Tag: Television

Relationships are Difficult

tv ad4The other day I had another argument with my television set.  We are no longer speaking, it and I.  I think it’s better if we stay away from each other for a while rather than say or do things we might regret later.  I’m not one to badmouth things behind their backs; if I have anything to say, I’ll say it right to the screen.  However, my TV is as petulant as a Somali warlord and about half as predictable.  Still, every grey cloud has a silver lining, and while my TV and I have been giving each other the cold shoulder I’ve had time to reevaluate our relationship.

I must admit my TV is not totally to blame for our breakup.  It’s apparent we’ve grown apart in recent years.  Sadly, even though it has tried to keep the magic alive, introducing new channels and keeping the picture quality bright and beautiful, I find myself longing for the good old days when it was just the two of us.  We only had basic cable then and a mechanical videotape machine (that flashed 12:00, 12:00, 12:00) but we were young and reckless and it didn’t matter.  These days my TV sets the time by itself – from a satellite.  It doesn’t need me or the Owner’s Manual.  In fact, there is no Owner’s Manual, anymore; everything comes preset.  I remember it, though: the childlike wonder of exploring new features, experimenting with the settings, long afternoons slowly coaxing the perfect contrast and brightness levels; each subtle change responding to my touch.  Once, I switched the default language to Spanish as a prank; in better times, we still laugh about that one.  Then there were those long winter nights when I’d stop off at Blockbuster or Videomatica.  We’d order pizza and spend the evening in the darkness, laughing with Tom Hanks or the Blues Brothers.  One weekend, we just stayed home and watched the entire Star Wars trilogy – twice!  Those were good times, back in the day.

In all honesty, I haven’t been totally faithful to my TV.  I’ve watched movies on my computer and played games on my telephone.  But they were sordid affairs on darkened, domestic flight airlines and city buses.  They didn’t mean anything to me.  I used earphones and never got the full experience.  In fact, they only made me appreciate my 40 inch flat screen — with stereo theatre sound-around — all the more.

I suppose it was just the day-to-day routine that drove me to use other devices.  I can have whatever I want, whenever I want it, but there’s a sameness about it – no spontaneity, no discovery, no trembling anticipation.  Despite all the channels, the HD picture, the iTunes Video on Demand, it always comes back to the same old/same old: know-it-all detective shows and dysfunctional family drama.

In fact, that was what the argument was about in the first place.  I wanted to watch something different for once, but it was already recording two “We’re all Doomed” documentaries and refused to change without killing one of them.  Then I accidently killed them both and recorded a stupid insult sitcom with Charlie Sheen.  So you see, it wasn’t actually her fault, at all.  In fact, she was just doing what she thought I wanted.  At the end of the day, that’s the real problem.  I haven’t kept up with all the changes in her life.  I really don’t know what half her remote buttons do anymore, and I haven’t given her the quality time it takes to find out.  It’s no wonder she thinks I take her for granted.  Yet, there she is, all by herself in the corner, quietly recording Season Three of Downton Abbey just so I don’t miss an episode.  I guess it wouldn’t kill me to go over and see if she wants to take a look at HBO and see if there’s something on.  Besides, I’m sure she wouldn’t want me to miss the NFL playoffs this weekend.

But I don’t think it’s a good time to say anything about the “Words with Friends” app I’ve got on my telephone.

Travel TV: A Word to the Wise

When I was a kid, I loved travel programs.  In my teenage years, I must have spent a month of crappy Sunday afternoons going places I’d never been.  I’m not one to brag, but aside from North Korea, there are not too many places my electronic friends and I didn’t see on this little planet of ours.  Yep, those were the days; slinging my pack around the world that wasn’t even in colour yet.  Ah, but the innocence of youth is fleeting, and even though I continued to watch travel programs, when I grew up, I resolved to see these marvelous places for myself.  On the first trip I ever took that required a passport, I discovered almost immediately that those wonderful television personalities I’d befriended over the years were a bunch of lying bastards.  Their sanitized version of getting from here to there is Nixonesque in its duplicity.  Even the mighty Pinocchio himself would be scandalized by such fraud.  So, as a public service to all those other armchair travellers out there, I’m going to point out a few things about these charlatans.

Let’s start at the beginning.  Where’s their luggage?  Gandhi carried more stuff than these guys do.  Nobody on travel TV, not even the kids who are supposedly backpacking through central Asia, ever carries anything bigger than a handkerchief.   Then the smug buggers have the audacity to tell the rest of us how to pack!  They hold up a bag the size of Paris Hilton’s purse and say something like, “I like to put everything in my carry-on; a few interchangeable items to mix and match, toiletries, and, of course, a good pair of walking shoes.”  But notice: they never actually try to stuff that stuff into the bag.  No, it’s always a cut to the next scene — when they’re rolling it off the Eurorail like it was made of Styrofoam.  If you and I packed like that, after a week, we’d look like we’d been attacked by monkeys.  The mix and match would be what do I want to wear today: stained or soiled?  And that’s not the end of their chicanery.

Every single hotel, motel, hostel and people’s home they stay at has a view to rival Victor Emmanuel’s balcony in Rome.  They always find these marvels on some crooked side street that you couldn’t Google if you wanted to because it doesn’t even have a name it’s so quaint.  The place is never full, nobody else is at the counter when they check-in, and the room itself looks like the good bits of Kubla Khan’s Pleasure Dome at Xanadu.  These palaces never smell like cabbage.  I’ve stayed in a few places in my time, up to and including a converted telephone exchange, but I’ve never run across such earthly delights.  I’ve never even met anybody who has, and I run with some of the worst braggarts this side of Texas.  But wait!  These folks aren’t finished yet.

The next morning, they wake up to a breakfast that would make Gordon Ramsey clean up his mouth.  It turns out the owner’s brother is a Cordon Bleu chef who gave up cooking for the crowned heads of Europe to help his sister run her B & B.  (Who knew?)  Not only that, but it seems this is the one week of the year when aardvark is in season, and the bro is planning an aardvark fiesta for that very night!  (What are the chances?)  Meanwhile, a troupe of traditional musicians who have been rehearsing in the basement of the Florentine church across the street, just happen to love aardvark.  And it goes on and on.

It never rains in television travel land.  The wind doesn’t blow.  It might do that misty cloudy thing you write poetry about, but you never see a gut-wrenching storm come slashing out of nowhere when you’re eight miles from shelter.

It’s never crowded, either.  There are no lines for the Eiffel Tour, the Crown Jewels or (I assume) the Second Coming.  It’s hop on/hop off at every tourist attraction from the Great Buddha at Kamakura to the Brandenburg Gate.

Nobody’s rude.  Everybody’s interesting.  There are no jerks in faraway lands, and certainly no idiot tourists busy poisoning the water for the rest of us.  It’s all one big Disneyland with a foreign accent.

I realize that television, by its very nature, is the willing suspension of disbelief.  I understand that you can’t build a half hour program around waiting in line to see the Mona Lisa.  I’ve written for TV.  It’s show ‘em what you’re going to say; don’t tell ‘em.  The nuances tend to get lost.  However, there should be disclaimers on travel TV or some explanation that the intrepid kid looking at the camera has an army of invisible sherpas, sweating the details.  There’s a huge difference between going somewhere with a producer, director and camera crew — and you and the boyfriend grabbing a flight to Bangkok off the Internet.  Honestly, if you’re going to distribute travel information, at the very least, it should be useful.  For example, why is there never a travel program that tells you: “Dragging 25 kilos of laundry around India is stupid.  Clothes are cheap there.  Buy as you go.”  Or “Restaurant X serves Mystery Meat, keeping looking.”  Or, every once in a while: “Hey, folks!  Don’t come here.  It sucks!”

Now, that would be information you can use.

How Good TV Goes Bad!

Apparently, the Fox Network is going to cancel House.  I have never seen the show.  No, I’m not a television snob who only watches PBS, nor do I have a philosophical disagreement with scripted TV.  I just didn’t watch it in the beginning, couldn’t figure it out in the middle and wasn’t willing to give it any time after it had passed its prime.  Over the years, literally thousands of TV shows have slipped past me this way.  By the time my friends convince me that the drama is riveting or the comedy hilarious, the program is two or three seasons deep and already going stale.  I usually tune in just in time to catch nothing more than saggy dialogue, lame insults and baggy clichés.  Sometimes, I go back and find a program’s broadcast youth in hit-and-miss syndication, but mostly I don’t, and I doubt if I will with House.  Grumpy medical people haven’t intrigued me since Doctor Gillespie.  Anyway, House was born, lived and is now going to die without us ever becoming friends…oh, well!  It had a good life.

Actually, House is an exception: most television programs don’t have a good life.  If they are bad, they die young.  If they’re good and nobody watches them, they die young.  If they are bad and tons of people watch them, they’re still bad and become a running joke (a la Gilligan’s Island.)  Plus, everybody from the executive producer down to the teenage viewer spends the rest of their lives trying to live down their association with that piece of trash.  However, the worst thing that can ever happen to a television show is that it’s good and tons of people watch it.  Only the very best programs can survive that kind of success, and most of them don’t.

Aside from a few excellent aberrations, really good TV is based on character and writing.  All you have to do is look at the CSI franchise to figure that out, and while Miami Vice kinda needed Miami, it could have just as easily have been Malibu or New Orleans.  This is the way it’s always been, since the dawn of television.  Even way back in black and white days, 77 Sunset Strip and Hawaiian Eye weren’t that much different, and everybody knows that Star Trek was just Wagon Train with short skirts and phasers.  Good characters make good TV, and good writing makes good characters.  However, this is also exactly what makes good TV go so horribly bad.

In the world of television, professional writers pour miles of work (and paper!) into creating characters.  They put them into storylines that let them shine and give them clever things to say.  The sole purpose of this is to make these characters interesting enough that we, the audience, come back next week to see them again.  It’s a hit-and-miss proposition, but when it works, a television show becomes successful.   The characters become our television friends — witty, sexy, smart, comical, caring or just plain cool – in short, everything we wish our real friends were but never are.  After all, who would you rather have a drink with, Lucy, the smart chick from Alcatraz or your idiot sister-in-law?  No contest!

Unfortunately, this is also the problem: once these imaginary people become our friends, nobody wants to get rid of them.  The producers, directors and technical crowd — right down to the guy who pours the orange juice — have a good gig going.  They’re not going to kill the goose that’s laying the golden eggs.  Furthermore, the advertisers don’t care if we’re watching dancing Bavarian mud monkeys — as long as the audience numbers are up.  And the writers will sell their own mothers before they start the whole process over again.  After all, it probably took them ten years to sell this idea.  So the characters keep hanging around, long after the professional writers (who mostly suffer from acute, undiagnosed ADD, anyway) have run out of imagination.  The stories go flat and repetitive.  (How many ways can everybody love Raymond, for God’s sake?)  They generally outlast themselves by two, three or five years and keep staggering along, like wheezing pensioners looking for the Rest Home.  Either that, or the writers, sensing imminent unemployment, go nuts and call in the aliens or reinvent someone’s parent as a gratuitous celebrity to eke out another season or two.  And that’s how most good TV shows die, shadows of their former selves, alone and abandoned by everyone (often, even the original cast) only the most loyal fans remaining.  As old friends will, we sometimes come back for the last episode, like hangers-on at a funeral, but mostly we’ve gone on to other things enthralled by our new friends who are young and exciting.

Now that I think about it, maybe it’s too bad I missed House completely.  From the looks of things, it was probably an intelligent, interesting program.  After all, the producers were smart enough to retire the old boy before he was literally on his last legs.