I know this is my second posting about reality tv shows, which therefore makes up roughly twenty percent of my entire posting career, but I can’t help it. I’ve become obsessed with Manor House and I would like it to be a matter of public record. I guess PBS finally realized that fart jokes with a British accent are still fart jokes and just because a show stars Judy Dench doesn’t mean it isn’t boring and stupid. They’ve finally got this amazing stuff on about the way life was in fancy-schmancy Edwardian English manors, from the family that lives there down to the people who clean the chamber pots. You get to learn lots of neat stuff, and there is actual drama in the house—they don’t need the producers to add mood music or have a cast that includes a racist cowboy, a gay racist drug dealer, and an American Indian racist techno club dj with Whig Party leanings in order to keep things moving. You might think the treatment of the cultural differences between then and now would be heavy-handed, but it’s not at all. The narrator just tells you the facts, and it’s fascinating enough hearing what comfortable 21st Century people feel about suddenly working 16 hour days.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the concept of reality shows isn’t so bad after all. I even think shows like Mr. Personality and Joe Millionaire are good ideas—it’s just that the way they’re done is lame. Sometimes the American stuff is well done, like with The Michael Essany Show or even, God help me, The Osbournes (it’s not the producer’s fault that family is so fucking obnoxious).
But the blue ribbon definitely goes to the Brits. It’s as if they’ve taken all that pent up energy that used to go into maintaining Naval superiority and put it into their reality programming. Rule Britannia! Britannia rules the (broadcast) waves.
I am sure you are all thrilled to get my opinion on this particular subject instead of a post about my actual life. But with the quality programming served up by PBS (and supported by viewers like you), how can my life possibly compete?
Goddam kids at work spilled water on my book and asked me why I have more gray hairs than their dads. Should've told them expensive cars and infidelity keep fathers young. All I could think of at the time was to punch them.
But goddam kids at work can't bring me down, no sir, because my thoughts are in the clouds this afternoon. Michele is poised to rock my Jersey suburb! She'll descend upon this sleepy town like locusts that know how to party and decimate its bumper crop of lameness.
Let's have a moment of silence for stupidness, which will surely be dead as soon as she arrives.