I rarely watch the American made TV series that are so popular in the U.S. and especially in foreign markets. Years ago I gave up on TV series as they got more and more vulgar and more and more idiotic in content. For me, watching them became a vacuous waste of time Surely, one can make the case for watching them based on escapism. "I just watch so I don't have to think too much after a long day at work." But I wonder if the idiocy on TV is affecting society, making it cruder, ruder and more lewd.
Just the other day I saw an advertisement for one of those shows during the live sports program I was watching on TV. In it a boy who looked to be about five shouted at the sitcom parent that someone "sucked". Five years old.....how could a five year old even know the origin and hidden meaning of, "You suck"? Such language in a real home would not be met with the laughter of the other performers in the series and of the audience. It's just not a good way to portray kids.
It appears to me (though I only have knowledge of these shows through commercial advertisements I see of them) that TV show series producers, incapable of producing intelligent content for their shows, have sold out to ratings and profit to now peddle the most inane and vulgar content on mainstream TV. Kids see this, embrace it as real and act it out everyday away from their TV sets. Poorly educated kids today have swallowed this kind of vulgarity as being normal and TV has become as debased as modern music is today. Just go to a school yard today and listen at recess to the kids.
You will hear an enormous amount of vulgarity used casually, just as in those TV series that peddle it. Art (I use the word loosely when referring to those shows as art) has created the new reality, not been created from it. Kids today know as little about quality TV as they do about quality music, and the lowest level has become the standard of attraction for them.
Where are the parents who let their kids watch the vulgarity and utter stupidity that they consume hour after hour on the tube? I know that I would be too embarrassed to watch some of the shows on TV today if my 16 year old daughter were sitting with me. Does exposure to a constant stream of impolite, and vulgar content on TV affect the attitude of the audience of kids watching? I think so.
But those in control of what appears on TV screens, the producers and commercial sponsors of the shows and networks and studios that make them, have no reason to take the vulgarity out of mainstream TV and put it on special pay channels that kids can not have access to without parental approval.
The coarsening of TV is coarsening our lives. Given the average kids spends more time each day viewing to those TV series than to hearing and seeing his own parents, I'd say the heritage we are leaving kids is not a good one.
Uh......"It sucks"!
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