Jill_Valentine
Sacred and Profane
Too often, time is wasted trying to be rationally, constructively critical of things. No more. I'm sure many of you have noticed, even remarked upon the general awfulness of Television of late, but have you done anything about it? Behold, the Roll of Shame - the very worst television today. Television that lacks even a single redeeming feature. Television so bad you can't help but watch, even as you hear your desperate brain cry out for mercy. And worse - television so bad it can't even manage that - it's so bad it's beyond funny. "Why don't you just watch something else?" some people may ask. Those people miss the point. Awful television is everybody's problem.
Hopefully, we'll gather it all together here, and then some helpful person with an anti-existance cannon can save us all from every entry. Reality TV shows, but not talk shows, are disqualified, due to the inherent horror within.
Apologies for the British TV bias, I've just temporarily forgotten which terrible television programme drove me to this.
Casualty.
Subtle enough for five year olds, special effects to match! Watching an episode of Casualty is a sensation a little watching a high-school morality play while somebody stomps and stomps and stomps and stomps on your face, with special boots that say "DRUGS HURT YOUR UNBORN CHILD!" or "ACTUALLY, THE BIG SHADEY THUG IS GETTING BEATEN UP BY HIS WIFE! BET YOU DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING!" For a long time, Casualty was watchable because it was fairly unique. Then ER came along, and was (and still is) actually good. And Casualty's supporters may try and say that's because ER has a bigger budget - but don't be fooled. No, the reason ER is good is because... well, it's actually good. Well acted, well written. Casualty is neither of these things. It's somehow got negative quantities of both. It's smug, patronising, and somehow manages to be aggressively annoying and horrifyingly bland all at once. It's the kind of television your school principal would refer to in an attempt to prove how cool he still is.
Hollyoaks.
I just don't understand why this is still being made. It's my firm belief that Hollyoaks coasts along on on an audience entirely made up of secondary school students desperate to delay doing their homework, willing to watch anything television can hurl at them. Can there be anybody, anybody at all, who watches it for the acting/ "Plots"/ direction? Even Brookside, for all it's faults, was a pioneer in it's field. Decades on, even people who've never seen Brookside understand a reference to Trevor Jordache. Well I've sat through hours worth of Hollyoaks to avoid homework, and the only characters I can think of are Oh-was-he-in-2.4 Children-or-something? and Scottish-Guy-who-works-in-a-pub-or-whatever. And the plots are either so bad I've blocked them out, or so non-existant that I can't recall a single one. I just hear the Hollyoaks theme tune and a sense of angry despair at the world churns up in my gut. In fact, just knowing it's on at the time sullies my enjoyment of other shows. Damn you Hollyoaks. Damn you to hell.
Trisha
I'm a pacifist by nature. I can't stand cruelty in any circumstances. I support Amnesty, I protest against human rights violations, and I tend to be wildly unpopular in pubs because I'm one of those annoying wishy washy lefties. However, I would have no problem at all with locking the exits of the Trisha studio and burning it down with everybody inside. Indeed, I sometimes fantasise about developing Carrie-like superpowers, and actively exterminating everyone involved. I could make a rational arguement for this - in the long term, it would cleanse the human genepool in all sorts of lovely ways, for example - but really, and truly, I just want to hurt them all and hear them scream. I want them to beg me for mercy, mercy I won't give them, because they've stained my life in a way nobody can ever make right. Trisha is televisually broadcasted excrement. Like Jerry Springer without the cartoony fun, or fiercely witty presenter, Trisha represents the very worst our species has to offer. Forget the Taliban, forget Abu Graib or WWII or slavery. When judgement day comes, Homo Sapiens will have to answer this - Why did we stand idly by and let Trisha happen? If you've never seen it, every installment is called something like "I'm pregnant with eight children for different fathers and I'm a man, and I'm a heroin addict, and I'm having an affair" Then three catastrophically ugly people are wheeled out, each apparently having been given a different stupid sentence each. Each person then bellows that sentence until it's time for another set of guests, no doubt even uglier than the last, bellow their allocated phrase. Meanwhile, the intensely punchable Trisha floats around the audience, like a kid waiting his turn to poke a jellyfish. Even the revelation that at least some of the guests were plants wasn't enough to dull the pure, raw misery of Trisha.
7th Heaven
God gave us the word "NYAAARGH!" especially for occasions like this. How can a show so calculatingly boring be so infuriating? At first I thought... well, fair enough. It's a show catering to a certain demand, and that's okay. But then I thought... no, hang on. It's a show cynically marketed to a certain audience, masquerading as something more. It's got all the moral fibre of a Happy Meal. I can't decide what depresses me more: that the people who supported it don't see that, or that it outlived Joan of Arcadia by eight seasons. Run Jessica Biel run! All the way to soft porn!
Hopefully, we'll gather it all together here, and then some helpful person with an anti-existance cannon can save us all from every entry. Reality TV shows, but not talk shows, are disqualified, due to the inherent horror within.
Apologies for the British TV bias, I've just temporarily forgotten which terrible television programme drove me to this.
Casualty.
Subtle enough for five year olds, special effects to match! Watching an episode of Casualty is a sensation a little watching a high-school morality play while somebody stomps and stomps and stomps and stomps on your face, with special boots that say "DRUGS HURT YOUR UNBORN CHILD!" or "ACTUALLY, THE BIG SHADEY THUG IS GETTING BEATEN UP BY HIS WIFE! BET YOU DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING!" For a long time, Casualty was watchable because it was fairly unique. Then ER came along, and was (and still is) actually good. And Casualty's supporters may try and say that's because ER has a bigger budget - but don't be fooled. No, the reason ER is good is because... well, it's actually good. Well acted, well written. Casualty is neither of these things. It's somehow got negative quantities of both. It's smug, patronising, and somehow manages to be aggressively annoying and horrifyingly bland all at once. It's the kind of television your school principal would refer to in an attempt to prove how cool he still is.
Hollyoaks.
I just don't understand why this is still being made. It's my firm belief that Hollyoaks coasts along on on an audience entirely made up of secondary school students desperate to delay doing their homework, willing to watch anything television can hurl at them. Can there be anybody, anybody at all, who watches it for the acting/ "Plots"/ direction? Even Brookside, for all it's faults, was a pioneer in it's field. Decades on, even people who've never seen Brookside understand a reference to Trevor Jordache. Well I've sat through hours worth of Hollyoaks to avoid homework, and the only characters I can think of are Oh-was-he-in-2.4 Children-or-something? and Scottish-Guy-who-works-in-a-pub-or-whatever. And the plots are either so bad I've blocked them out, or so non-existant that I can't recall a single one. I just hear the Hollyoaks theme tune and a sense of angry despair at the world churns up in my gut. In fact, just knowing it's on at the time sullies my enjoyment of other shows. Damn you Hollyoaks. Damn you to hell.
Trisha
I'm a pacifist by nature. I can't stand cruelty in any circumstances. I support Amnesty, I protest against human rights violations, and I tend to be wildly unpopular in pubs because I'm one of those annoying wishy washy lefties. However, I would have no problem at all with locking the exits of the Trisha studio and burning it down with everybody inside. Indeed, I sometimes fantasise about developing Carrie-like superpowers, and actively exterminating everyone involved. I could make a rational arguement for this - in the long term, it would cleanse the human genepool in all sorts of lovely ways, for example - but really, and truly, I just want to hurt them all and hear them scream. I want them to beg me for mercy, mercy I won't give them, because they've stained my life in a way nobody can ever make right. Trisha is televisually broadcasted excrement. Like Jerry Springer without the cartoony fun, or fiercely witty presenter, Trisha represents the very worst our species has to offer. Forget the Taliban, forget Abu Graib or WWII or slavery. When judgement day comes, Homo Sapiens will have to answer this - Why did we stand idly by and let Trisha happen? If you've never seen it, every installment is called something like "I'm pregnant with eight children for different fathers and I'm a man, and I'm a heroin addict, and I'm having an affair" Then three catastrophically ugly people are wheeled out, each apparently having been given a different stupid sentence each. Each person then bellows that sentence until it's time for another set of guests, no doubt even uglier than the last, bellow their allocated phrase. Meanwhile, the intensely punchable Trisha floats around the audience, like a kid waiting his turn to poke a jellyfish. Even the revelation that at least some of the guests were plants wasn't enough to dull the pure, raw misery of Trisha.
7th Heaven
God gave us the word "NYAAARGH!" especially for occasions like this. How can a show so calculatingly boring be so infuriating? At first I thought... well, fair enough. It's a show catering to a certain demand, and that's okay. But then I thought... no, hang on. It's a show cynically marketed to a certain audience, masquerading as something more. It's got all the moral fibre of a Happy Meal. I can't decide what depresses me more: that the people who supported it don't see that, or that it outlived Joan of Arcadia by eight seasons. Run Jessica Biel run! All the way to soft porn!
P
polexia
so with you jill, specialy with the trisha and 7th heaven LOL
