The TV repercussions of relationships

My advice to couples is this: don't move in together! Keep your own place, your safe nook. Relationships come and go and if you're living with a person as the two of you are breaking up, you're living in hell. Always maintain your own residence. And for dog's sake, don't get married!

But will you listen to me? Of course not. You'll rush into it, throwing caution to the wind. You'll see. And in the meantime you'll discover something almost too horrible to imagine: the TV viewing habits of your partner. Shudder.

I've had several long-term relationships of varying length. And in each, I couldn't believe what my lovers watched on TV. Let's see. One thought Laverne and Shirley was the funniest show ever. He watched reruns every night, hooting at every line.

Another insisted on watching not I Love Lucy, which would have been fine, but The Lucy Show. Oy. There wasn't one funny moment on that show. Ever.
Yet another had a favorite show that was on in the afternoon. Luckily, I was usually at work so I didn't have to watch him watching it. He actually thought The Price is Right was a fabulous show. Fabulous! On the rare occasions when I stayed home from work (I worked days, he worked nights) I could not believe how excited he was when it came on. I mean, he'd be screaming, "Come on down!!!!" like he was one of the maniacs in the audience.

Never ever move in with someone. But if you do, and you find out the person watches stuff like this, cancel the cable (if not the boyfriend). My advice.

Anyone else horrified by their partner's TV habits? Do tell. And don't worry about your partner seeing your comment. This is the internet. And what happens on the internet stays on the internet. It's totally private.

The black hole that is TV

I mentioned the other day that was excited because I recorded an old Mets game from 2000, against Atlanta. I was really looking forward to watching it. But last night I tried to watch it and found yet another example of the Great American Decline.

The game began normally and continued for about three minutes, at which point the recording screwed up and the screen went black. After a moment they went to commercial. After at least six minutes of commercials, they came back to the game, beginning at the same point where it began the last time. And it continued for about three minutes, screen went black, and they went back to another slew of commercials. And then it came back on and did the same thing again!

At this point, I realized nobody was home at the station. This was being robo-presented and they didn't even have a staff person watching to see how things were going. It probably continued that way for the entire game, with the computer seeing black screen and automatically switching to a commercial. The robot didn't know anything was wrong, and with no one monitoring the robot, it just continued along the same loop of failure. I deleted the game without going any further because of the hopeless nitwits that run the MLB station.

This is one of the reasons why TV is such a black hole: nobody's home.

Horror movies and violence against women

For the past two weeks the Chiller Channel has been showing non-stop bloodfest movies where all the victims are half-naked women. The movies run on the same formula: turn camera on, point at half-naked woman in vulnerable situation, stab, stab, strangle, stab.

In addition to movies about fictional psychos, they're showing serial killer movies: Ted Bundy, the BTK killer, all sorts of women-hating psychos. It's woman-killing season at the Chiller Channel. And not only has this been going on night after night for weeks but I just looked in the guide and it seems the stab-athon will continue into next week. This is not okay.

Five female students lost in the woods, ten female researchers stranded on an island, two women locked in a basement, a bunch of girls in a broken down car on a lonely highway, young women sleeping in a dormitory -- and a blade-happy maniac on the loose. Sure, a guy gets killed now and then but that's just affirmative action. It's all about the babes.

These aren't horror movies though they are horrible. The only genre that applies here is sadistic, anti-woman garbage. Now, I don't think there should be a law against this kind of movie. Censorship sucks. But violent misogynistic movies should get a triple-X rating -- to move them off a general-audience channel like Chiller and push them to the shadier areas of the listings, where normal people won't have to bump into them.

It's not responsible to show stuff like this night after night to a country of nincompoops. Who do you think is watching this? Male, beer-stoked, women-hating losers, that's who. It's sickening.

TV should be treated like porn

American TV fare is obscene. And by "obscene" I mean fat, ugly and stupid rather than pornographic. Obscenity comes in many flavors. However, a correlation between both senses of the term could be argued.

Let's first note that TV could be, but isn't, a bonus in our lives. If there was something entertaining, fascinating or truly educational on TV, there might be a reason to turn it on. But there isn't anything good on TV.

Maybe it's time to re-tune the whole plan. I say we start by pulling things off TV. We could take our cue from the internet. For example, I propose that there be a special "domain" for reality shows. Like the .xxx designation for porn sites on the net, perhaps we could use ".sht" or maybe ".pus" to denote it.

This way, by noodling with our controls we could easily exclude the .sht and.pus stations. Reality TV would disappear from our systems forever. Hooray! Or maybe you're a dimwit and you want to see only the .sht and .pus shows. You could have that too.

And let's relegate religious shows to their own domain. How about ".god" so it's easy for the fools to remember and equally easy for us to exclude. And again, if pinheads want to watch the damn .god channels, fine. But I don't see why they should clutter up my listings.

There's more. We could also create a domain for creative, intelligent TV. I know, I know: there is no such thing. Still, let's consider doing this. We could call the domain ".gud" or ".smt" or something. I think if we did this we would notice that there are no shows in this category. Then perhaps someone would try to fill the gap by making, you know, smart stuff to watch. Who knows? By creating the domain we might actually grease the skids for smart TV. It could even show up within our lifetime!

Perhaps that's setting our sights too high. But by creating domains we could at least block the dumbest shows from our sets. Those things belong out back by the trash. And like I said, if idiots want to go out back and hang around the cans, that's fine with me. Just tell them to shut the door behind them when they leave.

TV is screaming for a revamp -- but then, so is American culture. Oh, I forgot. TV is our culture.