Television BAD

Do you ever watch TV just to watch it? Not particularly interested in what's on, just watching cause you're too lazy to get up and get a book or do something more productive like sleeping? I do. Did tonight, actually.

Fun part is when a commercial comes on, I switch channels until I find something else interesting, with the intention to go back to the original station as soon as the commercials are over. However, I end up getting sort of interested in whatever I've landed on -- then 10 minutes later suddenly realize I never went back to the original show I was watching.

The problem is I was invested enough in the original show to remember that I wanted to see what happened next, but I wasn't invested enough to remember what the name of the show was. So I end up flipping channels a lot and hope I land on the original show in an interesting part, cause I just won't stick around if I land on the original show and it's a slow part. It's sort of frustrating, and makes for schizophrenic show timelines... I end up combining the storylines from Law and Order SVU, That 70's Show and ER. Oh no! Red gave Eric AIDS and now he's in jail dying of leukemia! It's pretty strange.

The thing that made me get my ass off the couch this evening is I reached the point where the only thing remotely interesting on was at the very bottom of the barrel, television-wise. There's a new station in the area. Channel 69. WAAT is the station callsign. As far as I've seen, the programming of WAAT Channel 69 consists of the following:

M*A*S*H reruns

Cops episodes

Hunting and fishing shows from 12AM to 7AM or some crap. They advertise this as some big attraction.

Some kind of b-movie showcase thing called, I think, Svengoolie

I can dig three out of the four in that list. M*A*S*H is alright. Cops is entertaining on occasion. The hunting and fishing I guess is interesting from a sort of "let's see how the natives live" perspective.

Svengoolie, however is attrocious. To give you an idea of what it's like, think on this:
Remember Mystery Science Theater 3000? For those who've never watched it, it's basically really bad B-movies with three guys down at the bottom of the screen making joking comments, poking fun, twisting words around, all portrayed as if they were watching this awful movie from the 50's in a theater. Some episodes were funny, some were less so. The B-movies they showed were universally awful. Now take that, and imagine that the surrounding show, MST3K, was also a B-movie. So it's a b-movie about making fun of b-movies.


This is Svengoolie, and this was the stinking pile of feces my remote finally landed on this evening; and the reason why I decided to turn off the television and instead look for more wholesome, internet-based entertainment. I say without sarcasm that I would honestly find more enjoyment reading rotten.com than watching Svengoolie.

See, it's not that I don't enjoy making fun of bad movies. Far from it! I quite enjoy watching bad films with friends, and I did rather like MST3K. No, in all truth I think the issue I have with Svengoolie is the production quality. Okay the set design is kitschy and the makeup is bad. Part of the gig and "feel" for the show. But the jokes that are supposed to be funny because they're bad jokes, aren't. They're not even bad jokes. They're statements. And we're supposed to infer that they were bad jokes and therefor funny as bad jokes for the simple reason that they were not, in fact, funny. Do you see how maddening this is?

And the method of poking fun at the movies is shoddy and underproduced, too! 90% of the time it's not a clear voice of this Svengoolie or whoever making fun, it's a sound clip from ANOTHER MOVIE!!! Props for technical prowess amassing somewhat appropriate source material, but almost every single time they throw in one of these sound clips it's of bad enough quality that I either A) cannot understand what the clip said, or B) cannot distinguish the clip from the rest of the movie, thus missing it as a supposedly humorous comment.

So I suppose the main thing that irritates me about the show is it's so half-assed. It's like they don't care. My German-Protestant work ethic aside, if I'm going to waste my time in front of the television, I want it to be wasted on something that at least gives the semblance of acknowledging me as more than just a slab of meat with eyes. It's totally insulting.

This show is bad and I want everyone on it to contract horrible dysentery.

That is all.

Oh, Edgar the Mouse says, "Hi"