The Secret Life of the American Teenager Is Boring as Hell
by Nick GillespieWith the possible exception of Roman Polanski, I suspect I might have been the only adult male over the age of 40 who watched the second-season opener of the ABC Family dramedy The Secret Life of the American Teenager earlier this week. I watched not because I am the heterosexual version of intern-trolling former Rep. Mark Foley (Maf54, where are you?), but to have some quality time with my 15 year-old son, who likes the show but can’t explain why (I suspect it might have to do with the idea that kids his age are having sex).
The show, which follows the (mis)adventures of a high schooler Amy who hooked up with a classmate at band camp and got preggers as a result, was a mini-hit last year and a mini-scandal. It’s most horrifying depredation to contemporary mores? The memento mori that is a puffy and still-largely talentless Molly “Sixteen Candles” Ringwald, who plays the lead character’s divorced mom. Like a boob-tube Ozymandias, look upon her visage and despair.
Last season revolved around Amy realizing she was in the family way and then having to tell her folks, friends, etc. The father of the still-unborn child was a cad, scamming on several gals, and Amy ended up falling in with Ben, a loveable nerd who promises to raise the bastard as his own. Although abortion was raised as a possibility, it was dispatched more quickly than the theme song from Maude, which may well have been the last prime-time show to feature a lead character who actually went the Planned Parenthood route. What was stressed again and again throughout The Secret Life to the point of tedium was that Amy did not have sex on a regular basis. Or even more than that one unfortunate moment in band camp. Nor did virtually any of the other kids (and apparently, Molly Ringwald’s character either).
In Season Two’s opener, Ben and Amy plan a secret wedding and they actually get hitched. During the course of the show, the bride and groom and their best man and bridesmaid need to get fake I.D.s so the ceremony can take place absent any parental input. Various classmates also get fake I.D.s so they can attend the reception, which was as dry as a Methodist’s liquor cabinet. Indeed, a running theme throughout the episode is how no one will drink alcohol at all, but especially if they have to drive anywhere. By the time the credits ran, I was looking to see if Carrie A. Nation was the script consultant.
Which is to say that apart from the vaguely titallating premise and promise of the show’s title, the thing is safe as milk. Skim milk. Soy milk. Possibly powdered milk. The Secret Life, arguably Hollywood’s most naked bid at the jailbait market since Saved By The Bell went into permanent summer recess sometime before Dustin Diamond entered a long-delayed puberty, thus exemplifies the worst tradition of after-school special.
It’s preachy beyond belief and, for all the bad stuff that’s supposed to happen to the characters, it plays out in a world that is about as menacing and gritty as the dancing gangs in West Side Story. Give me Rock and Roll High School any day, the 1979 flick that ends with the blowing up of Vince Lombardi High, as great a Sophoclean catharsis as has been recorded in a movie featuring Clint Howard.
The Secret Life also represents a ubiquitous Hollywood tendency that all libertarians and even conservatives should reject out of hand: That television and other forms need to be instructive to youth and other idiot members of society who apparently take their moral cues from the small and large screens.
In a telling and all-too-common moment of Hollywood hubris, director Rob Reiner (who has made some good movies, I think) said, “Hollywood should not be making exploitive violent and exploitive sex films. I think we have a responsibility [to viewers] not to poison their souls.” Thanks, Meathead, but you don’t have access to my soul in the first place. Or those of my kids.
We may be what we eat (which explains the puddles of foie gras that form whenever I stand up), but we’re not what we watch, and creative expression needn’t be the ethical equivalent of a Cross Your Heart Bra, designed to uplift and separate us from our base instincts. And certainly the viewer, whether 15 years old or 45 (alas!), doesn’t need to watch The Secret Life of the American Teenager to know to use condoms or not drink and drive.
One of the great disconnects in American life over the past 30 years is that even as popular culture has been getting more graphic in its depictions of sex and violence, sexual behavior and violent crime among youth have been declining. Folks on the left like Reiner and many on the right often assume a connection between what we watch and how we act. That’s just not the way it works. Which is actually cause for relief.
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
| 
Follow Us on Twitter
Subscribe via RSS
Tips & Feedback
48 Comments
“Folks on the left like Reiner and many on the right often assume a connection between what we watch and how we act. That’s just not the way it works.”
I’ve never understood how seemingly rational people can seriously make that argument. Yet they keep making it.
I used to get paid really well as a Creative Director slash copywriter in advertising.
I can assure you Nick that people DO act on stuff they watch, hear and read.
They may not act on EVERYTHING they watch, hear and read. Hence not every product has the folks buying in droves. However really smart (and just as shallow) people spend lots of time and money to make sure they affect people’s behavior.
This is not an original observation by moi. But as Hitler understand lo those 80 years ago with Leni Riefensthal, image is everything.
You’d think what we just went through with the end product of Obama might have given you a hint.
Good stuff Mr. Gillespie. Calling Rob Reiner Meathead after he says something stupid (not hard to find an example) would make me chuckle during surgery.
My 13-year old daughter loves this show. I think it’s a good step from Disney channel stuff to more grown up shows. She doesn’t need to go straight from Hannah Montana to the Girls Next Door. That may be Miley’s path, but not my kid!
I would have to say that the small and large screen does have some effect on people. If it didn’t, why have a website like this? Is this not a website to address the rampant liberalism that has saturated our entertainment and pop culture? Is it not to combat the negative effects of said liberalism?
Now, it may not have as massive an influence as some people think, but neither is it benign. I find myself thinking of a cautionary song I used to hear in church as a child: Be careful little eyes what you see…
What you fill your time and your mind with will have some kind of effect on you. Trying to argue that the small and big screen have no effect at all(which is what I came away with after reading this article) is absurd.
If people didn’t act on what they watch, see, hear, there wouldn’t be an advertising industry.
I watch the show because I’m a fan of some of the actors. If I weren’t, I probably wouldn’t watch it. (I wasn’t a “7th Heaven” fan either. Brenda Hampton needs to learn to write more realistic dialogue; that’s all there is to it.) However, I will say that their handling of the issues is better than most of what’s on TV. And I think it’s hilarious that they stomped on CW’s hyped-to-death “Gossip Girl” on Monday.
And Joe, it’s too bad about Miley Cyrus, isn’t it? I caught a few episodes of her show, and thought she was a cute kid with a surprisingly high amount of comedic talent. She still is — but now she’s getting sucked into the Hollywood sewer just like the rest of them. God help all those young actors and actresses. It seems like there’s no escape for them.
Finally, I’m sorry, but “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” stank to high heaven. I saw it once when my sister had it on, and I wouldn’t rewatch it if you paid me.
(Oh, one more thing: Do we REALLY have to call illegitimate children “bastards”? What is this, 1850?)
I have to agree with Jack on this one. Character is shaped by all sorts of things; this doesn’t mean, as Jack rightly pointed out, that watching a murder on T.V. will then make you go out and kill someone. Human beings are not so mechanistic, despite what folks like Dawkins and Dennet argue. But what you watch does affect how you think, what sorts of thoughts you reflect upon, and the intellectual content of one’s mind. Moreover, with great repetition, people do begin to mimic aspects of the behavior they view, especially language, and especially by children. Additionally, various media are used by people to feed already existing pathologies which are then exacerbated. How can one at the same time acknowledge the obvious emotional and psychological effects of the best art, and then say that certain types of content cannot affect the viewers’ actions in any way? I think this flies directly in the face of experience.
All that being said, I think if art depicts truth, than even certain graphic content can be appropriate, and I would think less likely to lead to negative behavioral effects.
[...] Whole thing, including some Rob Reiner and Mark Foley bashing, here. [...]
Funny stuff. Unfortunately Nick Gillespie burned through a whole years worth of pop culture references in one column. Clint Howard AND Maude? Pace yourseld my friend.
Millions of people watching dozens of shows does have an impact, such as by making certain things fashionable. And, that extends to social issues where stigmas are subconsciously attached to certain behaviors and other behaviors are subconsciously mainstreamed.
Of course, sometimes that doesn’t work. Very few Reason readers are probably going to rush out and buy a black leather jacket or let their sideburns grow out.
“What was stressed again and again throughout The Secret Life to the point of tedium was that Amy did not have sex on a regular basis. Or even more than that one unfortunate moment in band camp. Nor did virtually any of the other kids (and apparently, Molly Ringwald’s character either).”
And this is bad…. why???
I’ve never watched this show as I imagined it to be a “mini-Juno” type of movie. What you find humorless and worthy of mockery, however, actually makes me more interested in the show for my 14 year old son and 16 year old daughter.
Holy crap! My comment was deleted! Heads up folks, they don’t look kindly on snark what pokes fun at the staff.
Wow, now there’s some irony.
Had someone like James Dobson said that I bet Mr. Reiner would be leading the pitchfork and torch armed lynchmob to his door chanting about censorship and the 1st Amendment.
Product of unwed couple coulating = Bastard
It is proper english, and if we referred to bastards as such more often, we would probably have a less glamorized vision of “single parenthood” AKA irresponsible behavior that borders on child abuse. You disagree with the part about ‘child abuse’? Look at the stats for success (by any metric other than sucessfully serving multiple jail sentences) of the products of bastards.
Since 1970 we have had a 300% increase in births to “single” mothers. If we quit showing this as a good thing, with all the Hollywood stars being considered cool for having bastard babies, then the girls who see them might not think it’s so great to be “Juno.” Jack Bauer, great comment.
“What was stressed again and again throughout The Secret Life to the point of tedium was that Amy did not have sex on a regular basis. Or even more than that one unfortunate moment in band camp. Nor did virtually any of the other kids (and apparently, Molly Ringwald’s character either).”
And this is bad…. why???
Whether it’s bad or not, it’s inaccurate. Most teen pregnancy doesn’t come from one time couplings, but from frequent sex with the same person. The Left doesn’t like to talk about this, because it undercuts their theory of “Put on a condom and all is well” but the Amy character is not the norm when it comes to teen pregnancy.
wordygirl,
I think what he meant by was that mentioning it ONCE was enough. But the writers decided to drill it into the viewers’ heads.
This is what causes rebellion.
Compare that to the show Reba, which mentioned the pregnant teenage couple had sex once only once. (The fact of them having sex just once was mentioned only once . . . in the pilot) Therefore, it lacks repetition and tedium.
Reba tried to be quite realistic in its portrayal of pregnancy: with the hot-flashes, morning sickness, weight-gain, etc. They made it clear that their decision to have sex was stupid, but maintain a pro-life position by having her keep the child and raise her.
On SECRET LIFE OF TEH AMERICAN TEENAGER, I looked at an ad for the show in a TV Guide magazine that showed a teenage girl with a very pregnant belly. My only thought was “I miss John Hughes.”
Good article. However, I think you confused Methodists with Baptists, at least in general.
Still, you’ve clearly watched the whole show.
[...] NICK GILLESPIE: The secret life of the American teenager is boring as hell. [...]
John Galt, I’m not advocating illegitimacy in any way, shape, or form. (In fact, I happen to be practicing abstinence until marriage.) However, I fail to see how slapping a label on an innocent child for something that his or her parents did does anyone any good.
First off Nick, what’s shown on screen DOES affect people’s behavior. Particularly younger ones who have no network of Church, family, and conservative peers. TNT runs edited versions of “Sex and the City” and it’s a huge hit … with girls 12-16. Yes it will on average tend to push it’s young girl audience to the behavior of the characters. That may be a slight push, but a push nevertheless.
Second, with the collapse of social institutions, most young people learn from either peers or media or both, how to deal with romance, relations with the opposite sex, etc.
One of the most notable things about modern Western life is how “broken” relations between the sexes are, and how most young men have no clue about what women/girls really want. The girl having sex, with the most arrogant jerky guy (who romances other women) is spot on. That she’d want a “beta” guy who is nice, loyal, etc. is ridiculous much less than any “marriage” between a woman who wants the hot but jerky, arrogant guy and the “nice guy loser” could be a happy one.
Molly Ringwald famously did not want her character in Pretty in Pink to end up with the character played by John Cryer (Ducky) her yearning best friend. This was fairly accurate, women and girls always prefer the cocky, arrogant guy (who if he’s bedding more women, only makes him hotter, i.e. social proof or other women want him). Of course, now, Ringwald looks fairly pathetic while Cryer looks far better (comparatively).
What’s important for film and TV to portray, is the real rules of attraction and desire by women for men, to clueless young men. Avoiding heartbreak and idiocy by letting young men know that only cocky, arrogant, funny, and socially dominant works. Being “nice” = instant ticket to loserdom.
The show is bad because it encourages behavior by young men GUARANTEED to result in unhappiness and frustration (and eventual anger/misogyny due to constant, repeated failure) by most young men pursuing most young women. Slumdog Millionaire is just as bad in that regard.
The reality is that “beta” behavior as depicted in both “Secret Life” and “Slumdog” will generate contempt for the men exhibiting it by the target women. Why did the female characters in both projects have sex with the arrogant, jerky, womanizing men in the first place? Duh? Cause that is what women want.
Yes, this was not always so. Women did not always choose so, but so goes the modern environment, with the Pill, Condom, improved earnings/social freedom for women, and anonymous, highly mobile and atomized urban living.
Responsible projects would teach young men the “rules.” Be cocky, arrogant, and a jerk. The “Edward Cullen” character from “Twilight” (running a total Pick Up Artist routine on the girl) is what works. In the book the girl, Bella, laments the attention from the “nice guys” and wishes instead she’d be invisible. Since she only has eyes for the hot, physically dominant, Alpha male “Edward.”
Irresponsible ones would give young guys the idea that playing “Ducky” in Pretty in Pink would get one the girl and the happy ever after.
[I'm kind of surprised that the "Secret Life" did not have the beta boy's parents strongly disapprove of his move in that he could and would do "better" -- but that's par for the Hollywood course. No place runs more on Alpha dominance (think George Clooney and his harem of rotating girlfriends) and no place pushes the idiot moves that beta guys can get the girl.]
[...] Nick nailed it. But I’d go further…the disconnect from reality demonstrated by the average American television writer is why our best TV shows tend to be cribbed from the Brits (from Archie Bunker to The Office… Couples being one particularly hideous exception, granted). [...]
Nick, are you blind? or just nuts?
I agree that kids should see true-life depictions once in a while. But, my gosh, how can you say that we don’t follow and emulate what we watch? Not everything, but MUCH, especially in the case of adolescents!!
COME ON! GET A CLUE ABOUT YOUR CULTURE AND ITS CAUSES AND DOWNFALLS!
“di butler – January 9th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Jack Bauer, great comment”
Di — I’m gonna ago out on a limb here and agree! Gosh am I “rad” or what — that’s what the kidz are saying, right?
My So Called Life Indeed!
Jack,
Like, totally rad! Bitchin’, even! The cool teen show on when I was 16 was “Square Pegs”, and the cool movie was “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” Sean Penn’s best role to date.
Nick, Nick, Nick. You need to read up a bit on your Protestant denominations. There’s an old joke in the South: “How can you tell a Baptist from a Methodist?” Answer: “The Methodist will say hi to you in the liquor store.”
You need to read up a bit on regional manifestations of denominations yourself, Will. There’s another old joke:
Jews do not recognize Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah.
Protestants do not recognize the Bishop of Rome as the Vicar of Christ.
Methodists do not recognize each other in the liquor store.
Methodism is not everywhere as John Wesley intended, but then modern Southern Baptists would like draw some curious glances from Thomas Helwys.
Thanks for the comments all.
Re: Methodists vs. Baptists. While Baptists get the press, Methodism was a tee-totaling religion in its origins and remains so in many parts of the country, especially those that stay trut to the hard-core Wesleyan variant. And Methodists were very important in pushing Prohibition. Hence, headlines such as this 1921 from the New York Times: “METHODISTS URGE MORE DRY LAW CURBS; Want Congress to Stop Liquor Imports for Five Years and Ban Beer as a Medicine.”
Re: Teen pregnancy rates peaked in 1991 and went into a long decline until 2006 (latest year available), when they ticked up again. It’s not fully clear what prompted the decline (could it have been the example of Bill Clinton? Revulsion at Murphy Brown?) or what explains the increase. Will Bristol Palin or Jamie Lynn Spears kick off a teen pregger boom? That’s as unlikely, I’d say, as the Juno soundtrack reinvigorating folk music.
People’s behavior–even that of kids–is complex and involves a lot of processing on all our parts. Even monkeys don’t follow monkey-see, monkey-do.
“Folks on the left like Reiner and many on the right often assume a connection between what we watch and how we act. That’s just not the way it works.”
Perhaps not in ways that are directly recognizable as emulation. But the pervasive nature of pop culture filth absolutely affects the way all of us — not just teenagers — view the world, and thus how we react to what we perceive. What we perceive is based, partly, on what we watch. And what we read. Like this post.
I can’t say for certain, but I would guess that whatever reduction in violence and sex really exists, some of that can be explained by people recognizing the excess imagery and rebelling against it.
“The Secret Life” is uneven – there is a lot of stuff in it that just doesn’t ring true to an adult, but a lot of stuff that works pretty well for the audience in question. It’s one thing for the slutty valedictorian to snap “I’m not *stupid*, I don’t drink” when she also says nearly identical things about unprotected sex, not getting an abortion when you’re pregnant at 15, not reading the assigned book before you write the paper about it, etc., and when she runs away from home, she does it using money her mother gave her, and she doesn’t speed or break any laws. The girl won’t even ditch school, on the grounds that she doesn’t want to lose points on an essay. It was a bit sillier when everyone else said something similar, including the (totally screwed up, to a Voldemort-esque “is he even responsible for his actions” level) father of the lead character’s baby: he has, by my count, hit on every fertile female member of the cast with whom he’s shared a scene, and he had no problem having unprotected sex with an incoming college freshman (or engaging in any manner of insane, risky behavior.) I’m hoping that they’ll have someone do a drinking arc, both because plenty of kids don’t have sex at all in high school (at the moment it appears only two core characters aren’t sexually active, excluding the one who’s actually pregnant) and because Hampton does a better job with characters who are currently wrecking their lives than with ones who are trying hard not to. Hers is a risk-averse universe. I seem to recall the “oops, I’m hooked on Demon Rum” episodes of 7th Heaven being far less painful than most of the other episodes, at least.
One of the other things to keep in mind about nearly every kind of entertainment aimed at people between 5 and 20 years of age is that the characters are biologically but not emotionally older than the audience: the Magic School Bus characters are supposed to be 10-13 but react to things like a 6-9 year old might; Saved By The Bell and Boy Meets World featured 5th-graders in the bodies of 10th-graders, and while the cast of 90210 might have been in their mid-20s at the time, they were playing 16-year-olds who thought like 13-year-olds. You knew that Daria was meant for older teens and young adults because she acted like a high school senior and not an 8th-grader; you knew that Family Matters was meant for people in junior high school based entirely on the behavior of the three lead teens. Full House kept the audience targeted quite narrowly by having female characters six years apart in age, so that when it became impossible for the oldest girl and her friends to believably act 10-12 years of age (they were 16 or so in the scripts by that point,) there was a younger sister to take the reigns. CS Lewis did the same thing in Narnia, keeping the viewpoint characters no older than 12 or 13, and emotionally closer to the target age of 8 or 9. Even in cases where the story itself was about older-person issues (The Magician’s Nephew, The Silver Chair), our heroes are in their final year before going off to the horrors of junior high school.
So Amy isn’t really 15 (being played by a 17-year-old) – she’s closer to 11 or 12, the age of her core audience. Her little sister is in fact a sassy 10-year-old (instead of tiresomely “goth” 13-year-old); the perky Christian cheerleader is a 13-year-old even if she’s old enough to drive (and is played by a young woman in her twenties.) They should have an irrational interest in idealized sex and an irrational disapproval of “drinking” – that’s age appropriate. Same with thinking that somehow, getting “married” (illegally) will make everything better/easier/magical. And with the incredibly immature “all that matters is how I feel” behavior of nearly every underage character other than the cheerleader and the boyfriend, and the insane “we’ll take care of that problem tomorrow” attitude towards whatever doesn’t interest them right that second, and the verbal diarrhea that they all indulge themselves in.
If you keep this in mind, it makes almost all the problems of the show seem less irritating. Other than a handful of obvious sops to the parents in the room (Ernie Hudson doing anything, adults saying that they realized they didn’t want to have sex with their spouse when said spouse demanded junk food instead of fruit, etc.,) the show is meant for kids in the first two years of middle school. Who are, generally, extremely impressionable but easy to please from a dramatic standpoint.
Note the push for the website http://www.stayteen.org at the end of every episode, if you don’t believe me. You have to convince kids that behaving like a young, childlike teenager is a good thing *before* they hit that stage themselves. The whole idea here is, simply, “be a kid as long as possible (and don’t worry, we know you’ll make mistakes, just don’t make any really big ones till you’re out on your own.)” I believe that Molly Ringwald’s character’s behavior is meant to show us that adults can also make mistakes, but they’re much worse, and much harder to fix, and gosh, aren’t you glad you’re still young and can avoid these evil problems? They may also be going for some additional generational tension – the adults are way too supportive and “let’s fix things for you” towards the children in the first season.
I’m with Jack Bauer. I used to get paid a great deal of money to get people to act upon what I showed them or told them. I was very successful. Your claim that marketers, both deliberate and casual, do not affect you or your kids needs to reconcile itself with mountains of data that says they do.
I think you’re engaging in wishful thinking so you can justify the production and viewing of softcore porn. That’s a shot in the dark, but your complaints about a lack of sex in the show seem to indicate that.
In any case, your assertion that your children are not accessible to marketers tells me that they are indeed accessible and moreso than most since you don’t appear to be warning them that the moral content of what they watch has an insidious effect on them.
I should add — to say that what is broadcast and print affects behavior is *not* to say that regulation is the only remedy. To say popular culture influences society is not to deny libertarianism.
“One of the great disconnects in American life over the past 30 years is that even as popular culture has been getting more graphic in its depictions of sex and violence, sexual behavior and violent crime among youth have been declining. Folks on the left like Reiner and many on the right often assume a connection between what we watch and how we act. That’s just not the way it works. Which is actually cause for relief.”
Three points:
1. Is there any statistical support for the first sentence? I’m curious, because where I come from north of your northern border, national crime rates are down, but youth crime rates have been going up.
2. Is sexual behavior necessarily to be grouped together with crime?(!)
3. The final claim–that TV and movies do not affect us, and that they should not, is complete BS. First, TV, like all forms of media, does affect us; witness advertising, for example. Second, TV is a form of drama, and there have been messages in dramatic performances of plays going all the way back to the Sophocles that the writer mentioned, but appears not to have read or digested. It’s one thing to disagree with the message of a particular story, but to suggest that stories on the screen should have no message at all is to deny the obvious.
“One of the great disconnects in American life over the past 30 years is that even as popular culture has been getting more graphic in its depictions of sex and violence, sexual behavior and violent crime among youth have been declining. Folks on the left like Reiner and many on the right often assume a connection between what we watch and how we act. That’s just not the way it works. Which is actually cause for relief.”
That is just so completely untrue, I don’t even know where to begin. Sex among youth DECLINING??? Where oh where is any proof of that?> there are many many studies showing that STD’s are rising, out of wedlock births are more than 5 times higher than they were 30 years ago, single parent households are up and the age at which teens begin to have sex is down to 13 or 14 for women now. Those are all facts, and that MOST CERTAINLY has a lot todo with the culture, and the culture is expressed through television, movies, and music. The entire point of this site is that Liberals own those mediums now, and as a result of that we have basically a one party rule and people only know one side of any argument.
If you think American Teenager is some boring sh#t, you should read Reason magazine.
But Gillespie’s libertarian support of Mark Foley is touching.
I suppose the underlying question is:
What’re all these presumably moral, perhaps even Christian, individuals doing spending their time watching television — and mediocre television at that?
Is there nothing more enjoyable that could be done with that period of time, if one merely wants enjoyment? Nothing more informative, if one wants to be informed? Nothing more relaxing, if one wants relaxation?
I’m reminded of that bit in C.S.Lewis’ “The Screwtape Letters” in which that sly devil boasted of his ability to tempt humans to do, not sinful things they actually enjoyed, but things they didn’t even enjoy: “…as habit renders the pleasures…at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him.” Screwtape boasts of a soul he tempted saying, on his arrival in hell, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.”
Recommendation: Cancel your cable/dish account. Get Netflix or some other subscription on-demand kind of membership which limits you to only a few hours’ watching per week, which you must intentionally select from the last 50 years’ output instead of passively receiving whatever happens to be on this week.
Result: Less watching, more entertainment while watching, and everything you watch comes from a voluntary prioritization of your time.
My family switched to this method oh, two years ago. We don’t miss a thing worthwhile. And I can’t remember the last time we had to sit through a television commercial. (That right there, when watching an “hour long” program, gives you back 17 minutes of your life.)
Oh, and it’s rather cheaper.
And the only way Meathead’s treacly moral puffery can water-torture your brain is if you voluntarily put “All In The Family” in your Netflix queue. (I don’t know anyone who would…but if they did, at least they’d have Carol O’Connor to make up for it.)
All in all, it’s the civilized, pleasanter way to watch, and only the habitual dullness of personal inertia keeps families from making the switch.
[...] Gliepsie, captures my position on efficacy of televiion to instruct morality in people: In a telling and all-too-common moment of [...]
Correction: (warning – Slumdog movie spoilers)
Latika in Slumdog millionaire sleeps with two guys (the older brother and then the gangster) not because she is attractet to them, but because she does not think she has any other choice in order to survive.
Typo – ‘attracted’
That was a response to Whiskey’s comment deriding males who think they can get a girl with ‘beta’ behavior.
Btw, as soon as I identify an SOB (attractive or otherwise), I kick them to the curb. So ‘alpha’ alone (if a guy is a jerk) does not cut it with me or other women I know.
Being a ‘nice guy’ is no guaranteee either, however. If a woman does not think a guy is attractive. If a guy is not getting the woman he wants, it may be tempting for him to blame his ‘niceness’, but that may not be the culprit.
So sorry, guys, you need to be both not a jerk and attractive to the woman you want – there arent any shortcuts.
Ok, so we rewrite the script. Amy is 14, and rapes an 18 year old soldier with an IQ of 85 to be able to attach his paycheck. She then has the kid, but dumps him in the first four days, at the local hospital. Keeping up the pretense that she’s still parenting to maintain her check, she conspires with here mother to defraud everyone. Maintaining the pretense leads to comedic situations with false IDs, girlfriends covering for her, and her actual lovers jumping out of windows to avoid AFDC investigators. To avoid accusations of prejudice, we make her an upper-class white Mormon Girlscout, whose single mom is the UN ambassador. Her boyfriend is a gang-banger who gives her free drugs, and she schemes as to how to get him to tie her up because it turns her on. Should I get ready to move to Hollywood?
Good point, Mimi.
Alexander Hamilton was reputed to be a bastard, and he did okay anyway.
[...] like Reason’s Nick Gillespie and film producer Maura Flynn riled the social conservatives (what do you think, Dallas Jenkins?) [...]
Di,
“Square Pegs”? My head reels to waves of nostalgia from all, what, 10 episodes. But it was good and DEVO factored into it as well.
Mr. Gillespie’s cheap shots at Molly Ringwald’s appearance exemplify the type of gratuitously mean-spirited writing that caused me to stop reading Reason.com (of which Mr. Gillespie is the editor-in-chief). Reason’s writers and commenters specialized in this sort of juvenile assault. I hope Big Hollywood doesn’t plan to descend to the same level.
miley u rock & d song just ike u os also cool
Have you seen the show recently? I don't think it is appropriate for 13 year old girls. I did, but not any longer. The parents are unbelievable, especially Ben's father. No parent would be so understanding. And since you have one girl and guy having sex all the time (Adrian and Ricky), and everybody else thinking about doing it, why oh why did they have to have the one and only Christian give in to having sex with her boyfriend. Sure, we all know the likely hood of girls waiting until marriage these days, but you know, with a billion people on our planet, I do believe there are some girls that will wait until marriage. But, as usual, TV only shows one side, it is impossible for anyone to believe that some people have will power. In tonight's episode you had Ben's future step mom telling him he should have sex with Amy. After all you can't get married without first knowing whether or not you are good together in bed. And the father didn't seem to have a problem with this. And then there's Grace's Christian mom, who hasn't been grieving long, suddenly hot to trot. I'm just saying Christian's always get a raw deal on TV.
You must be logged in to post a comment.