Friday, Jul 25, 2008
The new Worst Show on Television, "The Real World" crosses the line, and we all savor the final days of "Six Feet Under."
Aug 7, 2005 | Freedom goes on holiday
These are the dog days of summer, fried chickens. The hottest, laziest time of year when no one with any self-respect would be working at all, if not for The Man and his incessant, unrealistic demands. The more cultured among you know that this is when most Europeans take their 15- to 20-week vacations and move to the countryside, eating apricot-filled beignets all morning, napping all afternoon and then waking up at sunset to feast on cured meats and fine aged cheeses and big bottles of port. Damn those Europeans! It's no wonder they don't do their part for freedom, all doped up on good cheese and fine wines!
You see, in America, The Man is a neurotic, overworked hosebag who's always breathing down our necks, hoping to boost productivity with his steamy halitosis and his incessant high-fives and monthly awkward bad-birthday-cake breaks. In Europe, of course, The Man spends his summers smoking Gauloises and chuckling over the latest strikes in France. He hops from cafe to cafe all day, sipping espresso with his little poodle, Henri, until it's time to get drunk. And little Henri is allowed into the nightclubs with him! How can the march of freedom possibly matter to anyone who can bring his dog with him into a nightclub?
To care about freedom, you have to have a big, grassy lawn. If you don't have a few hundred square feet of grass to protect from the terrorists, you just can't get it up for war. War, to those without lawns, is like squabbling over a good table at a bistro. Why not just relax and sit somewhere else?
I don't like to watch Good policy decisions rely on a firm grasp of such cultural differences. When one faction is surrounded by topless women on some pebble-covered beach on the Mediterranean and the other is eating dry white cake off a flimsy paper plate in an air-conditioned conference room, you're going to have more than a few misunderstandings.
Similarly, when half of you chickens don't watch TV at all, and the other half of you don't want to admit how much TV you do watch, and all of you don't want to be at work right now, in the middle of the summer, let alone wasting your time outlining your personal life for some TV hack, then all the little group activities around here are going to fall a little flat.
As you may or may not recall, last week was I Turned Off the TV and Did Something Great Week, and also Nothing in My Daily Life Is as Poignant or as Compelling as What I See on TV Week. Sadly, though, not one of you is willing to admit how impoverished your daily life is (Come on! We'll all get a good laugh out of it, I promise!) and only those of you with some product, service or blog to promote told me what Great Thing you did instead of watching TV.
What you did want to discuss was Nate of "Six Feet Under." In fact, I could probably change the name of this column to "I Like to Watch 'Six Feet Under'" without much protest, but then I wouldn't get to write about terrible shows like "So You Think You Can Dance," plus I'd be out of a job in a few weeks. Nonetheless, in honor of the fact that these are the last days of Alan Ball's macabre disco, we will definitely focus a lot of our attention on Nate and company. Those of you who plan to rent the DVD of the last season of "Six Feet Under" sometime next year should adjust your reading habits accordingly, because spoilers will be flying left and right until the final episode on Aug. 21. [In this column, you can just avoid the very last section, titled "No narm done."]
Dancing queen But first let's talk about "So You Think You Can Dance" (Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on Fox). Created by the same sophisticated geniuses who brought you "American Idol," "SYTYCD" easily takes the crown as the current Worst Show on Television, since no one but the most extreme rubberneckers are watching "Being Bobby Brown" anymore, and watching "Big Brother 6" really requires being diagnosed with a personality disorder or two.
"SYTYCD," despite the promising title, is totally devoid of humor or irony or kitsch. You know how "Dancing With the Stars" was purposely cheesy, with the dorky hosts and the Lawrence Welk-style intonation of the title and the sparkly outfits and the outdated everything? All of that stuff actually made "Dancing With the Stars" digestible. Like a big glob of melted Velveeta on a terribly stale corn chip, the tackiness of "Dancing With the Stars" formed a protective kitschy coating to help you stomach the emptiness of watching D-listers learn to do the foxtrot.
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