Fall TV Season Suggestions

Since the producers of our television programming have clearly concluded that virtually no one will watch anything that dares rise higher than the top edge of the gutter, let me make some suggestions, at least for the more serious channels, the ones that don’t actually specialize in images of people bashing each other in the face.

Considering the obsession of several channels with street gangs, truck drivers, pawn shop operatives and specialists at repossessing cars (what could be more exciting?), I suggest a new, highly advertised series on the lives of our nation’s heroic dumpster divers. According to the practice that is so popular now, it could be announced several hundred times on popups taking approximately a fourth of the screen and showing the athletes in question standing posed on top of a dumpster, facing at 45 degree angles away from each other and with arms arrogantly folded in front of them.

Since the Science Channel only puts on a few programs per week having anything to do with science proper, it might ring the changes on its incessant programming on how Tampax pads and foot deodorant are made and grace our screens with programs on how such items are disposed of.

Smellavision.

And since the highly prestigious National Geographic Channel seems tunnel-vision-focused on crime and prisons, their target audience’s interest might be piqued by a whole season dealing in depth with prison rape.

Oh, yes, and since the Travel Channel has pretty much conceded programs on travel to PBS in favor of showing people eating live caterpillars and the like, or shortening their lives by gorging themselves on anything within reach, perhaps it will want to show the inevitable results:  stomachs being pumped, contests on who can hurl the loudest and farthest, and so forth.

The possibilities are endless.  Several channels are in an ideal position to do programs on new styles based on Goodwill rejects, so that may be next.

Remember that country song from a couple of decades back, about “a hundred channels on the TV and nothing’s on”?  Now there are several hundred and more often than not I find myself lunging for my limited collection of DVDs.