Not All Reality is Exciting

I have probably mentioned this before. We do not have television at our house. I do not mean that as some sort of mating call for the pseudo-intellectual. We are not sitting around the living room reading aloud to each other from Marcel Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu in the original French. I spend more time than I ought watching Hulu.com internet “broadcasts” of Chuck, Psych, and The Human Target so I am not above watching TV. I simply tell you we have no television at our house to show I do not have all the conduits of information many people have. Yet, somehow I have lots of information.

Not long ago President Obama was on The View and when asked about Snooki, he didn’t know who she was. That was very reassuring to me. He has much more important things to pay attention to than a personage known throughout much of the free world for, umm, shall we say, somewhat hedonistic behaviors. He should be spending his time on things like the economy, oil spills and who will replace Ellen DeGeneres on American Idol. (Maybe Elena Kagan if the Supreme Court gig doesn't work out.)

I have never seen an episode of Jersey Shore or American Idol yet I know many things about both of them. I do not know them purposefully. The information seems to be in the air supply. Just another example of why the EPA needs to be more vigilant.
In the case of American Idol people who I enjoy have spent loads of time telling me what is happening on the show. Tony Kornheiser’s radio show dedicated so much time to it I stopped listening and a blog I read written by long-time television comedy writer Ken Levine does blow-by-blow accounts of each episode. I skip those entries. But still, I know a person named Crystal Bowersox was the runner-up last year. Crystal Bowersox…sounds like a special additive for laundry detergent to combat stains and unpleasant odor. (Tide - now with crystal bowersox for improved cleaning!)

Television people categorize these shows as unscripted. What? It really doesn’t take a group of erudite practiced crafters of the English language hours of intense effort to come up with such riveting storytelling as the account of Danielle from The Real Housewives of New Jersey as she tries to recapture the romance of dating by enrolling in a pole-dancing class? Are you sure Shakespeare didn’t come up with that first? There was a little known hand-written note in the first folio of Romeo and Juliet indicating the Bard considered a scene with Juliet and Lady Capulet discussing breast augmentation surgery to attract a husband. (This could have led to a very famous line: Two Bs or double Ds that is the question.)

The people in many of these shows get very rich and incredibly famous. Many things I do I do in hopes of becoming richer and a little famous. Maybe the path to getting my work as a writer known to the world is to have a reality show revolving around my life. The biggest hurdle to this is the fact my life would be considered truly boring by most of, who am I kidding, all of the viewing public.

It is often a topic of conversation in my house just how boring we are. My wife and I love each other and have had maybe two disagreements in almost 20 years of marriage and neither incident had us throwing living room décor or even epithets at each other. Our children don’t seem to dislike us and we think they are pretty cool. We don’t even have to yell at them to turn their music down. When the oldest kid is in the living room with her internet radio turned up you hear Julie Andrews or Rosemary Clooney, not rap artists or pop divas spouting unapproved by old people lyrics. When the youngest one is closeted in his room roaming the internet it turns out he is watching YouTube, not videos on how to make basement explosives but old episodes of The Addams Family.

The final nail in the excitement coffin has to be what happened the other night. I have two, count ‘em, two teenage daughters. They got together with a bunch of their peers and went over to a house with no adults in sight. They went into the basement theater. They fired up the projector and the DVD player and proceeded to watch… wait for it… Lion King One and Half. A cartoon! A direct-to-video Disney cartoon!