TV Timeout

I know this is a completely foreign concept for Michael Offutt, but I'm pretty disgruntled with regular TV anymore.  Going into next fall, I don't think there will really be any shows I actually want to watch with regularity.

I think it started in 2011 when the animated shows I watched started to fall.  I had watched South Park for years and years but it just wasn't doing it for me anymore, so at the end of that season (or end of the mid-season, whatever) I just quit and didn't miss it.  Not long after the venerable The Simpsons fell when they had Selma get married one time too many and I couldn't help thinking, why watch an episode I've watched 3-4 times already? Family Guy took a little longer just because it was in front of American Dad.  But once Fox cancelled American Dad, I no longer bothered with Family Guy.

This last year about the only network shows I followed were the superhero ones:  Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow, and Legends of Tomorrow.  My interest steadily waned in all of them.  Since these are network shows, there are weeks when they don't show episodes (or show reruns) and on those weeks I found I didn't really miss anything.  The same thing had already happened with Marvel's Agents of SHIELD in its first season:  I just got bored and no longer gave a shit.  I watched the end of the first season of that show but never watched another episode.  It's on my Netflix queue, but it's one of those I doubt I'll get to.

Speaking of Netflix, I think that's a large part of what spoiled the superhero shows for me.  Marvel's Daredevil and Jessica Jones (even though I didn't like the latter so much) are so much edgier that they make the network DC ones look like cosplaying kids acting out fan scripts in their backyard.  And since not all of us watch TV shows just because there are cute people in them, it made me think, Why am I watching this childish crap?

Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead are two shows I got into by bingeing and also two shows I just got fed up with their bullshit.  Game of Thrones it just takes forever for anything to happen and then that something is usually something crappy like another Stark man being murdered or the Mother of Dragons being captured...again.  As for The Walking Dead, the last season was just so boring.  Like with The Simpsons where you can only watch Selma get married so many times, you can only watch Rick and company take on another band of nasty survivors so many times.  I mean The Governor, Terminus, the Wolves, and now the Saviors.  But I'm supposed to be stoked because this dude has a bat with barbed wire around it.  OMG, a bat with barbed wire!!!  No one has ever thought of anything that clever before.

Plus there's the active trolling of the audience.  Notably that bullshit where Glen was "dead" for like 3 episodes.  They even took his name out of the credits to fuck with people.  I never once thought he was dead so when it was revealed he lived I just said, "Told ya" and yawned.  The end of the midseason finale had Rick and some other people surrounded by zombies and this kid says "Mom!" and so we're like, Oh no, the zombies are going to converge!  Except in lame Saturday morning cartoon fashion, when they came back, they just ignored that.  Rick and company got through the zombies just fine, until much later when the kid finally made some noise and bought it.  But of course before that we had to start with other people not connected to that so we could drag it out.  The penultimate episode Carol the badass old chick goes off for...reasons and they make sure not to show who dies when her and some dude are tangling and a gun goes off.  That's fucking soap opera shit.  Seriously, on soap operas they frequently have a gun go off on Friday's episode and then Monday's (after some vamping) they show who did it.  So basically The Walking Dead is copying Days of Our Lives.

Then the season ended with the baseball bat guy killing...someone.  Who?  Well maybe we'll tell you next season...after we drag it out for three episodes.  Please.  Give me a break already.

There are still some shows I probably will watch...eventually.  Shows like Robot Chicken, Archer, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and The League I don't get those channels so I usually wait to watch them on Netflix or Amazon.  That's probably better because then I can just binge them and not have to wait weeks, though none of those really use that soap opera bullshit anyway.

Not that Netflix shows are immune either.  I'll probably give House of Cards one last chance next winter, but if it's as dumb as the fourth season then I'm pulling the plug.

But mainstream TV is dead to me, except maybe for sports--only because you can't get that on Netflix.