Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Morphing of Media

Pretty Lady turned on her television just now, out of some mild curiosity as to election results. This is quite an unaccustomed maneuver for Pretty Lady--but imagine her surprise when she discovered that some of the channels were different! Actually new channels! She is not sure what happened to the old ones, or even what the old ones were like, particularly, but she is certain that she never heard of these before.

After fifteen minutes of waiting for some mention of elections, however, she grew both impatient and nauseated. These new channels evidently appear to have been designed for half-witted teenagers with supercharged hormones; the gist of them appeared to be very pretty people saying banal, portentious things to one another, between long, pregnant pauses.

In Pretty Lady's youth, this sort of thing was limited to daytime television geared toward housewives on Valium. Truly, society is In Decline.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I once explained to a woman I was dating that I would under no circumstances ever watch any sitcoms with her. She loved "Friends" more than oxygen.

When asked why I detested these shows and would not watch them, I asked her if she thought those performances were filmed before a live studio audience. She answered no, and so then I asked her, "Who is laughing on the laugh track then?"

I told her I would not watch a show where I was instructed when to laugh, and insulted that the producers assumed I would be too stupid to understand their humor so they put in a laugh track so I could be cued to chuckle at the appropriate moment.

Crom

Pretty Lady said...

Crom, you are so articulate. I merely detest these shows, on the extremely rare occasions that I attempt to watch them, because they are banal, shallow, trivial, boring, foolish, and terribly un-funny. I do have a sense of humor. I laughed like a hysterical hyena upon viewing that YouTube video I posted down the page, when Ali G asked the expert, 'Okay, which sort of acid actually make you fly?'

But canned versions of an ideal American Life which never interested me in the first place leave me utterly stone cold.