Who the F is Driving this Train?

Let me ask you a serious question.

Have you watched TV lately? I have to admit that for a long, LONG time I didn't bother. As pathetic and stupid as it sounds, in 1994 when Star Trek TNG went off the air, I honestly believed TV had hit the wall. We were doomed to live in a realm of entertainment so dreary and stupid that we would all smash our television, and run in a mad throng outside to play ball in the sun. It was a glorious moment in history, and we could have broken free.

Well instead a large percentage of those of us who should have broken free, just kept riding the torpedo as it went down. The collective intelligence has been permanently bruised because apparently, we're too lazy to go outside and throw a frisbee.

And then. Oh sweet jesus...some guy, and I don't know who it was, but he should probably be killed, came up with reality TV. When this rose in popularity I really thought we were well and truly fucked. The desire to live vicariously through a group of people who, in my opinion, were cultural rejects that should have been murdered in Jr. High, froze my blood. It disturbed me greatly that so many people were enamored with it as well, I assumed (and not wrongly as far as I'm concerned) that some kind of evil-technomonster-hypnosis-Mysterio stealing your jewels with a big magnet-weapon had been developed in some fucked up mad scientist wing of the pentagon and then placed in the quivering and sweaty hands of a bunch of Fox executives. I sat up late at night watching "They Live" over and over, considering it a journal for how I would break the rest of humanity free.

We all assume that entertainment functions in a pattern not unlike an EKG. It has peaks and dips, but the pulse is getting thready kids, the dips are starting to win the war. I recently starting writing for a prospective TV show, and part of our ongoing quest to not only understand ourselves, but the success and failure of history, is to watch a lot of pilots and shows. And dude....

Duuuude.

There is some straight up SHIT trying to make its way on TV. It's a breath of fresh ass.

I'll focus on one example: Men In Trees.

If you haven't watched an episode, let me advise you heartily: Don't. Blow your brains out instead, you'll feel better about it.

It's essentially Northern Exposure with a Sex in the City paint job slapped into it. Cliche has to exist, in fact you can't actually escape it. The reason for that is because the audience needs a point of reference, they need some common ground to associate with what they're seeing, or else you've acheived some dadaist nonsense that won't reach syndication...Or maybe just the Blair Witch project, I dunno.

Filing the numbers off an old series and renaming the characters though is embracing the idea just a little too well, and it makes people want to smash their thumbs in a door.

There's a big reason the internet has become such a powerful medium for entertainment. The audience is easily communicating their expectations and desires to those who produce the content. Content with no appreciable qualities is rapidly forgotten and pushed to the wayside, while the successful content spreads almost of its own accord, flitting through MSN conversations, and umpteenth-forwarded emails. You can't stop the signal. All we can hope for (and I actually do) is that this medium can some how be...HARNESSED, into the flux capacitor, and interpreted in an intelligent fashion into quality content with sustainability.

Of course, we're just as likely to have half hour segments of people filming themselves jumping off their roof onto their trampolines and tearing their ACL.

God we're screwed.