You might not be quite aware of it, since it has become such a part of your daily life, but you’re in a love affair, so are your parents, grandparents, friends and professors. Everyone is having a love affair and they have been since the 1950s. It’s with television.
Recently, our love has turned toward watching so-called reality TV shows, and the ones that seem to do the best out of all of them are those about love and relationships.
Of course, it’s a hot topic. It’s what keeps people like Sarah Jessica Parker employed for so many years, keeps Meg Ryan in the acting business, and keeps me writing for a newspaper.
The Bachelor has had more seasons than I’d care to remember watching, and I stopped quite a few ago. The premise behind the show is one man, or woman, has to choose from a pool of more than any one person should ever choose from to marry, and at the end must propose to their choice, having narrowed the pool down to only two.
How it is that the shows creators thought that any person could ever choose one person that they would ultimately marry from a group of 30 people is beyond me, since I personally can not even commit to a shampoo.
The show further asks that they use first impressions in the first episode to immediately eliminate a whole bunch of people. And while I too think that first impressions are really important, I don’t think they’re a reason to send someone home.
Give them the night to at least unpack! If you think that relying on first impressions alone is bad, just wait.
Another show titled Dating in the Dark, requires that three men and three women, living in separate sides of a house meet in a room that is perfectly dark, although the lucky viewers, through the magic of television and some sort of science-camera, can see them.
At the conclusion of the show, the sets of three are matched up into couples, though a process I’m not quite clear on, as I have never paid it much attention, and are revealed to each other under ordinary lights. Despite whatever chemistry they’ve developed while talking to one another in the dark, they always seem to be disappointed with what they see.
Not only does the show present all these people being stupid about physical appearance, on occasion the show has presented people making ridiculously offensive jokes, such as one woman saying to the man with whom she was paired, “Should we do the Helen Keller?” a joke referring to Helen Keller’s inability to see or hear and the need for her to touch things.
Not only was this not edited out in the show, but it was also used in previews of the fall episodes during August 2010. Maybe in some far off alternate universe it might be acceptable to leave jokes like that in your television program, but by no means was it at all necessary to put it in the preview.
A person could go on for hours and hours about ridiculous programming like this, and the more that one rants and raves about its idiocy, the more upsetting it becomes. In a few years, we’ll have some sort of new television craze that will exploit some other human emotion, and upset some other columnist.
