A Thousand Channels and Nothing’s on…

Posted by Blondzombie on February 18, 2012 in Pop Culture, Rants |7 Comments

Bullshit! Everything is on! Just take a look at today’s television shows, it is a vast landscape, filled with everything from documentaries, mockumentaries, dog shows and blog shows, great big awards shows and itty bitty two person talk shows. Shows that help you live a healthy lifestyle and ones that show you sick people living in their own filth, freak shows and geeks shows, sports and shorts, mini-series and web-series, any type of game show to damned if I know. The list is endless and if you can’t find anything on, unplug yourself from the grid, buy yourself a goat and live in a shack in the woods, cause it’s not gonna get any better…just more channels.

Television is the new religion, the Aztecs used to sacrifice people to their gods, but murder is no longer condoned in our modern society, so we sacrifice a crap load of our time to the flat screen alter. It is a regular part of my wife and I’s day. A chunk of time is devoted to worshiping our story arcs, cooking competitions, music based shows and whatever we think is cool at the moment.

I feel this is the golden age of television. The selection has never been so good and the writing is great. With the line between television and movies blurring we start to see some of the talent from movies making appearances on the networks and inversely we see movies being made out of television shows.

Another thing I noticed is the number of screens surrounding us. Next time you’re at bar take a look around. There are screens everywhere. The last bar I was at had thirteen screens in it and this was not a big place. Whether it is a television screen, a tablet screen, a smart phone screen, a computer screen, it doesn’t make a difference, we gravitate towards them all.

The problem isn’t that there is nothing on, the problem is that we have too much selection, it has turned us into listing snobs, programming elitists. I remember when I was a young lad, we only had three channels and we used to have to watch in the snow, three miles either way, barefoot…wait, I think I’m getting my histories mixed up. But seriously we only had three channels and you had to get up to change the channel and to make it worse, one of those channels was fuzzy. You would watch stuff just cause it was on, you didn’t even have to like it. Now you don’t even have to be there when your show is on, just program the box to record it for you and watch it when you want. Even if you forget to record it, someone else probably did and put it on the internet, then you can wirelessly share it with your friends and watch it on any screen you own. How can you think there is nothing on. Everything is on, everywhere, just take a closer look. Gotta go put in my time, the television gods are getting angry!