2004-02-16

TV annoys me. Like any fiction, it creates a self-contained and self-referential little world, with its own set of rules and realities. And those rules, by and large, are stupid, and they annoy me. For example:

In TV-land, sound carries like a suitcase full of lead. In TV shows, particularly sitcoms, whenever someone wants to have a one-on-one chat with another character � usually about a present third character � they simply move three feet to the left, and voila! They are in a miraculously soundproof bubble of space, wherein they can shout and gesticulate to their heart�s content without being heard by the object of their discussion, blithely standing in the far-off reaches of the same living room. And any door or wall, no matter how thin, provides a similarly sound-impermeable barrier, unless eavesdropping is germane to the plot. I remember noticing this on Three�s Company when I was like six years old: the second someone went behind that swinging door to the kitchen, they could gibber hysterically at each other about the latest two-dates-on-the-same-night shenanigans with no fear of detection. Often these strident conversations took place as the swinging door was STILL SWINGING. I grew up wondering whether Mr. Roper was stone deaf or just an extremely good sport.

Foreshadowing is ham-fisted, nearly to the point of causing actual cranial damage; and even if you haven�t been bludgeoned retarded by falling anvils, television producers assume that you have. Nothing in a TV script is ever mentioned at random. It�s like on Star Trek TNG: every time Deanna Troi mentioned casually, just in passing, that she had a headache, it was inevitable that within twenty minutes the ship would be under the power of some scary mind-controlling space-yam. I�m surprised they didn�t just jerry-rig her bottle of Advil directly to the Red Alert button.

Along the same lines, apparently TV producers assume that everyone in the land, just like they do, possesses a sucking black hole where their sense of moral rectitude should be. As a consequence, we are naturally unable to discern whether something is �bad� unless it is highlighted with three neon coats of nauseating pathos. Unwitting victims are easy to spot because of the scarlet �P� scrawled across their chests: any man in a TV drama who pauses, after kissing his wife goodbye, to smile misty-eyed at his fresh-faced, gamboling offspring, and who makes sure to emphasize to his adoring spouse that he�ll be home right after work with plenty of time to get to little Jenny�s school play, is FUCKING DEAD. Because apparently we uncultured barbarians won�t make the connection that �Murder is Bad� unless we see a hardened cop pause over a bullet-riddled corpse and say in a world-weary voice, �He was just on his way to his kid�s Little League match.� And then huge blinking letters flash hypnotically above the scene of the carnage: �BE SAD NOW!! BE SAD NOW!!� Fuck right off.

This one is more of a weird logistical glitch: in TV land, nobody is allowed to carry a full cup of coffee. This mostly applies to cop shows, where no stereotypical detective is complete without his trench coat and Styrofoam cup of Joe. None of those Starbucks cups ever have any liquid in them. They�re just empty cups with lids. You can tell by the way people handle them that they don�t weigh anything. Why is this? Does the actor�s union not provide for unscheduled potty breaks due to excess caffeine consumption? Do the lighting cables pose a dangerous tripping-and-spilling hazard? SOMEONE GIVE JERRY ORBACH A CUP OF DARK ROAST, FOR FUCK�S SAKE!