evil, tuesdays at nine, seven central

By Todd Stadler · Sunday, January 20, 2002 6:50pm

Have you ever found yourself asking why American television shows are so stupid? The short answer is that it's because Americans get what they deserve.

I arrived at this conclusion not through my usual habit of observing various media sources and getting frustrated at how dumb people can be (present company excluded). No, this time my lesson was learned through direct observation of Americans.

Not just your average Americans, mind you, but the kind of American who responds to the following overly-capitalized seduction, which was e-mailed to me by my friend Craig:

DEAR TELEVIEWER,
YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED TO PARTICIPATE IN A SURVEY WHOSE FINDINGS WILL DIRECTLY INFLUENCE WHAT YOU YOU SEE ON TELEVISION IN THE FUTURE. ... YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED TO HELP REPRESENT THE TELEVISION VIEWING PREFERENCES OF THE ENTIRE COUNTRY. WE ARE TELEVISION PREVIEW, A NATIONWIDE TELEVISION RESEARCH SERVICE, AND WE NEED YOUR HELP!
[the invitation then goes on to lavish praise on the experience they provide before telling you that, if you want to participate, you should show up at the Embassy Suites downtown to be part of a television audience survey]

And what kind of person responds to such a siren call? Well, I will say that Beeman and I were probably the only young adults who walked to this history-making event.

Which is to say that there were lots of old people. And, um, overweight people. In fact, I don't think I had ever understood so viscerally the statistic that twenty-seven percent of Americans are obese until I saw my fellow "televiewers".

This, of course, shocked me, as you almost never see old or fat people on television shows.

Yet I was not deterred. I wanted to change the history of television!

But first I had to fill out a survey. In it, I was asked some basic demographic questions, along with a rather extensive list of consumer product queries: which of the following shampoos do I like, which of the following toothpastes do I like, and so on.

While such questions are clearly of a highly personal nature, I knew I had to answer them to be able to watch this ground-breaking television programming promised me, so I wrote and circled and circled some more.

I can't say I provided them with highly accurate data. It's not so much that I lied as I simply can't say that I truly prefer one brand of iron supplements or arthritis cream over the other.

With the survey over, it was time to kick back and enjoy the show. Our grating emcee introduced the first segment by reading the following stultifying text, or something like it, off a sheet of paper: "Have you ever thought you lived a past life? Did you wonder how that would affect your love life?"

I'm fairly certain I have wondered nothing of the sort, but I watched Soulmates, the aforementioned melodrama, anyhow.

And let me say right now that it was awful.

Not just CBS-poor. No, I think I can legitimately say that it was unfit for broadcast television - any channel, any hour. Yes, even UPN at four in the morning. Every infomercial I've ever watched had more production value, and even a better plot.

Here's a short synopsis of Soulmates: Hypnotherapist attempts to cure man of smoking. She falls in love with him and violates basic rules of patient/client conduct in the first five minutes. He turns out to have an air of mystery about him. Or maybe it's just the ham-fisted soundtrack cues.

She follows him to his lair of mystery, whereupon she just happens to break into some sort of highly technological bunker. Although the soundtrack (and the dialogue, which I've already begun ignoring in large part) does not ever explain what the business of this bunker is, the casting director gives us a clue. See, there's lots of Asians inside, which are crappy script writer shorthand for futuristic technology and devious underhandedness.

In the meantime, her friend, whose main role appears to be that of "cute", announces that, while she is having an affair with some prominent hypnotherapist, she will not be sharing a vacation with him as she had hoped. Instead, she offers the tickets and reservations to our protagonist hypnotherapist. Who, I should mention, also appears to have a main characterization of "something cute" with the added twist of "braless".

Although most of the plot to this point had been rather poorly explained, I was nevertheless even more confused when it turned out that our protagonist's vacation was, in fact, not a vacation at all, but a trip to a Hawaiian hypnotherapist convention. Where everyone we had seen earlier in the show just happened to be.

I guess I should mention that there were a number of past-life vignettes interspersed with all this poorly-produced present day hoo-hah. Apparently, our protagonist, her loverboy of mystery, and a few other folks knew each other back in World War II. For those who majored in arithmetic, that means they all died around the age of 60. Perhaps it was the constant suspense in their lives that killed them.

Anyhow, a typical scene from this past life involved the proto-loverboy flirting with the proto-hypnotherapist before he shipped off to active duty:

he: Don't I at least get a lucky kiss goodbye?
she: Oh, don't worry, Pearl Harbor isn't so dangerous.
he: But what if the Japanese attack tomorrow and I die?
she: Not even General Tojo would attack an American airbase on a Sunday morning!
me: {sound of hand slapping forehead repeatedly}

And how did all of this hair-raising intrigue resolve itself? What do you mean you don't know what intrigue there is to resolve - I just told you the plot! Ah well, it doesn't matter, because I don't know how it all got resolved.

See, the show just kind of ended. About thirty minutes too late. It was arguably the worst thing I ever sat through. I can say this only because in any other situation, I would have switched channels within seconds.

The second show we watched was not nearly as bad, or so it seemed. Keep in mind that after that Soulmates drivel, a test pattern would have done fairly well.

The second show was called City (short, to the point), and it starred everyone's favorite star, Valerie Harper.

By "everyone", I mean everyone over forty. I later had to explain to most of my young friends who she is. Or was - I hadn't seen anything she'd done since the seventies until I saw this pilot.

It was introduced to us as a sitcom filmed a few years ago and now being "reshopped" (or some other such made-up word) for today's market.

What that really means is that City looked dated. The hair and clothes all seemed off. The random rap group in one scene had Kid 'n' Play hair. And somebody referred to Teddy Ruxpin. Very late eighties.

Mind you, that would all be fine if the show were called, say, That Late 80's Show. You can just imagine the laughs in that case.

But in this case, I felt I was watching the television equivalent of a reheated store-bought burrito.

Suffice to say that I actually grinned during the thirty minutes of sitcom plodding, and at the end, Valerie Harper's character got the feeling that things just might work out in this crazy world.

However, any feelings of warm sitcom closure were brought to a halt as they brought up the lights and asked us to fill out another consumer products survey.

Not only was I asked to answer more of the same questions as before - in some cases, I was asked the exact same question as before. For instance, in both products surveys, they asked me what kind of shampoo I preferred.

Sure, the hair on your neck might not be standing on end yet, but consider this: the two shows we had just seen had commercials interspersed throughout them. We were told that this was to make our viewing as much like a normal hour of television as possible.

And yet, the only product types that appeared on both the before and after survey were those for which we had seen a commercial.

It occurred to me that the crappy television I had just spent an hour watching was not the point of this exercise at all. It seemed increasingly possible that the shows were a ploy to get us to ignore the questions about commercials and commercial products.

Or maybe I came to that conclusion because my brain simply could not fathom the drivel it had been forced to consume actually being made into a television series. And I've even seen Supermarket Sweep on several occasions.

But the thing that really frightened me, the thing that made me question everything I hold dear, the thing that made me blather until this very paragraph, was when the emcee suggested we take a poll of the audience to see what they thought of the shows, after everyone had filled out their opinion forms.

I assumed that some people would like City, as it was generally harmless. I would never watch it all the way through, personally, but I'm a bit of an anti-TV crank. Nevertheless, almost every hand went up when the emcee asked who liked City. This disappointed me, but I can accept that Americans like their generic sitcoms. Anything for a chuckle.

But when he asked the same question of Soulmates, I was sure no one would raise their hand. That show was clearly crap. It wasn't even filmed particularly well. And yet a good ten percent of our viewing audience said they would watch Soulmates again. This is as strong a proof as ever there was for the iniquity of human nature.

I weep for America.