Monday, February 27, 2012

My Strange Anger With Television

What is up with America's fetish with exploiting people with mental illnesses for the purpose of entertainment? What the heck am I talking about? Just watch almost any show on TLC or AMC lately.

Hoarders. My Strange Addiction. My Crazy Obsession. Dance Moms. These people need help and we are all watching these show for entertainment value. My family is guilty of this. I have seen all of these shows and finally came to this realization. We are getting laugh-value and the OMG-factor from seeing how messed up some of these people are. Is this right? Shouldn't we feel guilty about ourselves?

Now that I have come to this conclusion I get angry when I see these shows advertised. Dance Moms? Abby and all of those moms ought to be locked up in prison for child abuse. They mentally abuse these little girls. Why are the police not called on every episode?

My Strange Addiction and My Crazy Obsession. I hope part of the deal with being on these shows is that they get intervention and lifelong counceling.

Hoarders. I've seen these people first-hand. It's not funny nor entertaining. It's sad. It divides families.

Television shows in America seem to get more in-your-face and over-the-top. America needs to do some soul searching and figure out what is decent and what is inappropriate. We need to stop exploiting the less fortunate so that we can have a good evening of television watching. If we keep this pace of cutting edge entertainment, where will be in the future? Making fun of mentally retarded people? Laughing at cancer patients dying? This trend needs to stop and it needs to stop now.

1 comment:

PF said...

From your recent posts it sounds like you and I are cut from the same cloth. I'll be reading more in the future... maybe I should start a blog like this one. Is it cathartic at all? :)

We have a ban on "reality TV" in my home — or we did, until I saw a few creep in on the Food Network in the guise of these "cooking competition" shows. What the hell? Chopped, Iron Chef America, the Next Iron Chef America, Worst Cooks in America, CUPCAKE WARS... Come on. Once something comes along that gets the slightest interest you're deluged with it until you can't take anymore and it chokes out everything else on the air. What happened to demonstrating how to cook dishes? I do understand that they still have some of that kind of programming, but good luck finding it prime time.

And at what point did A&E (Arts and Entertainment) TLC (The LEARNING Channel) The Discovery Channel, et al, have to turn into a vehicle for contrived dramatic reality shows? And since when do Bigfoot, Aliens and ghost hunting have anything to do with History, as are constantly shown on "H" and "H2," previously know as the History Channel? At least when the History Channel showed non-stop Hitler coverage it had to do with "history."

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