Youtube addiction gone awry
Technically I am still supposed to be reading that damnable book on Mao. You can see how well that's working out. Instead I found myself surfing youtube for mvs of television shows that I like. I do this so often that I got hard up and ended up looking up mvs for the O.C.
Before I moved to the land with no cheap cable, I was watching season one on the sly, so that no one would know I had a guilty pleasure like the O.C. in all its teenaged drama splendor. Not having seen it in two years, I was learning some new things from the clips. Apparently the blonde that always made me want to feed her and slap a personality into her is dead. Okay, no big loss. Her poor bastard love interest needed more drama anyway because t.v. tortured souls are only appealing to audiences when they're good and tortured. Some guy fell off of a cliff. The Ryan character (token bad boy) beat the crap out of lots of people. Then he beat the crap out more people. Someone got shot. Someone didn't get shot. The annoying blonde had a trauma disorder. Then she didn't. She overdosed. Then she didn't. The slutty Mom slept with this guy; then with that one; then with another one off to the side of the first two.
And yet, in my two year absence, I really don't think I missed much.
Huh.
There's something about the pretty people with problems format that just draws you in, even if you cannot relate to the characters and are in fact from a seperate planet. For example, all of my friends when I was a teenager were Ryan Atwoods. Did we have a Summer? Nope. If we did we would have tormented her on principal. A Marissa? Heck no, a kid that nuerotic would have been in the county services nuthouse faster than you can say "eating disorder and borderline personality". And someone would have fed her, for God's sake. We would have shared a lunch or something.
I think that what really draws us to this type of programming isn't that we can relate, but that we can't. It's the sheer malicious joy of watching shows about people with lives more screwed up than our own. I would love to say that I am intellectually and maturationally above such sadistic rubbish, but that would be a dirty lie. I'm already putting it on my Netflix list. :)
Before I moved to the land with no cheap cable, I was watching season one on the sly, so that no one would know I had a guilty pleasure like the O.C. in all its teenaged drama splendor. Not having seen it in two years, I was learning some new things from the clips. Apparently the blonde that always made me want to feed her and slap a personality into her is dead. Okay, no big loss. Her poor bastard love interest needed more drama anyway because t.v. tortured souls are only appealing to audiences when they're good and tortured. Some guy fell off of a cliff. The Ryan character (token bad boy) beat the crap out of lots of people. Then he beat the crap out more people. Someone got shot. Someone didn't get shot. The annoying blonde had a trauma disorder. Then she didn't. She overdosed. Then she didn't. The slutty Mom slept with this guy; then with that one; then with another one off to the side of the first two.
And yet, in my two year absence, I really don't think I missed much.
Huh.
There's something about the pretty people with problems format that just draws you in, even if you cannot relate to the characters and are in fact from a seperate planet. For example, all of my friends when I was a teenager were Ryan Atwoods. Did we have a Summer? Nope. If we did we would have tormented her on principal. A Marissa? Heck no, a kid that nuerotic would have been in the county services nuthouse faster than you can say "eating disorder and borderline personality". And someone would have fed her, for God's sake. We would have shared a lunch or something.
I think that what really draws us to this type of programming isn't that we can relate, but that we can't. It's the sheer malicious joy of watching shows about people with lives more screwed up than our own. I would love to say that I am intellectually and maturationally above such sadistic rubbish, but that would be a dirty lie. I'm already putting it on my Netflix list. :)
posted by jen at 2:40 AM
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