Thoughts on events, music, books and the whole enchilada of my human experience

  Confession time: I once kind of liked reality television.

Sort of. A long time ago.

I mean, the first season of Survivor was pretty good programming. A new premise: a bunch of people trapped on an island competing for a million dollars. I had never seen anything like it before and found it interesting enough. I even gave the first season of Big Brother a chance and kind of, sort of liked that one as well. Yes, the experience was both tedious and faintly voyeuristic, but I hadn't seen a bunch of people trapped in a house for long periods of time before and it was something to see how unhealthy an experience that is.

Then the whole newness of the "reality" TV experience started of fade and I've avoided every other one since then.

Why am I bringing this up?

Because of this article.

An all reality television cable channel. No joke.

As a basic cable subscriber, I already get junk like the Golf Channel, G4 (the video game network), Speedvision (stock car racing), QVC and STARZ True Stories. Pretty soon this reality channel will be added to the list of things I support unwillingly.

Why don't cable providers just let you pick and choose cable stations? I'd happily pay one-quarter less than we do now to drop half the channels we get. Heck, just give me the networks, A+E, TNT, Comedy Central, Sci-Fi and HBO and that would really be enough. Instead, my hard-earned dollars are soon to be supporting reruns of Celebrity Mole and I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! Oh, well, I already support Scare Tactics, so maybe the damage is done.

As a footnore: I know I'm supposed to feel guilty about publicly admitting I like television. Maybe I should go ahead and say something like the standard "I really only watch Discovery and The Learning Channel" to cover myself. What I've never understood about that statement (which I've heard from numerous people) is that those stations haven't shown good educational programming in years. Now it's all "In Search of Bigfoot" and "Strangers from the Skies" and "OMG!!!! I just saw a &**#!! alien! LOL" and other tripe. Sci-Fi's started to lean in that direction, as well.

So I'll go ahead and proudly admit it: I watch and enjoy The Wire, Six Feet Under, The Daily Show and reruns of Oz, ST: TNG and Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

Maybe enough watching of those will make up for all of those hours I spent in front of reality TV.

posted by Jon at 3:55 PM