There's so much wrong with today's TeeVee, that it needs a special Thuds volume to list it all. Not in the mood to pen a whole volume, though, so I will just write a usual five-thud column.
Background. TeeVee is a major part of my life at the moment, because I have suffered some relapses of my back injury, and must sit quietly in a neutral position frequently. So, the old RD sits on his comfy couch, with the right kind of pillows propping me in the right places, with remote (and usually) adult beverage to hand. Just recently, being an Xfinity (fka Comcast Cable) customer, I find I can control everything nicely on the 42" Samsung Smart-TV with my smartphone or tablet, so I do that.
In my home theater, the sounds are amplified by an older, but still good, Dolby 5.1 system, with wall and ceiling speakers and a huge floor-shaking subwoofer, all driven by the last non-digital receiver made, the Pioneer 702. The Samsung TV does a decent job of streaming off of Xfinity's 20mbps Internet service, too.
The Thuds, because after the honorable equipment, honor stops with TeeVee.
Thud the First: TeeVee, of course, is designed to appeal to those who never finished High School. Sure, there are a few exceptions, and I watch all of them. Fox News is designed for High School graduates. I watch that. Jeopardy is designed for thinkers at all levels above the 8th grade, I watch that. I watch some of the Military Channel, mostly for info on advanced weapons systems. I watch a LOT of Sportz, because it shows little of the inanity of the rest of the medium. I watch the occasional travelogue. You can dump the rest of it into the garbage, as far as I'm concerned. The talent shows are entertaining enough, but it's always about the judging, not the contestants or the material/talent they showcase. Why can't they make one without ANY judges, only an MC? Oh, wait! That's a bygone format of the 1950s and everything old is to be reviled, not promoted or reprised with reverence.
Thud the Second: Has to be the Socialist bias of all the news except Fox, and strangely enough, Russia TV, which can present straight news with NO lefty slant (but there is usually a pro-Putin slant). We bloggers are all over the Lefty-Newsy format and content, but even when caught in direct lies (example: the Romnoid "47%" tape, which we now know was heavily edited before presentation as a SCOOP! by Mother Jones News, a lefty TeeVee blog. What it all boils down to, dear readers, is that you write off the TeeVee and print news, and use the Internet blogs for your information, if you have ANY smartz, that is.
Thud the Third: TeeVee thinks we are all victims who want to be led to lawyers. My (absolutely) last resort in conflict resolution would be a lawyer, primarily because I feel that for the most part, they are leeches on our productive society. One of these days, I am going to see Dave, the Mesothelioma Victim's face one time too many and I will have an apoplectic fit and croak on the spot. More than once, I have shut off the TeeVee in disgust after starting to view an ambulance-chaser commercial. There are WAY too many ambulance-chaser commercials, all financed by the hugely corrupt legal system. I suspect that this issue will dog this Republic to it's dying days, which appear to be NOW. Hopefully, in the Second Republic, which I now believe I will live to see, we will finally decide that Free Speech has become, in several respects, a False Icon that we worship to the detriment of our society. Hopefully, there will be a way to stifle the ambulance-chasers.
Thud the Fourth: Years ago, I would have put TeeVee Preachers next, but they are way down the list now, and don't get a spot on my list of Thuds. Next comes Infomercials. Yes, there is info to be had in infomercials, but after you've seen how the MagiK Boolit works, and you decide you can do without one, why should you have to see this on one of your channels for the next two months? The answer of course, is because the TeeVee management couldn't sell the time to anyone else, so they sell it to the infomercial people. Commercials are a necessary part of TeeVee, they pay the cost of bringing us our choices, and in return, they get a minute (or four, now), every 8 minutes, to sell us something. Why can't I pay a premium to Xfinity to opt out of infomercials and see, say, old movies on those channels? For that matter, why hasn't someone come up with a network TeeVee commercial detector that not only kills off the commercials, but substitutes bandwidth in a queue that you have set up? If I'm watching Dancing with the Stars, and I did, last year, and the commercials come on, why can't my computer whisk me to the NFL channel during commercial breaks? Or the Weather Channel (except it carries less weather and more Discovery channel crapple on it now, so I don't watch it much anymore). Gin up this technology for me, TeeVee techno-whizzes, and I'll watch more TeeVee, but in the meanwhile, the Thud you hear is my boot connecting with your wooden head.
Thud the Fifth: "Reality TeeVee", generally. Generally speaking, "Reality" TeeVee is the worst thing to happen to Television since it was invented in the 1920s. Anything makes the grade in "reality" TeeVee, no matter how stupid, no matter how devoid of value, if it's "reality", some TeeVee manager will pay for it, and some idiot will film itand some channel will show it. In the name of "reality", we get TMZ, we get the Kardashians, we got Octomom, we get all sorts of "hold my beer and watch THIS" video. We need exactly NONE of these items on TeeVee, because they all have a negative impact on the culture, that is to say, they Dumb Us Down. Aren't we dumb enough already?
Thuds that got by: Sportz blatherers, award shows (oscars, etc), Rush Limbaugh (glad he's gone, he never learned how to say it briefly) and his ilk on the Left with THEIR bombast, PeeCee kiddy toons, womyn's victim channels, televangelists, day-long charity appeals, public TeeVee pledge breaks, too many Spanish channels (why are there over 150 of them on Xfinity and ONE, each and only French channel and ONE Russian channel?), fifty percent of local news being CRIME news...EVERYTHING qualifying for "Breaking News" both locally and nationally. A murder in Pawtucket, RI is NOT news in Portland OR, so why should we have to listen to ten minutes of coverage? Ditto a police chase in Shaky-town.
There must be more, but I'm about thudded out.