September 2000 Archives

The tribe has spoken. Oliver Platt -- we salute you.

There are only two problems with this scenario. First off, TV critics, while lovely people on the whole, are usually full of hot gas. And most would gladly turn a Styx album into a metaphor if they thought it would eat up enough column inches to get the copy editor off their ass ("In many ways, NBC's Thursday night lineup is a lot like side one of 'Kilroy Was Here'...").

The second problem? The new fall season is almost nothing like Survivor. There're no tribal councils, no Jeff Probst, no gratuitous rat-eating. Though NBC has given Steven Weber his own show, and you never know what'll happen when sweeps rolls around.

No, to put the new network shows in their proper perspective, we have to turn to that other CBS reality show -- that mother lode of utter indifference, Big Brother.

Like Big Brother, the new shows will arrive with a lot of hype and a ton of fanfare. Like Big Brother, they'll try to capture some of the buzz surrounding their predecessors. Like Big Brother, most of the new shows will turn out to be hastily assembled, poorly produced and resoundingly amateurish.

And like Big Brother, the vast majority of the new shows that debut in the next few weeks will be well nigh unwatchable.

The trick, then, is to figure out which of the 30 new shows are inoffensive and unassuming enough to remain unmolested in our Big Brother-like compound and which will be the first to be beaten with orange-filled socks by angry housemates once the lights are doused.

To do that, it takes hours upon hours of study, of introspection, of asking the tough questions. Questions like:

• Will Boston Public adhere to the time-honored David E. Kelley tradition of sucking wind by season two, or will it follow the time-saving lead of Snoops and blow chunks from the get-go?
• Is there any discernable difference between The Trouble With Normal and Normal, Ohio, other than the fact that one features John Goodman as a gay father and the other, presumably, does not?
• Which show is America clamoring to see -- Craig T. Nelson as a police commissioner who solves crimes in The District, Marg Helenberger as a forensic scientist who solves crimes in C.S.I, or Oliver Platt as a newspaper columnist who solves crimes in Deadline? Or Geena Davis as a corporate executive who commits crimes against humanity on The Geena Davis Show?
• Since both shows air at exactly the same time, just how much darker is James Cameron's new Dark Angel than Joss Whedon's returning Angel? And will I need to don protective eyewear?
• If Bette Midler plays herself on a TV show, and nobody watches, does she cease to exist? And is it wrong to believe that's reason enough not to tune in?
• Most important, which one of these dogs gets put down first?

I've spent the better part of a week contemplating these questions. And I believe the answers are: Yes; I'm not sure; what was the fourth one again?; much darker, I guess; no; oh God, is it ever; and beats the hell out of me.

And I supposedly do this kind of thing for a living. What hope can you people expect to have?

That's why, when handicapping the new shows for Dead Pool purposes, we've brought back the Cliché-O-Meter -- the measuring stick that proves not only isn't there anything original on TV, the Web sites that write about TV are starting to copy themselves, too.

To make it even easier to heap scorn and derision upon the creative efforts of others, we've devised a new method for tracking pabulum -- our patented Big Brother Scale. Using complex mathematical formulas, we're able to boil down each of the new shows to their essential characteristics, matching them to the tedious Big Brother cast member who best represents those unfortunate traits. For those of you unfamiliar with the cast of Big Brother -- and I'm just going to assume that's everyone in the room -- the Big Brother Scale breaks down like this, from least offensive to most awful:

Cassandra	Too dignified and banal to survive	Curtis	Bland and unremarkable
Jordan	Completely forgettable	Will Mega	Creepy and unsettling
Eddie	Foul-mouthed and resentful	Josh	Utterly clueless
Brittany	Overwrought and under-whelming	Jamie	Dense and delusional
George	Painfully unfunny	Karen	Repeated viewings may actually result in lasting trauma

And if that doesn't clear things up for you, I can always prattle on about the similarities between the new fall season and Styx's "Paradise Theater."

No? Well, happy hunting then.

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DISCLAIMER

We stick in the disclaimer here about the Dead Pool every year, with the misguided optimism that people actually will read articles from start to finish before they send angry letters to smart-alecky Web sites. And every year, we learn again that the Internet has given people with poor reading comprehension skills a larger forum in which to make spectacles of themselves.

But hope -- and the disclaimers that come with them -- springs eternal. And so we'll repeat it once more if, for no other reason, than to hear the melodious strains of our own voices: None of us Vidiots have actually seen the shows we are mercilessly deriding. We are guessing as to which ones will get cancelled first based upon conjecture and carefully developed hypotheses. If we happen to say something particularly mean-spirited about your favorite actor or the show that employs you and you feel you have to write and give us what for, please don't e-mail us. Because we'll only make fun of you and all you hold dear with extra zeal.

And that goes double for you irascible Styx fans.

The offensive object is a commercial featuring Suzy Favor Hamilton, arguably one of America's more talented distance runners in the last ten years. Instead of featuring her moonlighting as a disc jockey or sweaty role model spouting aphorisms between laps, Ms. Hamilton is shown preparing to take a bath. The setup immediately evokes countless Friday the Thirteenth movies -- and a minute later, Hamilton spots a masked would-be killer in the mirror.

After a stereotypical shriek, stumble and false start, Hamilton's off and running. The psycho killer guy tries to give chase, and drops, exhausted. Cue the end of the commercial, and a caption that reads "Sport. You'll live longer."

This spot is great: chick athletes are being treated as actual jocks, with handy physical skills. The cherry on the sundae is the horror-movie conceit: the girl in peril turns out to be better equipped for survival than Jason the would-be chainsaw killer. In a summer where you couldn't avoid the Carmen-Electra-loses-her-clothes promotions for Scary Movie, this Nike spot was a funny antidote.

More importantly, it showed sports as a lot more relevant to women's lives than any fuzzy spot where girls blather on about half-filled stadiums or disport in the deep end for Visa. Naturally, people have chosen to ignore this aspect of the commercial and fixate on the stereotypes in the commercial, apparently missing the joke entirely. One woman fumed to The New York Times that the commercial was "truly disgusting and misogynistic," thus demonstrating to the rest of the world that not only does she not watch any of the commercials airing during a WWF broadcast or on any of the Viacom cable properties, she was buying into a stereotypical set of attitudes about what's acceptable for men and women on television.

You see, Nike's got a commercial out where a skateboarder has to defend himself against a gladiator. Nobody's called it disgusting or anti-male. Apparently, commercials depicting men successfully defending themselves against physical harm are okay, whereas commercials showing women doing so are disgusting. Double-standard much?

A lot of self-identified feminists are wary of humor, and understandably so: making someone the object of a joke is the best way to dehumanize them or insult them without being called on it. But there's an enormous difference between humor that's meant to enforce the status quo and humor that's meant to challenge it. The Nike commercial was a fine example of the latter.

The best punch line associated with the commercial may well be where it airs. NBC -- which has tried hard to cultivate a rep as a chick magnet network with retrogressive tripe like Providence -- won't air the spot anymore. Yet ESPN, often touted by media planners as a "guy-oriented" channel, has no problems showing a commercial featuring a butt-whooping female athlete.

Now that's funny.

For those of you who, like me, were infants during the infamous Black September massacre of the 1972 Munich Olympics, here's the lowdown: a group of Palestinian terrorists took a group of Israeli athletes hostage. Over the next twenty hours, the athletes were killed, quite brutally, due to a series of stupid blunders. Most of these blunders are dissected, in unsparing detail, in the documentary One Day in September, now showing on HBO.

It's riveting viewing. After briefly touching on the protests the IOC set off when it refused to suspend the Games during the hostage crisis, the screen explodes into the track finals, set to Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" and intercut with images of the masked terrorists standing guard with their guns. An athlete collapses in fatigue on the grass and you can't help but think of the two athletes laying dead in the compound, blocks away. It's not exactly inspiring: the medalists are grinning, and I was torn between admiring their focus and wondering how they could be so damned happy during a terrorist standoff.

Nobody associated with the Olympics comes out smelling like a rose: not the athletes who sunned themselves by a pool immediately below the scene of the crime; not the IOC, which initially refused to suspend the games in recognition of the athletes' danger; not the Americans -- who, as it turns out, were the ones who let the terrorists into the building when they were sneaking in after a night of drunken debauchery; not the Germans, who stupidly forgot that every move they made was being broadcast on international television, and thus let their quarry watch them try to stage a sneak attack on national television; not the people who clogged the road to the airport, gawking at the action and blocking the authorities who could have salvaged the final, fiery debacle on a German runway. Oh, and the Germans take it on the chin again when it's revealed that a few weeks later, they rigged a hijacking that permitted them to hand over the terrorists without much more short-term embarassment.

In a sense, the hostage siege was the beginning and the end of bona fide reality television: journalists stayed on the scene and fed coverage to the rest of the world. This was before the Internet, before CNN, and the focus of the networks simultaneously imparted the seriousness of the siege and lent it credibility on the global scale the terrorists desired. On the one hand, people were bound by the sense that the entire world was watching; on the other, the audience legitimized the notion that there was no such thing as bad television coverage. To quote ABC Sports' Jim McKay, "something has to happen."

It did. And it was ugly.

The sheer amount of blood in the hostage quarters is appalling; the screen lingers on the red walls and floors of the room where the first killings took place, coming to rest on a foul tangle of bloody restraints.

Nearly all of the images are appalling: the athletes exulting in winning races while other, equally deserving athletes lay bound and dying; the old German men giving interviews, looking equally defensive and defeated thanks to 28 years' hindsight; the crowd of reporters eagerly awaiting the next headline-grabbing development.

To quote an Israeli runner disgusted by the coverage of her countrymen's captivity, "This was not a movie. These were real people."

The few images that aren't appalling broke my heart. There are snapshots of the Israeli athletes, their faces suffused with the hopeful glow that we're used to seeing in our own Olympic athletes. They look like actual folks, not the nameless, faceless "hostages" we're all used to thinking of. Like real people, they are still mourned. There is a woman interviewed who is my age, whose father was killed before she was even born. "I have never heard his voice," she said. "I have never heard him say my name."

Until tonight, I had never heard anyone say the Israelis' names either: Yossi Romano, Andrei Schpritzer, Moshe Weinberg, Eliezer Halffin, Mark Slavin, Ze'ev Friedman, Kahat Shor, David Berger, Joseph Gottfreund, Amitsur Shapira, and Yaakov Springer. Plenty of television coverage was devoted to the terrorists -- we've all seen the snapshot of the stocking-masked terrorist. But how many of us have ever bothered to find out who the victims were?

Watch One Day in September; make friends with someone who has HBO if you don't have it. Watch this, and bear in mind that for many, the Olympics haven't been the same since the day politics trumped athletics and the world watched along on their television.

Let's say, just for the moment, that I'm a geek. This is just a hypothetical example, you understand. And let's say that there're some shows in the upcoming fall season that, being a geek, I'm interested in watching. Shows like Fox's Freakylinks and Night Visions. Night Visions is sort of like Twilight Zone hosted by Henry Rollins, and I think we can all agree that Twilight Zone would have been better if Rod Serling had been a tattooed weightlifter who split his time between angry alternative rock and edgy stand-up comedy. I'm not sure what Freakylinks is about, except that it has a Web site already. Oh, and it "follows a young Webmaster whose paranormal Web site leads him to his long-deceased twin, who may be very much alive!"

Okay. So we've established the genre of television that I, the science-fiction reading television viewer, like. And lucky me, there's also a pair of shows on UPN: Freedom and Level 9. Freedom is set in a totalitarian postapocalyptic future, and stars, um, nobody. Because this is UPN. But the four main characters are "fighting machines whose razor-edged bodies and defiant spirits are ultimate weapons," and they're waging a guerilla war against the evil feds. I admit that it sounds awful even by UPN standards, but I'm into that sort of thing. Level 9, meanwhile, features noble government workers fighting against the evil tide of hackers. This is presumably to balance out anti-government talk in Freedom. But it still stars characters that sound like they know their way around a Graphical User Interface, so I, the loyal science fiction-reading, web page-surfing, conspiracy theory-collecting geek, am interested in watching it.

Are there any other shows that catch my eye? Of course -- there's ABC's refreshing conspiracy-theory sitcom The Trouble With Normal, unless they've changed its name again. Billed as an "outrageous new comedy," the main characters have become convinced that the government is watching their every move. And the funny part is -- oh, you'll slap your thighs when I tell you -- their neighbor, Jon Cryer, actually is watching them for the government! Wacky government-spook hijinks will, presumably, ensue.

Okay, so we've established that there's a pretty good range of new television shows out there that appeal to my taste for science fiction, conspiracy theories, and awful, awful plots and acting. So what's my beef? Where's the fly in my ointment? Where, in short, is my excuse for wasting your time here? Just this:

All those shows are on the same day. Specifically, Friday.

Why would the networks do that? They know in advance that the target market for these shows is pretty small, and they know that your typical JFK-assassination-movie-watching fanboy is annoyingly fanatical about the random show they pluck out of the herd. Some of these shows wouldn't be successful even if they weren't scheduled against nearly-identical opposition. Freedom probably wouldn't be successful even if it were the only thing on every channel and was constantly beamed directly into the brain of every mammal on Earth with an opposable thumb. But they've done everything they can to make sure that this whole handful of shows has to divide up the tiny subset of viewers, so they'll all fail. If I were the geek lobby (and how do you know I'm not?), I'd start writing the outraged "Keep My Favorite Show On The Air, Network Maggot!" letters now. I figure, why wait for the formality of the cancellation notices?

The networks do this every year -- remember in 1978, when Mork & Mindy was scheduled against Project UFO? Remember 1985, when Knight Rider was scheduled against that awful revival of Twilight Zone? Remember in 1948 when Fashions on Parade was up against Musical Miniatures?

Oh, you do not, you liar. You'd probably believe me if I claimed that Hat Squad and Fish Police were in the same time slot in 1992. Of course, they were actually on the same network. Man, did CBS used to suck or what?

So what's the answer? Why do the networks persist in glomming all similar shows together in one place? Are they just stupid? Is it all a coincidence? Or is it something more sinister?

Beats me. All I know is, the only show with geek appeal that I didn't mention is Dark Angel, which is conveniently scheduled far, far from Friday. It's on Tuesday. Directly opposite the not-at-all similar Angel.

Those wacky networks. I guess they're just setting us up for silly mishaps and misunderstandings, so our antics provide amusement for the alien overlords that watch our every move.

Everybody? Hello? Where'd you all go?

No. You're not watching Big Brother. Your friends and loved ones aren't watching Big Brother. In fact, nobody is watching Big Brother. Except for us professional TV critics, and the only reason we're watching this nightly monument to tedium is because we're being paid to do so.

That's right, isn't it, Jason? I am getting paid to watch Big Brother, right?

Oh.

God, my life is empty.

CBS, of course, maintains it's not as bad as all that. The Thursday episode that aired a week ago scored a 6.3 rating, certainly better than anything CBS broadcast in that time slot last summer. Although, that fact is less impressive when you realize it's Diagnosis Murder and Walker, Texas Ranger reruns we're using as the basis for comparison. And the numbers for Big Brother are but a fraction of the people that tuned in for Survivor's 13-week run.

Ah, Survivor -- its success has given the amateurish Big Brother the air of an Edsel, the feel of a Hindenburg. Survivor captured the nation's imagination, sparking water cooler debates and barroom stemwinders about the show's twists and turns. Big Brother will be lucky if most people remember that the show's still on the air.

Case in point -- Big Brother had scored an average rating of 10.9 on Wednesday nights. But this past week, without Survivor there to prop up the body, the rating fell to 7.5. NBC, which had been trounced by CBS and its merry castaways all summer long, finally won the night.

Blame the two CBS shows' divergent fortunes on their respective production values. Survivor boasted an exotic locale, expert editing and a diverse cast that provided moments of conflict and comedy. Most important, Survivor never pretended to be anything other than what it was -- a glorified game show with tiki huts and torches in lieu of Whoopi Goldberg in the center square.

And Big Brother? Big Brother looks like a public access show. And not the good kind of public access show, either -- the kind where the town crank signs up for 30 minutes of airtime to rail against the city council and the freemasons and the plot to poison the water supply with Tang. No, it's the bad kind of public access show, with spotty editing and sketchy camera work and a gaggle of onscreen yay-hoos oblivious as to just how asinine they look.

The show works like this: 10 somewhat annoying, mentally enfeebled people are brought together to live in a house where their every banal movement is recorded for broadcast. Cameras are everywhere -- the closet, the bedrooms, even the toilet. Once in the house, the Real World rejects are forced by Big Brother's sinister Dutch producers to perform the same sort of tasks weary housewives think up for rambunctious dimwitted offsprings on rainy days. Every two weeks, the housemates must nominate two of their fellow shut-ins for banishment. The viewed public, buoyed by an excess of leisure dollars and a lack of interesting hobbies, then calls a 900 number to vote out one of the top two vote-getters. This continues until one simpleton is left in the house. For his or her efforts, the lucky winner gets 240,000 or so after-tax dollars and the consolation that all he or she had to do to get the money was to act like an ass on national TV.

I could be paraphrasing from the official show description just a bit there.

As of this writing, four cast members have gotten the ol' heave-ho: Will, the angry black man; Jordan, the devious stripper; Karen, the neurotic mental patient; and Brittany, the woman who couldn't stop a) dying her hair, b) talking about her virginity, and c) driving me to kill. Those remaining under house arrest include Curtis, the dopey lawyer; George, the dopey father; Josh, the dopey horndog; Jamie, the dopey beauty queen; Eddie, the dopey palooka; and Cassandra, who seems rather sensible, and therefore, we have to wonder if she's lost some sort of bet or if CBS has pictures of her or something.

Karen has been the most interesting Big Brother participant, so long as we define "interesting" as "dangerously unhinged." Once ensconced in the house, she used the platform of a nationally broadcast TV show to sob nearly incessantly, decry her awful, loveless marriage and then, just for variety, sob some more. Oh, and she did very well in Big Brother's jump rope contest.

It's easy to sneer at the poor simps trapped in a prison of their own making on Big Brother -- it's fun as well, y'all should try it -- but in truth, the fault doesn't lie entirely with the on-air talent. The producers and editors who patch together each episode from footage gathered during the day also have to shoulder a good chunk of the blame for this train wreck.

You see, with the cameras on 24 hours a day, the Big Brother production team has plenty of material from which to cobble together a show. But, as those meddling kids at Salon found out, the producers don't always pick the most interesting footage for the broadcast. Or air the footage in the proper context. Or, indeed, show events in the right order.

So desperate are our little Dutch friends to generate even an iota of excitement and scandal amid the pie-eating contests and the jigsaw puzzle challenges, that they've taken to selective editing to try and jury-rig some drama. So the brains behind Big Brother are doing all they can to paint their 10 wards as horny, petty or, if that fails, horny and petty.

"Come on, Jordan, you're a stripper!" you can almost hear them shouting in their comical Paul Verhoeven-like accents. "Show Josh your ya-yas, and help us get a 20-share. We've got house payments to make, you know."

Well. They are Dutch. No doubt they have a hard time understanding how the word "reality" is a part of "reality show." They certainly seem to be having a devil of a time understanding the word "entertaining," too.

So the Big Brother 10 may not actually be as dim as they've come across on TV. Then again, people who live in glass houses shouldn't complain about their editing.

It's like St. Louis Cardinal pitcher Dizzy Dean once said of his nemesis, Bill Terry of the New York Giants: "Could be that he's a nice guy once you get to know him. But why bother?"

That's just the problem -- Big Brother's contestants are convinced that you should bother, that you have to bother, that you need to bother. It's not just the prize money they're after -- they only get half of the going rate for telling Regis that Richard Nixon did, in fact, appear on Laugh In, after all, and besides, it's not like any of the Millionaire contestants have to live in close quarters with a nasally Minnesotan with green hair -- it's the fame.

Yes, the Big Brother contestants are convinced that the road to fame and fortune leads smack dab through their hermetically sealed living arrangements.

A frequent discussion around the Big Brother dinner table is just exactly "how big this thing" has become. After Jamie won one of Big Brother's what-I-did-at-summer-camp contests, the producers gave her a choice -- meet with your mom who flew down from Washington state, or meet with a casting director for two minutes. Jamie picked the casting director. The Big Brother contestants went into their isolation tank just as Survivor was taking off. Surely, they've concluded, Big Brother has captured the hearts and minds of America, that once they're free of their IKEA-furnished purgatory a grateful nation of agents and publicists will beat a path to their door. To a man, the Big Brother contestants dream of parlaying their stint in the nation's fishbowl into a lifetime of fortune and acclaim.

I dream of tending goal for the Detroit Red Wings next season, by the way. I guess we'll all have to cope with life's disappointments.

The Big Brother cast will not be visited by the fame fairy, not because they aren't nice folks or because the ability to humiliate yourself on command isn't a marketable job skill. Rather, they will come up short in the fame game for one simple reason: the Stench of Awful encompasses Big Brother so thoroughly that anyone associated with the program will be lucky to ever find honest work again.

Julie Chen is bathed in the Stench of Awful. The CBS news reporter with the bulletproof hair has done such a poor job as Big Brother's fidgety, cloying host that she's doomed to a lifetime of low-visibility, dignity-free employment. That she's currently the news reader on CBS's The Early Show proves that God's justice is both swift and merciless.

Dr. Drew Pinsky, Big Brother's "relationship" expert, has been stained with the Stench of Awful. So much so that answering fratboys' questions about fellatio on MTV's Loveline may well be the apex of his on-air career.

But a veritable cloud of Awful hangs over the heads of Paul Romer, John De Mol and the rest of the flailing Dutchmen who've brought Big Brother to our shores. Most of us are lucky enough to suffer through our failures in private. These guys have laid an egg that airs six nights a week and reaches its sure-to-be stultifying denouement about the same time the Summer Olympics have kicked into high gear. They haven't just produced a boring show; they've produced a crass, manipulative and intellectually dishonest show that's forced to rely on edit room trickery. In a just world, Romer, De Mol and the rest would be locked in an eight-by-twelve cell, forced to play the same mind-numbing games they've inflicted on everyone else, their every inanity broadcast to an uncaring world. And they'd only be given enough food to keep one person alive.

Now that's a reality show. And it'd probably get a better rating than Big Brother.

Many modern-day philosophers suggest that religion's day in the sun is over, and that nowadays television has taken over as the masses' official opiate. These people have obviously never had a good opiate. Heroin, for instance, is hugely addictive and can cause psychotic episodes, painful constipation, and/or death, but it still holds no side effect as horrifying as thirty minutes' worth of Jm J. Bullock. If it did, the suicide rate in Scotland would be that much higher.

Nonetheless, I can sort of see what they're getting at, especially during these summer months. That's because as the weather turns warm and I slave through the hot hours, working toward each day's ultimate goal of a frozen bean burrito and a fifth of rotgut, I often find myself daydreaming about younger, happier times.

Ah, summer vacation!

Tire swings hung from the ol' oak tree.

Cooking s'mores and singing songs around the campfire.

Ice cold lemonade on the front porch.

Running through the sprinklers in the hot August sun, the air thick with the aroma of freshly mowed grass and barbequed pork ribs.

Yes, I distinctly remember seeing all of these things on the television from my spot on the floor two feet in front of it, where my ass would remain firmly planted from mid-June to early September.

While other kids were out riding their bikes, or hootin' and hollerin' down at the community pool, my itinerary for a typical summer vacation day was as follows:

Wake up, watch farm report, make toast, watch cartoons, remember toast, watch game shows, eat toast, watch soap operas, poop, watch more cartoons, transfer poop from shorts to toilet, watch reruns of Three's Company, bolt down dinner at behest of Mom, watch reruns of the year's prime time swill, go to bed. Second verse, same as the first.

To this very day, if you visit my parents' house (which, by the way, I highly recommend--they're lovely people) you can still see a perfect impression of my youthful cheeks in the living room's threadbare pile carpeting. In my childhood home, there was no wall with lines scratched on it to measure my growth. They would just trace around my ass once a year while I was engrossed in the Twilight Zone marathon. For years, this is how I thought Labor Day was traditionally celebrated.

I knew by heart every network schedule, every commercial script, every word to the "Hanker For a Hunk o' Cheese" song. I would view time not in minutes and hours, but in shows, as in, "It's half-past Gilligan", or, "It's quarter to the part in Scooby Doo where they sing a totally unrelated song and run aimlessly in front of a tie-dyed background."

Oh, sure, in my teenage years I would spend some of that time pursuing other interests, such as masturbating. But, like reruns of F Troop, you can only take so much of that before the uncomfortable burning sensations set in. My rule of thumb, so to speak, was that when you can see through the skin to your urethra in some places, it's time to turn the TV back on.

So in a way I suppose television really was for me a kind of opiate. Most addicts will tell you that they turn to drugs because of some sort of emotional emptiness. I used TV to fill a gaping void in my summer lifestyle. Namely, the excruciating, bottomless Ennui that kicked in approximately five days after school got out.

You remember the scene. By day five you've already played more games of freeze tag than a human being can reasonably be expected to endure. You've returned the golden chalice to the gold castle in Atari Adventure approximately six thousand times. And then you're suddenly hit with the realization that you have a monstrous expanse of time stretching out before you, but no money, transportation, or fake ID with which to enjoy it.

Everyone had their own method of battling The Ennui, but with no fishin' hole in the vicinity, our choices were severely limited. Those with BMX bikes or skateboards would play the time-tested kids' game of "Find Novel Ways to Attempt Suicide." Some of the more industrious kids would head out into a vacant lot with shovels and build a fort. Which actually sounds kind of fun, until you realize that it usually consisted of digging a big ditch and then sitting in it.

I took the easy way out. I'd just cook up a spoonful of Hogan's Heroes and ease myself into a bleary-eyed stupor. Sometimes I would really play with fire and chase the junk down with a line of Good Times. I knew you weren't supposed to mix Norman Lear and Nazi death camp sitcoms, but extreme times call for extreme measures.

Was I dependent? Probably. Did it screw me up permanently? That depends on how you look at it. It's probably not a good thing that I can quote verbatim any commercial for a Milton Bradley game made in the last three decades, yet I commonly forget my current age. On the other hand, I have grown into a fairly productive member of society. I'm very good to my cat. And I haven't killed anyone in months.

But these many years later, I have come to understand that television is a vice that will hound me until the day I die. For most nights, when I return home from another unfulfilling day of lower back pain and monitor radiation... I get cravings.

You see, The Ennui is still with me, though it has taken on a slightly different flavor. In a bitterly ironic twist, I now have all of the resources necessary to enjoy life, but I have no time. And, for that matter, no life. Since you're still reading this, I assume you can relate.

I realize that ninety percent of the TV you find on the streets these days is low quality and impure. Much of it, in fact, appears to be cut with feces. But it doesn't matter. The Ennui must be sated. And against my better judgment, more often than not I find myself reaching for the remote, slumping into a worn corner of the couch, and frittering away the precious hours of my life staring, catatonic, into the demon eye of the idiot box.

The only difference is, I don't watch so much goddamned F Troop. Even a junkie's gotta have his standards.