June 18, 2009

Let It Bleed: The Best of Everything on TV

I gotta be honest; I pretty much always watched it all - by Bill Kunkel

Or as much TV as my parents would allow and I could sneak in late at night. Of course outside of Manhattan, New York didn’t get cable TV until 1989, so for much of my life TV actually STOPPED at night.

Maybe it was after the Late, Late Show on CBS. Or maybe even the Late, Late, Late Show (also on CBS). But now comes the monkey on my back that men call DVR and since it arrived like a thunderbolt (comparable only to the coming of cordless phones, free online porn and clumping cat litter) I can now compulsively record (sans commercials) the tastiest of the many genres available to the TV gourmand. (Even I think that’s a lot of French words in one paragraph.)

But hey, I watch it all, baby, to save you, my readers, the trouble. You see, I know where to find the Good Stuff – and it isn’t always in the most obvious places. In fact, I’ll TELL you some of what I watch and you judge for yourself. I’m not saying that everything I watch is classic TV, but every show mentioned here is, in my opinion, well worth checking out.

I watch mainstream drama (“Mad Men”, HBO’s “Oz” and “Deadwood” reruns,), animation (“The Simpsons”, “Robot Chicken”), reality shows (“Pitchmen”, “Jockeys”, “Lockup”), game shows (“Deal or No Deal”), True Crime (“Royal Inquest” “Crime 360”), Fake Crime (“Lie to Me”, Dragnet ’67-’69 reruns), Political Satire (“Colbert”, “RealTime”, “Penn & Teller’s Bullshit”), Science (“Mythbusters”, “Man Vs. Cartoon”, “Brink”), History (“What the Victorians Did For Us”, “Life After People”) Food Shows (“Good Eats”, “Kitchen Nightmares: Britain”), Comedies (“30 Rock”, “Tracey Ullman’s State of the Union”), Sci-Fi (“Primeval”, “Ashes to Ashes”) and Sports (“The Ultimate Fighter Finals” and actual sports, of course).

And you know what’s TRULY sad? That’s not even ALL I watch. I also watch “TNA Wrestling” (as long as Mick Foley’s around), “Rotten Tomatoes”, shows about people who make elaborately sculpted cakes and their personal angst as well as the whole Spike catalog, from “MANswers” to “1,000 Ways to Die.” I could go on, but I think we all get the point. As the gardener Chance tells anyone who asks in the famous novel and film, “Being There”: “I like to watch.” Andy Warhol was also a famous voyeur who could not only look at semi-static images for hours; he could make the Art Set of the world pay to watch it with him.

Sometimes I feel like the Marvel Comics super villain M.O.D.O.K/, a cybernetic homunculus who has cables feeding constant images and streams of information directly into his brain, which comprises most of his body and requires constant stimulation. That glass teat feeds me the most fascinating potpourri (oh Christ, more French) of content that has ever been available to human beings. As Paul Simon sang on “The Boy in the Bubble”: “These are the days of miracle and wonder, this is the long distance call. The way the camera follows us in slo-mo; the way we look to us all. The way we look to a distant constellation that is dying in the corner of the sky. These are the days of miracle and wonder and don’t cry baby, don’t cry, don’t cry.”

Cry? When there’s an episode of “Nanny 911” ready to start at the touch of my finger on the remote? Not bloody likely.

So, what do YOU watch on TV?

--Bill “The Game Doctor” Kunkel

[Bill Kunkel’s short story collection, “High on Horror: Tales of Dopes, Drugs & Dread” is available at the Kindle Store]

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