how can you be expected to turn it off after five hours?

3. It's increasingly anti-male. This is something I began to notice years ago. Do you ever notice how men are treated and portrayed in commercials and sitcoms? The average male on T.V. is a shallow, bumbling idiot with no common sense whatsoever. Now, before some of you women out there claim that this is reality, think about it. Do you think this is accurate because all the men you know are stupid, or is it because men are classically portrayed as idiots on T.V., the greatest influence on our culture ever? Commercials are the worst...usually the man is an overweight, balding guy with glasses who needs some help from his omnipotent wife. T.V. men are incompetent and helpless without their smirking, intellectually superior spouses. Once in a while I'll see a woman acting silly and superficial, but usually it's a man. (Radio is getting this way as well. I can't count the number of times I've driven to work and yelled at my radio all the way because of man-bashing ads. They're usually subtle, but sometimes they're just outright vicious.)

4. Too damn many car commercials. My God...why can't I sit through a half-hour show without having to suffer through 10,000 car and truck ads? I'm not saying that we need regulations against it or anything, but when will enough be enough? Whatever happened to looking in the Yellow Pages or reading the newspaper?

There are definitely a WHOLE lot more reasons than these why TV sucks, but I don't feel like coming up with any of my own right now.

:-)