Descent
A television show called “I Survived a Japanese Game Show” uses human degradation as fodder for humor. In the episode I watched, two American women vying for a cash prize, ran, leaped and stuck themselves on a wall, while a jeering, taunting Japanese audience applauded and laughed.
I spoke to a writer friend of mine about what I had seen, and he promptly sent me five minutes of the show in which six men stood shoulder to shoulder on a platform and prepared to answer questions proffered by an almost hysterical master of ceremonies. I cannot tell you what the questions were, because I do not speak Japanese, but every contestant, in terror, held onto his crotch with both hands, and I can well understand their discomfort, because as each idiot failed to answer his question correctly, a spring mechanism was released and the man was struck in the testicles and left writhing on the floor in obvious pain, while the audience went wild.
Hard to believe?
I tell you I have the footage.
While I understand that the level of gross ugliness displayed here is only a momentary plateau, before the descent to an even yet unimagined wretchedness, my mind boggles at what people will find funny.
What have we come to?
There seems to be a universal suspension of taste accompanying a loss of pride on TV shows all over our screens for everyone to view. Think of the Denise Richards show-Charlie Sheen’s ex-wife. Here is this woman involved for our edification in vacuous conversation about inane things she is doing with her life, and attracting enough audience to keep her on the air. It’s the sort of show that even the most salacious producers wouldn’t have conceived of, much less find anyone willing to front it, only a short time ago.
And there is an audience for it.
All right, you see it once to see if it could really be true that such programming exists. But this “series” persists.
All you have to do is watch “America’s Got Talent” to know what people think talent. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of souls, travel from different parts of the country to audition their heretofore unexposed, extremely amateur selves and the idiosyncratic things they do, for whatever pleasure they gain from being derided and laughed at by the show’s often sneering critics. All the while the rudest audience I have ever heard, that does not hide its derision but stamps and claps and hoots these people from the very beginning of their performance, creates a total bedlam worthy of [Marquis] de Sade’s madhouse. Its all a misguided freak show, amateurishly shot and conceived. There is an audience for this mayhem, who we can only imagine is mesmerized, well, at least intrigued enough to continue to watch the general idiocy before them.
These unscripted shows are a small part of a proliferation of such trash, taking over major viewing time this last year and beyond. And, of course, it is terribly clear that if you do not need writing, you do not need staffs to accommodate script development and production. And if you do not need any of that production, you do not have to pay for it.
What a money machine! Soon enough, no money at all will flow out to buy minds. And without minds, intelligence, creativity and imagination die. The industry is killing the business of writing television for a living. It already refuses to permit a creator to own his own creation. If they continue to take written plots from waiting writers, there will no longer possibly be a writer waiting for an assignment, because writers will not hang around to starve. It’s always been a difficult enough business. It is now becoming almost impossible to find work.
Writers who have been around a while, and have never done anything else, may perhaps hang around and tear their surviving hair, trying to find some solution. But what of the kids? And what of the audience?
The bar is now set so low that it is embarrassing to imagine the level of intelligence, forget sophistication, for which you are writing. Education in our country is in disrepair, underfinanced and greatly ignored by kids growing up. Television thus becomes a major exposure-often the only exposure-to our audience.
I’ve pointed out what they are being exposed to.
Oh my god!