At the best of times, the UK’s Daily Mail is hardly known for its objectivity, but its latest rant against the immorality of television reminds me of something from the Victorian era.
In her verbosely titled rant ‘True Blood, Vampires and the Explicity TV sucking the innocence out of Our Children’, the Daily Mail’s own Olivia Lichtenstein attempts to make a case linking the popular TV show ‘True Blood’ to the decline of society’s moral values. In this, the author manages to unleash a torrent of incoherent outrage that could best be described as channeling Mary Whitehouse.
Maude Flanders herself, may she rest in peace, would have been proud of Olivia’s “Somebody Please think of the Children” approach. Criticising the TV show’s graphic representations of sex, gore and drug taking, Mz. Lichtenstein does a great job of injecting her subjective alarmism into every paragraph of her poorly written review, while reminding us that any form of entertainment not directly aimed at toddlers is inherently evil.
This is where I have to disagree. While it is true that True Blood is not the sort of entertainment I’d recommend as a learning aid for the Teletubby demographic, it is worth pointing out that its prominent parental advisory warnings, late time slot and inherent theme go a long way towards highlighting what the show is: entertainment for adults.
Maybe Mz. Lichtenstein should spend a little less time blaming mass media for stealing our childrens’ innocence and a little more time actually parenting. Like many of her morally outraged predecessors, she fails to realise that letting the big black box in the living room take over her parenting responsibilities may incur some risk of her children being exposed to unsuitable material.
I’m sure it’s a lot easier to blame the harsh, dirty and immoral world for all that ails our society’s young ones, but it’s this very same blame-shifting attutude to parenting that has landed us in this mess in the first place: taking responsibility for one’s own spawn, it would seem, requires more moral fiber than Mz. Lichtenstein and her ilk seems to possess.
What we have here is another perfectly glaring example of a society heading down the path to idiocracy, our collective failure to own up for our own lack of interest in making sure today’s sugar-fed, TV-raised children grow up with some concept of personal responsibility.
Then again, Mz. Lichtenstein should pay more attention to her own rag’s position on society’s moral compass. With this article on its front page, the Daily Mail’s own position as the UK’s beacon of moral rectitude is on shaky ground at best.
You can read Mz. Lichtenstein’s amusing piece here. Curiously, comments have been disabled for the article.
[Thanks @GenuineEntropy for the heads up]
So you’ve just bought a new HD TV, and shelled out for that sort-of-pointless HD cable box upgrade you hardly ever use.
Well, sorry to break it to you, but you’ll soon be behind the curve. BSkyB has announced it will start its first 3D TV service next year, which you’ll need a 3D-ready TV (normally anything with a 120Hz refresh rate) and a pair of those oh-so-geeky shutter glasses.
Animal Planet will never be the same.
I almost choked on my sandwich. Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, is apparently on its way to a TV adaptation. Now, this is one of the seminal books on nanotechnology, a story so utterly cool that the mere thought of bringing it to the TV medium makes my head ache. And the producer? George Clooney.
I don’t know whether to laugh maniacally in anticipation or cry tears of deepest sorrow. I think I’ll just concentrate on finishing my sandwich.
For anyone even remotely interested in television, today’s kind of a big deal. What today marks is the US TV Networks’ fall lineup announcements, by which many of our favourite shows will live or die.
So far, the news is mixed: Chuck is alive, albeit with a reduced budget (really?!) and episode count, and Sarah Connor: The Terminator Chronicles is, regrettably, dead as a doornail. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what other vehicle Summer Glau will be able to snag to showcase her ass-kicking prowess.
Keep an eye on this page if you really can’t wait to find out what’s what.
While the fate of Dollhouse and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles still hangs in the balance, FOX had a couple of interesting announcements for its upcoming lineup.
Most interestingly, Prison Break is over, while Family Guy’s spin-off The Cleveland Show appears to have been green-lit.
While I have been a fan of Prison Break since its beginning, I am not saddened by the news of its cancellation. I hope the upcoming finale will draw a line under a season that has finally stretched the show’s thin premise way further than it should have been.
Last Friday’s TV ratings confirmed something I had been fearing for a long time: TV storytelling is dying an ugly, lonely death.
Over the last few years we have seen a veritable rebirth of television, with great series like 24, The West Wing, Lost and many others bringing a level of quality and depth to television that was previously deemed the sole province of the Big Screen. It’s not unusual these days to see big-screen superstars starring in well-written, engaging television productions, the budgets of which often rival last decade’s cinematic blockbusters.
And yet, this golden age of television may be succumbing to an insidious cancer: cheap, mass-produced reality shows and the idiots who watch them. Which brings me back to last Friday’s ratings.
Last Friday saw the release of the pilot episode of Dollhouse, Joss Whedon’s (of Buffy and Firefly fame) sci-fi tale of brainwashing and human slavery. Sadly, the pilot screened in the 9pm slot against Supernanny on ABC, which beat it by a good 1.4 million viewers. And thus, almost before having a chance to begin, Dollhose has already been labelled a flop.
The return of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, suffered a similar fate at the hands of Ghost Whisperer, a series so irredeemably inane that its very presence on TV screens could be considered a testament to our cultural decline. Ghost Whisperer beat Sarah Connor’s ratings by a staggering 6.6 million viewers.
Now, I will be the first to admit, sci-fi is not for everyone. As a genre it’s long been considered niche, a stigma from which only a few shows have managed to break free. LOST and Battlestar Galactica made great strides in bringing the genre to a mass audience, but the struggle has been an uphill one.
So long as our culture bias leans towards the voyeuristic likes of the X factors, Supernannys and Extreme Makeovers, the incentive to invest money on big-budget, well cast and well written shows will just not be there. In a world where cheesy Knight Rider has more appeal than Heroes, where Pushing Daisies hovers on the brink, Firefly gets cancelled, and where America’s Next Top Model reigns supreme, what place is left for a challenging story line?
I find it somewhat Ironic that, in a medium dedicated largely to fantasy and escapism, we seem to have settled en masse with simply watching other people’s mundane lives. At least some of us can take solace in the fact that there will always be a good book to escape to.
Reviewing technology with an occasional sprinkling of art and humour.
