Amidst my usual Sunday routine of watching professional football and snacking aggressively, I noticed something that caught my eye. Courtney Cox’s Cougar Town was advertised in high esteem as the new, bright ABC primetime show for the winter line-up.
My emotions stuck between sheer rage and confusion, I became highly inclined to investigate this tragic depression in American television that would make a show as unintelligent and unimpressive as Cougar Town primetime material. With the sad ending to the great detective Monk and American hero Jack Bauer, Michael Scott quitting The Office, Entourage and Weeds approaching final seasons, and the depressing conclusion to the undoubtedly best series in the history of television, Lost, the future of television appears bleak.
There is no great show to get excited about and look forward to as an escape from every stressful week of school. There is something fundamentally wrong with America’s once most thriving source of entertainment.
The good’ol days of kicking back to a nice half hour or hour-long television segment for a quick dose of entertainment has become extinct and replaced by other addictive alternatives that lack a predetermined time restraint. Television has been criticized for being distracting and time consuming, but there are much worse forms of entertainment to which dedicated television fans will make the switch.
Students who look through pictures and follow friends’ most recent activities for hours on end on Facebook, who read over the extremely embellished recollections of a stranger’s nightly activities on textsfromlastnight.com or who argue with 12-year-olds via headset about their Call of Duty kill-death ratio are battling no less of an addiction problem than Lindsay Lohan on a Columbian vacation.
Using large amounts of non-scheduled time to learn unnecessarily excessive amounts of information about casual acquaintances, to read about complete strangers, or to kill virtual foreigners for point value can account for major loses in study time and other necessary time commitments that an hour-long primetime show would leave plenty of time for. The aspect of “What do I need to accomplish after this is over?” is thrown out the window when one can mindlessly be fully engulfed in head-shooting Nazi zombies for hours.
Although it is imperative that we here at CHS stray away from this dangerous world of abuse into which we’ve recently taken a swan-dive of regrettable irresponsibility, it is completely the networks’ fault for our shortcomings in academic commitment.
Until one of these big time television stations comes out with a quality series up to Lost’s Dharma initiative standards, I may have to succumb to these Internet entertainment phenomena. My first step is the creation of my Formspring account.  I have high hopes of entertaining myself by continuously answering various comments (usually on my lack of forearm hair). The absurdity of this is my last ditch plea to my Comcast box to properly divert my attention once again.