In a fit of ennui and soul-wrenching boredom this weekend, I saw my first episode ever of a show called “Super Milk Chan” on Cartoon Network. As I am a registered, card-carrying cartoon fanatic, my interest in this show was one of pure curiosity. I tuned in to catch this spot, which, much to my dismay, dwarfs any other form of lunacy that currently exists on television. Within five minutes, I was ready to shove an icepick into my eye.
The show’s premise is simple enough, a 5-year-old with no super-powers whatsoever except for a high squeaky voice and a penchant for calling others names that no 5-year old should rightfully know, is asked to save the world on a regular basis.
From there, it starts to get weirder. Or, to be perfectly honest, completely and unabashedly screwed up, to the tune of making the Son of Sam and Charles Manson look like well-adjusted contributing members of society.
And therein lies the problem. Television has regressed into what I have to come to term the “Super Milk Chan Phenomenon,” after this show’s obvious oddities. It seems that the only television that will remain on the air is something that shocks people’s sensibilities, is altogether strange or new, or nudges the line between what they will show us and what is taboo to televise just a little further.
Take the Fox network, for example, a network which has killed three of my favorite programs (“Firefly,” “Futurama,” and “Family Guy”), so that they could show me episodes of “The Swan,” and yet another incarnation of “Who wants to marry whoever?” Instead of giving me thought-provoking, humorously cynical, enjoyable shows aimed at a discriminatingly intelligent audience interested in being entertained with pop-culture humor and a look at society through a warped and parodic lens, we are treated to the intellectual equivalent of a train wreck: Captivating, and yet bad for the head.
But for those like myself, we need something more. We’re the kind of people who enjoy British comedies such as “Monty Python,” “The Simpsons” lambasting societal mores, the tumults and tirades found on “The Daily Show,” the occasional stoic undertones of well-reported news, and an occasional artistic, yet mind-bending movie such as “Memento,” “Cube,” or “The Game.”
So why is it, to the average television executive, that intelligence and entertainment are mutually exclusive? Why do most shows that start out with a stream of thought-provoking undertones, and possibly some new “hook” to draw in the masses, regress into blasting us with the thing that pushes the line just a little further?
The answer is simple. Television executives don’t trust us, the entertainment-frenzied public, to make our own decisions, so they make them for us in a bout of profit-mongering panic. We’re forced to watch the same rehashed, cookie-cutter plots in different packages, and of course, thousands of variations on the same theme: “reality” television shows that bear no resemblance to reality whatsoever.
This is why I’ve pretty much given up on television as a whole. I might watch a couple hours per week, if that. As a matter of fact, I’ve seen one episode of any reality show ever, and that was the next-to-last episode of the first “Survivor.” So, no, before you ask, I don’t know how “Friends” ended, nor do I care how the lives of nonexistent people in a studio portraying places that don’t exist were affected by some monumental change that didn’t actually occur.
Instead, I crave adventure coupled with intimate self-discovery, humor wedded with political satire, romance that doesn’t always have a happy ending, news that is real and unbiased, and movies where the writers are at least a slight improvement over a pack of untrained monkeys at a couple of dingy typewriters.
Until these things exist, my television time allotment is highly limited. When a morsel of intelligence, like the fabled diamond in the rough, finally creeps onto my radar, I will support that franchise with prejudice, but until then, my television sits, primarily collecting dust, and of course, occasionally tuned to the network that brings us endless “Scooby-Doo” reruns, and the television equivalent of frenzied, sputtering, drooling dementia.
Originally printed in The Daily O’Collegian, December 7th, 2004.
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