“Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.” - John Berryman, from the Dream Songs
I am in my fifty-fourth year, and today is the first day of my fifty-fourth autumn. It’s a nice time of year in New England; today is warm, but there’s a little mist in the air, the trees are just beginning to turn, and there’s a very slight coolness that tells you that it’s not summer anymore.
It’s lovely, but the thrill is gone. I’ve seen it before. It’s lost its excitement.
It’s also Fall Preview Week, or whatever passes for Fall Preview Week, on television. (ABC is calling it “Red Carpet Premiere Week.” Ooh, ritzy!) When I was a kid, I devoured the telephone-book-sized TV Guide that came around this time of year and sat mesmerized in front of the set, watching all of the new shows. I managed to see pretty much everything, too. I’m not sure how I did it. And I was thrilled by everything I saw.
TV’s been good over the years at satirizing itself. I remember the Simpsons watching the premiere of a new show called "Admiral Baby", which turned out to be exactly what the title promised: a baby becomes an admiral, for no apparent reason. And I have a very fond memory of Peg Bundy on "Married With Children" excitedly reading the fall-preview TV Guide aloud; I especially remember "We Are Fami-Lee" (a Chinese family comes to America – Peg got a good chortle out of that, once she got the joke in the title), and "Nun of This" (Karen Valentine as “a nun with a gun.”)
We get the joke too. Fall Preview Spectacular Season is supposed to be over the top, and fun, and exciting.
This year, for me, not so much.
I didn’t watch "Dancing With The Stars" the other night, but I saw lots of clips of Hasselhoff galumphing around the stage. (It’s not that he can’t dance; it’s more that he dances the way I dance.) And I did settle back with Partner last night to watch the season premieres of two of my favorite shows, "Modern Family" and "Cougar Town." (When we watch together, generally we lie supine on the bed, side by side, the way people lie in a mud bath at a day spa, and let the TV wash over us.)
The shows were . . . okay. Nice to see Mitchell kiss Cam, if only on the top of the head. Nice to see the characters deepen a bit; nice to see a family depicted realistically (let’s face it, we’re all a lot crazier with our family and behind closed doors than we are in public). And "Cougar Town" was bouncy and fun in its Scrubsian way, but it got a little sentimental a couple of times, and maybe it’s too early in the season to get all touchy-feely. (I couldn’t help but notice that they introduced not one but two new parlor games last night – Movie Mashup and Hug Battle; they’re obviously capitalizing on the “success” of Penny Can. Movie Mashup is a cutesy little movie-trivia game; Hug Battle, on the other hand, is a bizarre aggression/intimacy thing which needs to be seen to be believed.)
(Oh, and I saw the last ten minutes of a new sitcom atrocity called “Better With You.” Chillingly, monotonously ordinary. The writing was pure Disney Channel, the acting was uninspired, and the show did not generally advance Western Civilization. I say no more.)
I wasn’t thrilled with the new shows. I checked around the office to see if people were having any transformative TV experiences so far this week, and most people registered indifference; a few of the younger ones were kind of excited about a few new shows – "Glee" was mentioned - but nothing amazing. (To be fair, most of my office acquaintances are around my own age. “Young,” to me, is anyone born after the fall of Saigon.)
I had this sudden flash of being a Jane Austen character, sitting in the parlor of a country house and discussing the London Season. Except I’m not Miss Bennett anymore. I’m more like Lady Catherine de Burgh, sitting in a high-backed chair at the side of the room, disapproving of everything, recollecting how much more decorous everything was in the Old Days.
Everything passes. I saw an article the other day about TV Guide; the entire company was sold a few years ago for less than the price of a single issue.
How’s that for change?
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