Sweet Sixteen

Someone or something you definitely could live without.

Early in our marriage, Kimberly and I experienced a lot of "drama" within our group of friends. This guy hated that guy... This girl said something about somebody... That guy was a manipulator... This other guy said some things... There was always something going on, and it was never fun. I often felt like a mediator between people, and honestly, very little of the shenanigans actually had anything to do with myself or Kimberly. It took a couple or three years to sort it all out, but finally, six years into our marriage, we are relatively drama free.

Enter the Real Housewives.

There are many fundamental problems I have about this series of shows, the first of which is the aforementioned "drama". Why, after we worked so hard to eliminate all the petty crap out of our social lives, is this show allowed in our household? If you haven't seen this show ("this show" used as a blanket remark...there are multiple incarnations of the show. There are "real housewives" of New York, New Jersey, Atlanta, Beverly Hills, and some others that don't come to mind right now), let me give you an in-depth analysis, so we're all on the same page:

A bunch of snooty bitches that think they're better than everybody else, also think they're better than each other. As a result, they look at a camera and complain.

The above "drama" statement is only a small part of what I hate about this show. The bigger problem is that of our dumbing-down.

Look, i'm all for mindless television. I have a show or two that fall into that category. Eastbound and Down is one of them. It's a great show, but it takes absolutely no intelligence to watch and be amused by it. Another show that falls into this category is It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (although I believe the writing is better and actually does take some level of intellect). Point is, of those two shows, one hour of my life every week is consumed. Real Housewives of... is on for hours each day. And people watch it.

There's a movie called Idiocracy that came out a few years ago. In this movie, the main character (played by Luke Wilson) freezes himself and wakes up 500 years later to find that Americans have become complete idiots. Everyone, from doctors to lawyers, even to the President of The United States, has a very limited vocabulary, eats nothing but this junk-food-type buttery-substance, drinks energy drinks, and watches the number one show in the country: Ow, My Balls, a show featuring nothing but men getting hit in the crotch with various things. There was no plantlife left because people had forgotten that plants need water (they irrigated with the same energy drink they drank) Trash was piled up as high as buildings because no one had figured a way to eliminate (or even conserve) wastes. And nobody cared...Ow, My Balls was on. Luke Wilson's character was proclaimed a genius, despite his having average to below average intelligence in the time from which he came.

I know it's a stretch, but I worry that this is the direction we're headed. So much of television these days is completely mindless, even to the point of not even being written...they just turn on the cameras and watch these annoying people with tiny world-views spend money lavishly and complain about their "friends". A bunch of snooty bitches griping about each other does not constitute good tv. Yet for some reason, people are sucked in. And it bothers me.