CP Chronicle 187

REALITY SHOWS? I'LL GIVE YOU REALITY SHOWS WITHOUT A SINGLE POSER ANYWHERE TO BE SEEN.

For at least as long as I have been writing this column, HBO has been producing some of the most amazing dramatic and comedic programming ever seen on television. In fact, you could easily argue that HBO has single-handedly changed the landscape of television and not for the worse.

It's raised the bar for quality in drama and comedy programming, which has inadvertently (or maybe deliberately, I don't know), made a lot network comedies and dramas seem extremely lowest common denominator by comparison.
At the moment, except for an ever-dwindling handful of dramas and a lone sitcom, (Becker), the Wife and I really don't spend that much time with mainstream network TV anymore. In addition to the lack of quality programming, our diminished interest is also due to the fact that the so-called 'major networks' are filled to bursting with insipid reality shows. There are so many of these abominations that I have actually been able to categorize them for you, my loyal spuds.

1. The "We're Gonna Make You A Star" shows, where celebrities nobody has ever heard of get to pass judgement on wannabe celebrities nobody has ever heard of and make them big stars for about 15 minutes, seven of which are commercials.

2. The "We're Gonna Marry You Off To A Total Stranger" shows where extremely vain and gullible women beg like hookers on a slow night for a little lovin'.

3. The "We're Gonna Stick You In The Middle of Nowhere-Not Really" shows. Where everybody on the show gets to prove to everybody in TeeVee Land just how evil and conniving a bunch of humans can be when it comes to winning money.

4. The "We're Just Gonna Stick You In A Suburban House And Tape You 24/7" shows. This is a variation on #3 with smaller groups of socially inept assholes doing subtler evil and conniving things.

5. The "We're Gonna Shove A Bloodsucking Leach Up Your Nose" shows, where people are forced to confront their deepest fears just to entertain a bunch of trailer trash. Man, if I were on this show, I'd spill my guts about my extreme fear of eating in high priced steak houses.

6. The "My Agent Told Me This Would Be Excellent Publicity" shows, where little known celebrities become only slightly more well known, but for all the wrong reasons.

7. The "Find Your True Love and Steal Them From Their Partner" shows. These are studies in documentary style soft core pornography, in which pretty people seduce and/or break the hearts of other pretty people who seduce and/or break the hearts of... And the granddaddy of them all…

8. The "I Don't Know Why I Had A Homosexual Affair With A Transvestite House Painter When I Had A Perfectly Good Hetero Fatty Back Home In The Double Wide", shows which, of course, allow even the lowest of the low, their pre-requisite 15 minutes of fame, breast-flashing, trash-talking and violent posturing. Chuckle of you will, but I predict that these shows are what will be come to be blamed for The Undoing Of Network Television. Why? Well for one thing, beyond the obvious voyeuristic aspects, reality shows have all the intellectual nutrition and real entertainment value of a bad 'knock knock' joke. Secondly, they are slowly but surely melding into one continuous, foul smelling stream of filler for commercials. And finally, they are completely disposable and non-recyclable. Like a Russian-made automobile, they have no re-sale value. So the decision to flood the airways with puerile crap like this, instead of working to develop new original dramatic and comedic programming is a huge blunder, because in the billion channel universe, it's all about creating syndicatable product, so that the brain dead (and us too) can watch them over and over again, as we have since TeeVee Land began. But I've got to tell you, nobody, not even the most brain cell challenged a-hole you can imagine, is going to want to watch 13 hours of any of the above, when they already know who does and doesn't get kicked off the island. I mean they've already put yourself through 13 hours of Chinese water torture, just to satisfy their voyeuristic impulses. Will they really want to do that a second time? I didn't think so.

By now you're possibly thinking that I've swung so far from the point at which I started that I'll never get back. But that, my dear Spuds, is where you would be wrong. Because there is a point and that point is that while it may be a popularly held belief that truth is stranger than fiction, I think TeeVee Land is the one place where many exceptions to that rule can be made. Because in TeeVee land, truth is just as big a bullshit device as fiction, except with fiction we don't always have to feel like we're being brought down to some subterranean level of human existence, where we are, in fact, no better than the predators and prey that populate this sordid world of cheap, non-union entertainment. Oh Mr. Rogers, I'd like a refund on this segment of TeeVee Land, please. It's broke and, unfortunately it can't be fixed.

And this is the crossroads. The point where the Wife says to me, screw cable, surely there's a way that we can get HBO and ESPN and the hell with the rest of it. And she says this for a very good reason. Basically because we have just finished watching the first six episodes of Six Feet Under.

SIX FEET UNDER (TWO XL SPUDS)

Six Feet Under, created, written, produced and for the most part, directed by a dude named Alan Ball, is the closest thing to a work of real dramatic art that I have seen on TV. The characters in this show, The Fisher family, own a family-run funeral home in La La Land. A large funeral megacorp wants to buy them or put them out of business. The three children are all, in their own ways, pretty screwed up, yet somehow represent bits and piece of all of us in their screwed-upness. The oldest son comes home from Seattle where he works as an assistant produce manager in a organic food co-op, and never goes back. The younger son who has stayed to run the family business is a closeted homosexual. The even younger daughter is a high school senior who drives an old hearse, which she has painted green and yellow and is looking for love in all the wrong places. The mom is a long-suffering housewife, who is having an affair with a hairdresser, and the dad is a ghost. The oldest son, meets and has sex with a very screwed up woman at the airport on his way in and begins a weird love affair with her. The younger son is in love with a black LAPD street cop. And so it goes. This show is a single continuous story divided up into 6o minute segments that flow so fluidly and effortlessly, that make you laugh and make you cry, and cause you to wonder about life and death in ways that are not morbid and scary. This is highly stylized human drama, scaled and set perfectly to the rhythm of television. The Wife and fell completely in love with this show after the first fifteen minutes and we have not looked back. This is one of those series, like the Sopranos, that rings so true to real life that it puts every reality show currently out there vying for attention to absolute shame. It makes an embarrassment out of prime time soap opera shows like Touched by An Angel and Providence, and it shows you just what producers like Joshua Brand and John Falsey were trying to get at with St Elsewhere, Northern Exposure and The
Byrds of Paradise.

Don't get me wrong, TeeVee Land is a big place and there is there is a lot of good programming there, but there is pitifully little that's truly great. Six Feet Under is truly great, as is the Sopranos, as is NYPD Blue, as is Oz, as is Seinfeld, as is 24, as is The Guardian as is The West Wing. That's because the creators of these shows, for one reason or another, have found a collection of characters that we can like and relate to. Characters that reflect in more ways than we care to admit, our real selves. These are characters with warts and pimples and bad hair days and sordid love affairs and fractured hearts and tons of emotional baggage trailing along behind them. Just like us. Just like us. That's the key. Unlike most of the fictional programming out there, the truly great shows are the ones that stray the least from reality. They're the ones that show us our life in all its full-blown catastrophe.

And the same voyeuristic impulses that lead so many to the pond scum 'reality' shows, lead the rest of us here. The only difference, is that here, you have to think a bit. Here, the ideas challenge you a bit. The characters are a lot more real than the exhibitionist clowns who parade through the reality shows, and they entertain you a whole lot more because of it.

The first season of Six Feet Under has recently come out on video and DVD. So, if you don't want to get that terrible black box from Mr Rogers that allows you to see it on one of the movie channels but limits your ability to tape anything that you're not already watching, you can rent them two or three episodes at a time. I strongly suggest you do that. Because the first six episodes we saw slipped by so effortlessly that I imagine being able to only see one episode at a time might be extremely frustrating.

I guess I rambled on a bit this week. Let's write it off to spring fever. See you next week.

COPYRIGHT 2003, Jim Murray COUCH POTATO CHRONICLES