A stuffy professor wrote a stuffy article that I had to read for my stuffy law class. He argued that violent TV makes people paranoid and believe they will become victims of a violent crime. I'll take it one step further than Dr. Boring and his violence study. Television makes people believe they will become rich Californian pop stars hunted by zombies who can decorate a room with designer furniture for less than $1,000.
Come on, you know I'm right.
The phenomena behind 'American Idol' is disgusting, yet most people will tell you they watch the first few weeks of the show for the humor factor alone. People don't watch 'American Idol' to hear good singers. They watch it for the tone-deaf sideshow freak from Kansas who believes they are Elvis incarnate or the next Mariah Carey.
Where do these rejects come from? They were you last year. They were sitting on their couch watching 'American Idol' laughing as someone butchered a token *NSYNC song and thinking 'I am so much better than that loser. I could win this.' No. Television made you believe you could be a pop star, and you are not.
More jarring than thousands of Americans wishing they were Britney Spears is the culture imitation spawned by teenage dramadies. Another not-so-stuffy article I had to read for a media class commented that people still try to 'keep up with the Joneses,' only instead of our neighbors, the Joneses are the people we look up to on our favorite television programs.
Unfortunately, the people idolized are not the staff of 'The West Wing' but the cast of 'The OC.' People sacrifice their own identities for a shirt that is 'so Summer,' or aspiring to be more like Seth Cohen. America's teenagers are turning into a group of indie, BCBG-wearing pseudo-emos.
I am afraid of zombies. It is my completely irrational fear, just as yours is being eaten by sharks or having aliens steal your brain. I developed this fear after watching a TV movie about zombies on the Sci Fi channel. I was scared to leave my bedroom any time after 7 p.m. 'Were there zombies before you watched the show'? my roommate asked. The answer is of course 'No,' but television brings the fear of weird things into my consciousness.
Last year when I went home for Spring Break, I watched a day-long marathon of 'Trading Spaces' with my mom. It was fun to watch people try creative and novel designs for less than $1,000, until my mom dragged me to Home Depot early the next morning so we could repaint all of the bedrooms.
While it is amazing how much a room can change for that little money, what the TV show doesn't show you is how pissed off people get when they've been painting for five hours or swearing at the self-assembly required cabinet that will not self-assemble. Nothing is as easy as it seems on TV (Take it from someone who did those five hours of painting).
We can't become pop stars, live the rich life in California or paint a room for five hours at a time. That's why that stuff is on TV: so we can watch other people do it instead of doing it ourselves. It doesn't have to be real.
Except for zombies. I'm pretty sure they're real and living under my deck.
