Amy's Thoughts on Television Shows She Loves to Hate

I hate television. But I cannot stop watching it. I lived without a television at my disposal for six months when I lived at URI. My roommate didn't have a TV and I didn't particularly want one. If I really wanted to watch something (such as the Police edition of "Behind the Music") I'd go into the common room and watch it there. And it was great to live without television in the room. I wrote more, spent more time with friends (sometimes watching TV) and went to the gym with Yvette. Things were good.
But since I've lived in Boston, television has sucked me back in. It's almost always on at my apartment, and once I sit in front of the blasted thing it's hours before I manage to get my ass up and do something productive. There's always something that will hold my interest for a while. The evening news. The 7pm rerun of the previous night's Daily Show. Perhaps the occasional Simpsons rerun. Then prime time.
I'm not even watching quality educational programming. I seldom watch PBS. I usually don't watch the History Channel or learn about bugs on the Discovery Channel. I've been on a kick of watching the crappiest shows that the networks can market to the masses. So, in the manner of confessing sins at church (which I only know about from watching TV), I shall describe my horrible television watching antics. It may get ugly.

Sunday nights are all about ABC. At 8pm, it's Extreme Home Makeover. If you've never seen this show, you're missing out on a sob-fest to rival any chick flick in the theaters today. The once-attractive, now endlessly annoying Ty Pennington (the former carpenter on Trading Spaces) leads a team of impossibly attractive designers, carpenters and a gay man with blinding teeth to a family that has a crappy/condemned/unsuitable home. The family sends a video to ABC, usually with at least one family member openly sobbing into the camcorder. The ones that get to me are the kids with terminal illnesses or horrible disabilities. One "very special episode" had a family with deaf parents, a son without disabilities, and a son with severe autism AND who was blind. The autistic son was escaping the house in the middle of the night, the parents had to keep the him within sight at all times to make sure he was okay, and the "normal" kid had to hold everything down and call the cops when his brother went missing. The designers wept openly about how terrible it was for these people, specialists came on to illustrate what it's like to be a kid with autism and it was all very sad. And, despite my tough-girl exterior, I usually get a little teared up at the end of the show when the family is so happy to be in their new house with all the top of the line appliances from Sears. Sometimes, as was the case at the end of the episode with the autistic kid, I cry openly, since the boy loved to swing and the carpenters built him a huge swing with bells on it and the kid just laughed himself silly. And I felt that all was right with the world, until Desperate Housewives comes on at 9pm.
I have a love/hate relationship with Desperate Housewives. In my older years, I've developed an appreciation for the prime time soap operas (90210 reruns, etc). I like thinking that other people's lives are even more complicated than my own. I like Desperate Housewives' twist on the melodrama (older women in somewhat committed relationships, suburbia instead of urban settings) but the writing isn't that great. They're good at keeping things mysterious with all the plot twists, but some little things just take you completely out of the show. In one episode, one of the couples needs to buy a water heater. In one scene, the wife is out looking for a body in the woods. Then the scene changes to something that's happening while the women are in the woods, but somehow the wife is at the mall when she was JUST in the woods. What? In other episodes, something is happening in the afternoon, and then it shifts immediately to the evening without explanation. Plot lines start and end without explanation. All I can say is that 24 is way better at suspense and keeping things continuous than Desperate Housewives is. But, the actual dialogue is pretty funny in Desperate Housewives, especially for Bree's character. But, I may be biased, because I love me some redheads.

Next time: Ashlee Simpson's show (to be renamed "I swear to God I'm a legitimate singer and not the spoiled white girl version of Milli Vanilli").