Last night’s television schedule was the most grueling night of supposed entertainment I’ve ever put myself through.
It began with Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, a show I’ve gotten hooked on even though I strenuously object to their taking an hour of footage and making it into three, one-hour shows every week. If you don’t watch the show, it’s a Queen for a Day update that finds a family dealing with some kind of awful situation and tries to make things better by building them a new house full of fabulous furniture, appliances and custom-decorated rooms.
If the show’s ultimate goal is to show that money can’t buy happiness, yesterday’s episode was the perfect example. The "lucky" family was a father raising three very young children alone. His wife had recently died of leukemia at the age of 28. The show went through all the usual paces: raising scholarship and bill money, rebuilding the house with personal touches from the old house, etc.
The kids enjoyed all the goodies, but the dad and all of his in-laws cried throughout the entire tour of the new house. That’s the problem with Extreme Makeover: Home Edition: no one viewing the show would want to be on it, even to get a beautiful new house, because his or her life would have to be going very badly to even qualify.
After that massive wave of televised sorrow, I watched Deadwood. This week’s episode centered around the funeral of a child who had been trampled to death by a runaway horse. So much for the "good old days"!
I think I’m going to have to limit my video entertainment to light comedies for a while, just to balance things out. They still have shows like that, don’t they?
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