Television is to Intelligence as Cancer is to Life

With very little trouble, and in all likelihood a great deal of pleasure, I’m sure I could fill this space every month with rants and diatribes on the medium of television; its content and its influence. I suppose I don’t because it’s too sad to think how many people watch, how much they watch, and just how heavily influenced by it they are. Not to mention what people watch. The total shit that literally millions and millions of people take in boggles my mind. To each his own? I guess, but not if you watch ‘Extreme Makeover’, that’s just fucking stupid. Where do I draw the line? I don’t know but it’s way, way above that and legions of other shows just like it, and not just “reality” shit. Those are some of the justifications I use to keep myself from watching too much, that and the fact that television sucks almost completely.

But then there are times when you catch something, something so impromptu, strange, and easily missed that it keeps you watching for more instances just like it. And I’m not talking about the so-called real situations with similar attributes you’d find on any of the myriad half-scripted and over-produced/directed “reality” shows. The situations I’m talking about are markedly different.

Example: A few weeks back some friends and I are sitting around on a Sunday afternoon relaxing and watching nothing in particular on the tele. During a commercial break, a Fox News preview comes on. Not the omniscient, unbiased, and unwaveringly pro-journalistic-integrity twenty four hour a day news channel, but local news that’s on the Fox Channel affiliate. These little previews are the best, and local news in general might be the funniest thing on television period. All the anchors give their little snippets of what’s to come on the ten o’clock news, usually something like ‘Chicago’s own so-and-so on American Idol, we’ll tell you how he/she fared’. That’s paraphrased, but it’s no joke. I’ve seen American Idol results, along with other elimination based reality show’s occurrences discussed at length on the ten o’clock news. That’s not news, it’s entertainment!

Anyway, I’ve gotten off track. I really just wanted to impart this anecdote. On that particular Sunday, after the other two anchors had done their thing, they turned to the sports guy for him to do his five-second preview. He’s a big guy, balding with a Sipowitz-like horseshoe afro and a mustache to boot. I think his name is James Brown actually, but it’s not important to this story. He’s wrapping up the sports news of the day when he ends on an injury note about some athlete’s current condition and says this: “He’s listed as day-to-day, as are we all”. What? WHAT? Minutes later, after I stopped laughing and caught my breath, I told everyone else in the room what I thought was so funny. Apparently they’d missed it as they had wisely tuned out the commercials and Fox News updates. I just couldn’t believe he said that, it was just so out of place and unexpected. I expected at the next commercial break there would be another update, this time informing us ‘local sportscaster shoots himself in the head on-camera after taking out entire news channel staff postal worker style’. I mean, all he needed to add with the comment was an insane, wide-eyed, unblinking stare to have me pissing myself with laughter. It was straight out of a comedy sketch. It’s understandable; I guess he just thought the sports update needed a dark, gloomy, remind-everyone-of-their-own-mortality twist. Funny, I was just thinking that! Seriously, he’s the SPORTS GUY! Maybe I’m the only one who found it that funny, but I did.

That’s an example of one of the very few redeeming qualities of television, the fact that unbalanced, weird, insecure, or otherwise highly unstable people do - from time to time - manage to get on television. And when they do, it makes for entertainment unlike anything you can see on any reality show. After all, most anyone will act like a moron or totally crazy when you put them on television for the first time and pit them against others like them in competition for gobs of money, which is the reality television formula it seems. But this sports guy makes his living on television, he’s comfortable with it. So apparently he’s crazy, hates his job, or his wife just left him or something so he decided to try and creep everyone out. Like I said, hilarious.