After eight months of having my eyes buried in textbooks, it was quite refreshing to have them glued to something else during summer vacation — a television.
During the summer I anticipated endless hours of suspenseful, funny, truly entertaining programming. What I ended up watching was women in their mid-30s engaging in physical altercations over words exchanged on Twitter, along with people in their mid-20s getting drunk while on the prowl for potential “smush” partners.
As I watched these individuals parade around with their ignorance and lack of regard for all things decent and sensible, I asked myself, “What happened to good television?”
What happened to plot lines and cliffhangers? What happened to characters that felt like real people who you could love? Where are the good actors? Hell, where are any actors? Now more than ever, it has become quite evident that the fundamental components of good television have been substituted for cheap thrills and laughs, leaving viewers on an unending search to find decent programming.
Why is it that shows like “Basketball Wives” and “Jersey Shore” — which display the stupidity, immaturity and ridiculousness of our society — have become the highlights of mainstream American television? The source of this epidemic is not reality television, but all programming which only highlights the depravity of our culture, of humanity, without any depth or substance to support it.
Surely, what makes a good television show is a matter of personal taste. I remember having to make my case for “One Tree Hill” quite a few times to my male friends with little to no success. But regardless of what kind of genre of television one is drawn to, anyone can agree that good television actively engages the viewer in a world or experience which exists outside of themselves.
Good programming always leaves the viewer wanting to return to that world, even if they have outgrown it or developed other interests.
Such was the case when Nickelodeon announced during the summer that it would bring back some of its most popular shows from the 1990s. The network made the decision after reading countless pleas on Facebook pages and YouTube videos in which fans paid homage to their beloved shows and complained about the ones the new generation has been subjected to. Nearly all of us ’90s babies tuned in for the return of “Doug” and “All That.”
One could argue that most of the people who sat down for the return of these shows just wanted to indulge themselves in the memories of their youth. However, the truth is that even though we have settled into adulthood, shows like “Hey Arnold” and “Clarissa Explains It All” still captivate us because they were genuinely great shows. Even while on the verge of entering my twenties, I would prefer to watch Helga pine over Arnold in her closet than watch whatever else is on TV now.
All hope is not lost for television, though. I finally decided to watch “True Blood” over the summer and learned that it is indeed worth being the trending topic on my Twitter feed each Sunday night. There are still wonderful shows out there that are stimulating, enticing and genuinely funny — the kinds of shows that remind you why you like TV.
It is up to us, the viewers, to find them among all the cat fights, bad jokes, terrible plot lines and poor dialogue, all of which are not as few and far between as we would hope. I guess we have a lot of channel surfing to do.