TV Wasteland

After two weeks of intense competition, heartwarming and heartbreaking stories that was the glory and the majesty of the Vancouver Winter Olympics, I’ve come to one irrefutable conclusion: regular television sucks.

The lunkheads at the big networks have been spoon-feeding us such a mass of stale, dry oatmeal for so long that is takes something like the Olympic games for us to realize it.

Drama? Really? We get cop shows that open with a shot of a corpse that met a more imaginative death than the previous week, while a team of police and forensic investigators jockey for the most clever sardonic quip to capture the moment. Then forty-odd minutes of flashy graphics, vacuous dialogue, gratuitous cleavage and an aging actor brooding behind his sunglasses. Yeah, this is way better than overtime in a gold-medal hockey game.

Reality TV? Are you kidding me? A bunch of spoiled, needy, attention-grabbing celebrity wannabes clawing and back-stabbing their way through every episode. That they could share the same screen as Joannie Rochette is laughable.

If that wasn’t torture enough, there are shows like Lost, which is so appropriately named, not only because you need a team of quantum physicists and a slide rule to figure out what happened in the last episode, but also because all the time you wasted watching this contrived sack of camel spit is lost…forever. Here’s the thing, bobsled: two guys in a toboggan sliding down a track of ice, whoever goes fastest wins. Simple and exciting.

As I sat in front of my TV last night, willing Brian Williams to magically appear with anything other than two decorators cat fighting over paint chips and fabric swatches, I seriously considered packing up my digital cable box and calling Purolator to ship it back to Videotron (hell, if Purolator can ‘deliver the games’ surely they can handle this overpriced paperweight).

Sigh, post-Olympic let down has set in. Time to dust off the Habs sweater and hope that the players might be somewhat passionate about a game in Columbus, Ohio. Back to channel flipping and maybe catching an episode of Mythbusters I haven’t seen, or Mike Holmes gutting another house while he tut-tuts and shakes his head. Back to a barrage of network promos that promise earth-shattering revelations and episodes we cannot miss, most of which you can miss, because two weeks later they’ll be running as repeats.

Ugh, regular television sucks.

Oh well, only 877 days ‘til the 2012 games.

Go Canada.