Thursday, July 12, 2007

Drama, Drama, Drama

Do you know what really bugs me? Television nature programs. They’re all exactly the same, have you ever noticed? They all depict a man or a woman in bad camouflage with war paint on their faces, holding a shaky camera pointed at themselves with various wild animals strolling around in the background. And they all say things like, “Aren’t they the most majestic creatures?” and “You wouldn’t believe it to look at them, but these pint-sized bunnies have been known to swallow daring explorers like me whole, in order to protect their young”. They then proceed to crawl around on their bellies amid these killer bunnies “so as not to pose a threat”.

TV is always much more dramatic than it has to be, though, isn’t it. Whatever type of show it might be, you can bet it’s at least four times as dramatic as anything in real life would ever be. Even by my families standards which, in my opinion, deserve its own soap-opera slot on daytime television.

You get shows like The OC, where everybody’s dated, married or related to everybody else. One Tree Hill, also, is a fantastic example: Haley and Nathan, the 17-year-old pregnant married couple. Nathan’s brother Lucas who flits constantly between Brooke and Peyton who have, by the way, both slept with Nathan too. Lucas has a heart disease; Brooke has her own clothing line; Peyton is, in my opinion, an undiagnosed chronically depressed mess. This is hardly surprising when you consider the facts: two dead moms, an absentee father, a psycho stalker and a secret half-brother. I’m not saying I don’t love the show, but it does prove my point fairly well.

Then you have shows like Oprah and their wildly outrageous stories. “I was born a boy, had a sex change, married this guy and now I’m falling in love with his sister!” Some of the things and people featured on that show leave me feeling fortunate to have a mother and a father who are only married to each other, as well as a dog that I’m not sexually attracted to.

Even the news these days leaves me reeling. Last night I watched as a man sitting in a deck chair was lifted into the air and carried off into the sunset, with the aid of I don’t know how many helium balloons. How much helium would it take, anyway, to lift a fully grown male and his lawn chair that high into the sky? You know what? It’s not even worth thinking about. The fact is, he managed it, and made it onto world news. And that’s what the worlds TV has come to.