TV is Ridiculous

There are only two TV shows that I try to watch on a weekly basis, “The West Wing” (Sunday night at 7) and “ER” (Thursday night at 9). I have never watched prime time TV on Monday and I probably never will again.

I got bored last night so I turned on the TV to NBC, I usually like their shows. I came in part of the way through a show called “Surface,” a sci-fi show about aliens or something. I had seen previews for it, and even though I’m not usually in to alien shows I decided to give it a try. It was really…really weird. Two people floating on a raft in the ocean in a pile of alien eggs, little green dragon looking things, (maybe the aliens?) running around in suburban homes, and a boy in the hospital with a bad bite on his leg who says it wasn’t the little dragon dudes who bit him and is apparently some how connected with them. Slightly intriguing but I don’t think I’ll be tuning in next week.

The next show on was “Las Vegas.” Usually I jump to find the remote to turn off the TV as soon as I hear anything about this show, but last night I figured that as long as I was watching mediocre TV I would check this one out too. The show started with some woman (the owner of the casino, I found out later) getting blown off a roof…by a strong gust of wind I guess? Although most of the characters were shocked at her death, none of them were sad. Apparently no one liked her. When the other hotel higher-ups found out that she had left the casino to a charity (The Foundation For the Blind) one of them said, “Maybe we were all wrong about her,” and another replied, “Or maybe she was just a total bitch.” I assume that the meanness of the characters, and their apparent apathy about her death was supposed to be funny, but I thought it was totally ridiculous. Also ridiculous was the ease in how the management and ownership of the casino was handed after her death. In the show, one of the higher-ups (I don’t know any character names) convinced the blind representative of Foundation for the Blind that the charity would be better off selling him the casino, so he did. Then the positions that the now deceased owner had recently switched were switched back. I don’t know much about the way casino buying deals go down, but it seems to me that more care would be taken in a multi billion-dollar sale than was portrayed in the show.

I also watched “Medium,” which I really want to hate, because I don’t like the premise of the show, (giving hope to people with missing children that a psychic might be able to help them) but I end up kind of liking it anyway, so I won’t go into detail about how ridiculous it is.

All of the shows on Monday night were about things that the people watching will (most likely?) never experience; alien invasions, glamorous and disgustingly rich Las Vegas life, and psychics solving their problems. It seems that the writers of the shows are trying to help the average person escape from their mundane life, if for just an hour, though in my opinion are doing a less-than-average job at it.