Bad TV is important. How I met your Mother, Family Guy, the OC, the double digit seasons of the Simpsons... it's all wonderful. Sure, people say it's unimaginative and predictable but that's what makes it comforting. Sometimes you just need to turn your brain off and enjoy something for face value because hey, that's what it's there for.
My little sister was really upset when I got home this evening, she's almost done with secondary school and one of the things you learn at that age is that a lot of the people who are supposed to be your friends are just jerks. So there were the usual speeches about how she'll meet cool people in college and that the reason her friends are jerks is because she's smarter than they are and they'll be stuck in this dead end berg forever while she's off enjoying life. But, honestly, that doesn't help. The people giving the speeches get the satisfaction of knowing that one day she'll look back and agree that they were right but in the present all it amounts to is 'hey kid, deal with it'. So what did help? Sitting down with her and watching about six episodes of How I met your Mother back to back. When people are upset they don't reach for the gormet dishes, they go for the chocolates or the crisps... and that's what bad TV is, junk food for the soul.
So why am I defending generic sitcoms all of a sudden? Well I recently started writing again. I like writing but it's something I haven't made time for in a long time for various reasons (if I went into them here then it'd be another five hundred words so I wont). Anyway, I thought I'd take a bash at a screen play, I have some ideas floating around and I kept getting started and then trashing it because I realised, to my horror, that I wasn't writing Garden State or Good Will Hunting or War and Peace the Musical... I was writing fairly generic bad TV. But right now I kind of feel good about that.
My little sister was really upset when I got home this evening, she's almost done with secondary school and one of the things you learn at that age is that a lot of the people who are supposed to be your friends are just jerks. So there were the usual speeches about how she'll meet cool people in college and that the reason her friends are jerks is because she's smarter than they are and they'll be stuck in this dead end berg forever while she's off enjoying life. But, honestly, that doesn't help. The people giving the speeches get the satisfaction of knowing that one day she'll look back and agree that they were right but in the present all it amounts to is 'hey kid, deal with it'. So what did help? Sitting down with her and watching about six episodes of How I met your Mother back to back. When people are upset they don't reach for the gormet dishes, they go for the chocolates or the crisps... and that's what bad TV is, junk food for the soul.
So why am I defending generic sitcoms all of a sudden? Well I recently started writing again. I like writing but it's something I haven't made time for in a long time for various reasons (if I went into them here then it'd be another five hundred words so I wont). Anyway, I thought I'd take a bash at a screen play, I have some ideas floating around and I kept getting started and then trashing it because I realised, to my horror, that I wasn't writing Garden State or Good Will Hunting or War and Peace the Musical... I was writing fairly generic bad TV. But right now I kind of feel good about that.