Post date: Nov 16, 2013 8:48:57 PM
My life consists of reading, writing and, oh my god, watching television. It's this third activity I would like to pontificate on today. I have had a satellite system for ten years or so and use as much of an eye for taste as I can muster.
It's so easy to dismiss television out of hand but the truth of the matter is that it has a huge impact on our culture, both negative and positive. The trick is to use ones power of discernment to separate those programs that have real meaning from those that are, to put it mildly, pure junk.
I didn't watch any T.V. through my twenties and thirties and the major part of my forties, starting in my late forties. In the short time that I have been watching I've noticed significant changes in the programing.
When I started watching I was delighted to see so much wild life programing on networks like the Discovery Channel and the Animal Planet. There were programs of the highest quality often produced by the BBC with Richard Attenborough as the narrator
In the frame of time that I've been watching those type of shows have changed into personality driven programs, much like the Crocodile Hunter from Australia. These types of shows are mainly about the humans in their quest of adventure and are devoid of the science that I ,and many like me prefer. The human based wildlife shows are all about wrestling the alligators or snakes or whatever animal they can bother. I don't like to see anyone die but when the Crocodile Man met his match tussling with a sting ray I had to smile at the irony. I see now that they are promoting his eleven year old daughter to be a performing clone of her father.
One type of program that at first held a lot of promise was a show called Modern Marvels. This program and others like it explained how things worked and how they were made. These shows were very educational and for the most part free of the personality driven, "look what I can do" aspect in their programming.
It only took a little while before they polluted that genre with a new show called, CUT IT IN HALF, in which an idiot takes all these tools designed to cut through anything and slices through every thing imaginable. Whereas Modern Marvels goes to great lengths to explain how things are made, this new program fuels the adolescent desires to WRECK stuff.
Speaking of adolescence, there is the Military Channel to delight all the fifty year old teenagers out there. They have one cut of an American sniper blowing the head off some poor Muslim at a distance of a mile. Wow, look what we can do folks.
Summing up the entire palate of programing options there are a few choices and a lot of trash. I would like to see a satellite system that gave a person a choice of channels and maybe charge by the channel. I could get rid of a hundred channels and keep thirty that would satisfy my viewing preferences. Another hopeless idea would be a satellite co-op that would offer an eclectic choice of viewing that would satisfy the discerning viewer.
POSTED BY THE WALLNETTO AT 8:39 AMNO COMMENTS: