Past Opinion Articles

Article for the week of 4/10/05

Reality TV Takes Next Logical Step
By Grey Entertainment

Once more some boneheaded TV critic has asked the ages old question of “has Reality TV gone too far”, to which some TV producer moronically answered immediately “not far enough”.
The latest round of supposed entertainment from the brilliant minds that bought us the Survivor series is aimed at “the lazy, contemplative, navel watching hippie types”. What is it? Televised navel watching.
Twenty-two minutes, that’s half an hour with ad breaks, of a camera looking directly at someone’s belly button. We are assured that it is all live, with proof being the occasional movements of the belly, which do honestly look like breathing.
The variety of the show is that the same navel is never show twice, that is the guarantee, except on request shows when a previously shown navel may in fact be on screen again by popular request.
There are white navels, black navels, Asian navels, male navels, female navels, navels with hair going down, or up, to them, pierced navels, inies, outies and those really weird ones no one likes to talk about.
This is the state of modern television viewing.
In centuries to come, as aliens advance towards Earth, because with this sort of indicator we’re not going to be out there any time soon, they will see this sort of thing and wonder how anything as advanced as radio transmission ever, ever got developed on a planet that so utterly lacks intelligent life.
Perhaps most frightening is that this is an increasingly popular show. So popular that there are actually legitimate volunteers to fill in surveys on the show. There was a police investigation, everything, people want their thoughts known on this matter. Unfortunately that’s still not a good thing.
One of the most frequent comments is that it “gives me the time to stare at a navel when I just don’t have the energy to spare.”
Equally frightening but I suppose a little less surprising is that the second most frequent comment is that “it gives me a naval other than mine to look at that’s inline with the TV when I lie down.”
I’m going to assume that comment wasn’t just made by pregnant women.
Supposedly this is the point where I stop the rant and state vehemently that something must be done. I won’t. I’m pretty sure I’ve been in this situation before and it’s stopped nothing. Were it possible I would get out of the entertainment industry and do something useful with the rest of my life, such as building small piles of dirt in the middle of the Arizona desert, giving them names and holding frequent tea parties.
Much more appealing is simply resigning from the human race.
However were I to do that it would surely start a trend. And before you know it everyone wants to join, then all it takes is one idiot joining in too, before you know it we’re the morons!