| Weekend television is good? Myth busted. |
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| Written by Sarah Richmond | |
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Everyone has their favorite TV show to relax with at the end of the day. For the most part, my friends and I agree on what to watch--we’re fans of Family Guy, South Park, The Office; almost anything that’s funny. So during the week, we have no problems agreeing on what show to watch. It’s on the weekends, long, dull, non prime-time Saturday and Sunday afternoons, that we begin to run into problems. Aside from watching whatever bad movie TBS and Comedy Central are playing for the hundredth time (last resort), my guy friends and I differ on what qualifies as “good TV”. Much to my guy friends’ dismay, I’m a big fan of trashy reality TV. “Beauty and the Geek”, “I Love New York” and “America’s Next Top Model” are my favorites: if it features young women who are taller, prettier, skankier and stupider than me I’ll watch at least one episode. Their premise is simple: take a group of girls who are starved for the spotlight and make them compete for something they believe will define and change their lives forever like a job, money or a man. All the while they display the kind of behavior that convinces the audience that none of them deserve the prize. They’re addicting, mind-numbing, escapist peeks into staged but glamorous lives, and I like them because they don’t pretend to be anything more than that. Obviously, my guy friends refuse to watch these shows on the grounds that they’re stupid and are for girls. They’d rather watch re-runs on the Discovery channel. I’ve already said that the shows I watch are trash, but sometimes I wonder if theirs are that good either. Nearly every show on the Discovery channel has two or three clips of CGI meteors smashing into each other spliced in with shots of real scientists, and a voice-over that says things like “is the earth on the fast track to annihilation?” You might say it’s a doom-coated serving of meteorites, black holes and volcanoes. The people who make the shows must be laughing their heads off. All they have to do is pick something that can potentially but improbably kill a person, explain it at a ninth grade level, whip up a few animations of meteors crashing into each other, and relate it to the eventual destruction of our planet or mankind and they’ve got a typical episode. The shows are hard to stop watching because they make you feel like you’re learning, while in reality there were only one or two pieces of valuable information in the entire hour long episode. Don’t kid yourself. You were in grade school the last time an episode of NOVA was hard to understand. Mythbusters is one of those Discovery channel shows that I think leaves a lot to be desired. I used to like watching it, but lately I’ve just been bored. The focus isn’t so much on the science behind things as it is on who can make the biggest explosion. In fact, in one episode they blew up a car and instead of explaining the explosives they were using, they focused on Adam’s lame attempts to get a “movie style” shot of him diving away from the car. Mythbusters isn’t much more than explosive eye candy. And speaking of eye candy, Kari, a member of Mythbusters’ “B team” and the only female, and Tory, also of the “B team” are little more than that. Even more frustrating is the fact that their tests are rarely as thorough or consistent as they need to be to even begin to draw a conclusion. Adam and Jamie often disregard the scientific method in the name of entertainment. True, Adam and Jamie are special effects experts, not scientists, but many people believe this show is scientific first and entertaining second, whereas in reality it’s more about keeping the audience entertained with jokes and explosions. The bottom line is that science and entertainment don’t mix. I would much rather watch a show that claims to be nothing but pure entertainment, than a show that claims to be informative but is really all about entertainment. |
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