Hubby has a ritual when it comes to viewing the previews for most TV shows these days.
Dre slowly and dramatically, Roman-emperor style, extends his right arm and then, in a sudden flourish, offers the thumbs-down signal.
I either nod in agreement or give my own thumbs-down signal.
As I've discussed here before, I realize we have moved beyond the 18-to-49 demographic that TV show makers and TV programmers go after with gusto.
I trash the reality shows a lot, but reality shows aren't the only things that usually cause us to exclaim, "We're paying all this money and there's still nothing on TV," and then go hightailing it back to HGTV, MeTV or the National Geographic Channel.
It seems that just about every TV show that comes down the pike is glorifying dysfunctionality, with healthy doses of supernatural horror. A few shows we've tried to watch but, for us, jumped the shark by the second or third episode.
Gritty, edgy protagonists are certainly not new. There has always been the notion of the antihero in his realistic, flawed glory. And granted, the family sitcoms and cut-and-dried police and Western shows we grew up with would be fish out of water on today's television lineups. (And we have our own guilty pleasures when it comes to TV watching.)
Unfortunately, society has become so desensitized to real-life dysfunctionality -- not to mention the feature-film depictions of it -- that TV-show meisters now routinely dish out as much envelope-pushing, envelope-shoving, beat-the-heck-out-of-that-envelope materials as they believe viewers will take.
We over-50 types knew in our heart of hearts that it would come to this. But there was that naive little corner of said hearts that hoped the average nighttime network/cable TV-show lineup would still contain more than one or two shows that wouldn't have us scrambling to hide the dog's eyes.
The TV-remote "on" button has, in recent years, been a portal to a world populated by:
• Outlaw biker gangs.
• Sherlock Holmes as a modern-day recovering druggie.
• Teachers turned meth dealers.
• Drug-addicted nurses.
• Adult-fantasy series that draw controversy over incidences of rape, gelding and other acts of violence.
• Zombies. Nuttin' but zombies.
• Characters whose checkered personal lives need not be rubbed in viewers' faces in the first place because the official stuff going on is enough entertainment. Case in point: Amoral law professors played by actresses we admired.
• Vampires and werewolves and witches and monsters ... oh my.
• Scandal-quashers who wallow in their personal scandals.
• Women who spent gobs of time and money to earn juris doctorates only to become sex workers.
• The devil! That's not an oath. I mean, the Prince of Darkness himself getting the heck out of hell and relocating to Los Angeles, where he ends up running a nightclub and helping the police catch bad guys. (It can be argued that this show is trying to take dysfunctional and make it functional.)
• In general: Sex! Sex! And more sex! You think that would be one tired, single-trick pony.
I realize why, according to a survey the paper did a few years back on readers' TV channel likes and dislikes, the History Channel (which could stand to show Ancient Aliens a few thousand fewer times) came in as a favorite among our largely over-40 readers.
If we DTVs (dysfunctional-TV protesters) ran the world, I'm not saying we'd bring the Beaver or the Bradys or the Cosbys back. But we'd flip the script. We'd fill the TV schedules with our preferred mild but still interesting fare and take the shows we find cringe-worthy and distill them down to a few key series that would run late on weekend nights, with the infomercials:
• Sons of Anarchy Breaking Bad While Walking Dead and Writing Their Vampire Diaries. Meth-selling teachers-turned-motorcycle-riding- vampire zombies.
• Lucifer's Elementary Game of Scandals. His Dishonor comes to the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros as a formerly drug-addicted detective type who also prevents scandals.
• How To Get Away With The Girlfriend Experience. Lawyer moonlights as a high-dollar lady of the evening who rounds up her fellow "ladies" to solve murders.
Heck, we'll even be generous enough to throw in Keeping Up With The American Idol Bachelor Survivor of the Real World.
Flipping through those emails:
hwilliams@arkansasonline.com
Style on 05/29/2016