Life in an Artistic Vacuum

Hey readers,

Back to sardonic bitterness for a post or two now, this evening i'm going to discuss why mankind is in an artistic black hole from which nothing can escape.

Two words sum this up: 'Reality TV'. Yes, i'm going to tackle that vile ever present spectre infecting the psyche of the consumer. I will not rest until I have wrestled it to the ground, broken its neck and stand above its remains roaring in a bestial moment of triumph, alas I fear however that this battle may be long and fruitless.  This form of television seems to be particularly popular and prevalent in the USA. But what is it about America that it seems to have an inexhaustible fascination with pseudo fly on the wall reality shows following the 'lives' of human degenerates from various locales and social classes? Worse still, its taking hold here in Britain! TOWIE, Made in Chelsea, Geordie Shore, and that Irish one. They are all insults to intelligence, morality and artistry. Please for the love of god make it stop! I think anyone with even a modicum of respect for television as an artistic medium died a little inside when TOWIE won a BAFTA...Right? 

 I know i'm essentially beating my fists against a brick wall and that its an exercise in futility due to the unfortunate profitability of these 'shows'. The dynamics are simple, the demand is there, so supply is provided. I wouldn't mind so much if the majority of viewers watched this programming and recognised the participants as the idiots as what they are, but so many appear look up to the 'stars' of this televisual vomit and seek to emulate their behaviour! To add insult to injury the sheer size of the market for this kind of thing stateside is staggering, go on any TV streaming service legitimate or otherwise and 90% of it will be 'reality' crap! how many 'sports star wives' shows can lonely disappointed wives of former high school football stars possibly watch? Anything that doesn't follow the format of Jersey Shore and the like will be some inane semi-scripted bull follwing the 'day to day' activities of some obscure business of subculture. (Something I like to call 'deadliest catch syndrome'.) This stuff is everywhere! Seriously, I'm now going to write a list of shows that appear to follow these formats that I spotted with just few clicks at a webstite:

•  All Star Dealers (presumably poker dealers)
• My Strange Addiction
• Celebrity Rehab (Really? Are we that voyeuristic? Go read OK or something)
• Storage Hunters/Storage Wars (competing reality docu-drama things about self storage companies, no, really)
• Extreme Couponing (not even a word)
• Project Runway (see below)
• MTV Caged
• *Insert Location's* Next Top Model (ooooooh skinny girls in a house competing for a job! Drama!)
• Freaky Eaters
• Doomsday Preppers (lets all laugh at the crazy people that live in bunkers! hahahahah!)
• Sister Wives (oh those Mormons and their ideas...)
• Jersey Shore (yay, role models!)
• Geordie Shore
• *foreign import of the 'shore' format*
• Dance moms (haha pushy parents are HILARIOUS)
• *insert professional sport here* wives (seriously there's like 4 or 5 of these)
• Various celebrity couple docu-soaps (really, too many to even start trying to list all of those)
• South Beach Tow (a towing company reality show? REALLY?)
• Big Rich Texas (Think the hills with more cowboy hats I guess)
• The A-List Dallas (more vapid rich people from Texas, yay!)

I could go on, but we'd be here for days. I hope by now you're starting to see my point. The entertainment industry is utterly saturated with this stuff, its all cheap, all devoid of any depth and barely qualifies as entertainment. I for one have never been entertained by stuff like this. I utterly fail to see the appeal, it's simply beyond me. I don't know maybe my mind is less developed than those that do, maybe I just don't have the insight to see the deep rich messages behind everything. Somehow though, I doubt it. Equally, I doubt my shrieking on a barely read blog will have any real impact on seemingly unending torrent, this tidal wave of morally bankrupt detritus clogging TV schedules, and all the while tightly scripted, well acted and astoundingly produced dramas like Southland undergo budget cuts and cast reductions. Epic series like Game of Thrones are forced to be produced by specialist channels like HBO (admittedly this does have it's advantages) but in the process limiting its audience. Ladies and gentlemen, I implore you, stop feeding this beast, stop driving this stampede lest the future of entertainment be swallowed up and quality programming becomes nothing but a distant memory, preserved by DVD sales and premium cable networks.

Thanks for reading

Wheelchairman2