Don't hate the player, hate "The Game" (the tv show)

Ok, I've reached the breaking point for this fascination with the game. What is it? I don't get it, you guys. Aesthetically, it's annoying. The cameraman's kinda of shaky guerrilla-style filming is effective at making me feel like i'm in the room. It works, really. But I don't WANT to be in the room. I don't know these people. And all they have is problems. And if they don't have problems, they just make up problems. We do that enough in real life. Why would you escape the perceived and real stressors of the world to the fake perceived and real stressors of television?

Anyway,
There's two types of shows to me.

Some are based in reality (e.g. your law and orders, various other dramas, even some comedies). Now these shows, while the sequence of events that occurs on the screen may not be likely, or possible, make a marked attempt at having REAL personalities. To me it's not always the storyline, but the characters that determine how realistic a show is.

Then there's your fantasies. I can only think of three possible types of shows that legitimately fall into this catagory: I'm talking about family-oriented shows, some comedies, and I'm talking about soap operas... I'm talking about the Game. Just hearing the way people talk, their responses, you can tell this is dearly departed from reality. My disdain for Soap Operas is not strong enough to blog about. But the Game doesn't accept its Soap Opera status (yes I called it a soap opera). It wants to be hipper. More down. More modern. More relevant. More real. But it's not. It takes all the dumb shit that we have to deal with, markets it like the dumb shit is what we're supposed to deal with and says "hey look its ok, this is what real life is supposed to be!", mixes it with bad acting, (which doesn't make any sense, since everyone should be very well versed with the dumb shit), and adds in a shaky camera (which I am tempted to address again but I won't be redundant).

Think about it. What this show does is ESSENTIALLY take this culture that we have developed, a culture that is based on drama and fantasy and conflict, (so much so that they said "TO HELL WITH WRITING A SCRIPT!" and came out with The Real World), which HAPPENS to be an affect of the ridiculous amount of TV we watch, and create a program BASED on this perversion of reality, and try to make it real. They're taking life, regurgitating it, and feeding it back to us. You're watching visual vomit.

Let's look at BET one second. I know DAMN well everyone that reads this blog is not a fan of "Blacks Entertaining" Television. BET is based on black culture. But it was never the WHOLE of black culture, even when BET was legit, it was just the surface of black culture. Now black kids watch TV and are convinced that this is what they're supposed to be (not realizing of course that its not the whole story). So then black culture changes over time. And newer programming reflects the change. Then the next generation mimics what they see and so on the cycle continues till you have 12 year olds running around screaming YOUUUUUUUUUUU. It's all in fun. But it tries to be real. And it convinces people it's real. And those people try to mimic that reality as if their reality doesn't make sense. And this fake reality is so WHACK, but people settle for it. I hate that shit and I can't stand BET for it.

In the same breath I can say I cannot watch The Game. I hate it I hate it I hate it. But if you watch it, I still love you.


Peace