Shows That Make You Mad (But You Keep Watching)

[Syn]

I started watching a show recently that inspired this.

Are there any shows that make you mad, but you keep watching them?

The Walking Dead used to fit that bill for me but I stopped watching it a couple episodes into the current season, thankfully. I'm free.

But a week ago I started watching Mad Men. It is infuriating. Everyone in this show is such a terrible person. Occasionally the main character, Don Draper, will show signs of becoming a not-terrible human bean. Then he'll do something terrible and kill that hope.

I think I'm just watching it to see awful things happen to awful people at this point. I shouldn't watch this! It's so frustrating! Why does it hold my attention?!

[Buster's Uncle]

It gets worse with Don that way as it goes - I only watched a little, piecemeal, but Draper started seeming okay, if complex, and the soap opera misdeeds just never stopped piling higher and higher.

I don't gather The Sopranos went anywhere but the same way - Tony started as a sympathetic murderer/thug -the One-Eyed King of the Land of the Blind who wanted out in his heart- but the soap opera got mighty deep and blatant from what I've picked up online and elsewhere after the declining third season and then we didn't have HBO anymore.

[E_T]

Not really as I don't watch that much TV.

Although, thinking about it:
The Last Ship  Them killing the Doctor at the end of the 2nd season sort of killed that for me, that and they way they picked up the third, I quit watching it very soon afterwards.

[Unorthodox]

The one show me and Talia watch.

Curse of Oak Island. 

I mean, I get that they are never going to find a treasure and all, but they totally fail to follow up on things they DO find. 

I mean you're pulling (human) bones and pottery out of an exploratory hole, how do you just move on to the next thing instead of exploring further? 

(It has not escaped my radar that such things MIGHT just be planted by the network to keep people invested in the show, too, thus follow up would be pointless)

[Buster's Uncle]

Okay - on Cheers in the first season, Sam was --- an alcoholic ex-baseball player, sure, who was apparently drafted into the big leagues out of high school.  Dianne was an educated -some references I caught were genuine smart book-reader stuff, there definitely was one on the writing staff- heterosexual love-interest Felix to Sam's Oscar; prissy and vain and insufferable in her flights of fancy/taking it too far and arrogance.  None of that ever changed until Shelley Long left, actually a good career move --- for Kirstey Alley.

Point being, sometimes Oscar is the one who's right.  Sam (and I've known a lot of guys like this, especially in community college, who weren't going further in their schooling, but not because they were stupid; they'd catch it and call me on it, often with wit, when I was condescending) was like those bright rednecks.  Dianne would say the most outlandish things, often with a condescending finish that said "dummy" underneath, and Sam would pause a second and then let the air out of her completely and cleverly using logic and wit. Not. Stupid. - smart, just not well-educated.

When they kissed at the end of the first season, she must have sucked part of his brain out, because when they left his office, he was as stupid as she'd always claimed and it stayed that way the rest of the run.


First season Night Court had a similar thing happen.  The humor had a wit and just slightly mean edge that piled on the funny, and Dianne Chambers must have snuck into Harry's office during season hiatus and sucked the brains and/or creative integrity out.  Cheap jokes and cheap sentimentality the rest of the run, just dumb and never near so good again. (Except Markie Post's bangin' bod, yo. )



I kept watching both, but sullenly.

-Except when Ms. Post wore something tight.

[E_T]

First season Night Court had a similar thing happen.  The humor had a wit and just slightly mean edge that piled on the funny, and Dianne Chambers must have snuck into Harry's office during season hiatus and sucked the brains and/or creative integrity out.  Cheap jokes and cheap sentimentality the rest of the run, just dumb and never near so good again. (Except Markie Post's bangin' bod, yo. )

I kept watching both, but sullenly.

-Except when Ms. Post wore something tight.

Don't forget I don't think that the show really recovered from losing the Actor whom played the Old Lady Bailiff.  They did cast a great replacement and had a good story to go with her death, but the show lost something afterwards, part of the writing style maybe...

[Buster's Uncle]

Tru, tru.   Neither of her replacements played the mean edge as well, especially Roz.

[bvanevery]

Why does it hold my attention?!

Psychologically I'm going to guess a need to explore the Jungian shadow, the dark sides of ourselves.  I think that only goes so far though.  I've noticed that a lot of TV writers have "very negative" things in what they put on TV.  I find myself resisting that, as I don't much care for dwelling on the ugliness of the human condition too much.  For instance Game of Thrones has a lot of gratuitous violence and cruelty in it, often of a depraved sexual nature to boot.  I find I will continue to watch that series in spite of the off-putting stuff in it, because I think it has good characters and most of them are well acted.  I have also some interest in seeing how events actually play out, but that is secondary.

I think there is a point at which we imagine our ideal TV show, we sit down in front of an actual TV, watch an actual TV show, have partial feelings of disappointment, but also like something about what we see.  So we keep watching because frankly we're lazy.  TV show makers know this and that's how they mostly retain their audiences.  I hereby dub this the couch potato factor.

However if there are too many barriers put up, I will in fact turn off the TV and completely reject all of it.  I could be playing SMAC instead, for instance.  I could read another chapter in Mein Kampf, or one of my Mom's many biographies of Stalin.  There's a book on the shelf about all the nasty things the Greeks did to each other.  Who needs Game of Thrones?

Or I could just get back to <gasp> productivity.  Shouldn't I be writing a 4X TBS RPG or something?

[Syn]

Productivity. I don't think I've heard that word before. What does it mean?

[bvanevery]

Cheap jokes and cheap sentimentality the rest of the run, just dumb and never near so good again.

I think the general trope explaining this sort of thing is called jumping the shark, after a famous Happy Days episode where Fonzie does just that.  Not sure if it coincides with writers actually leaving a project, but definitely in a marked decline in writing, where interesting ideas are all played out and dumb stuff just happens.  TV series keeps going on fumes until it's cancelled.

[bvanevery]

Productivity. I don't think I've heard that word before. What does it mean?

That's when you're a couch potato and you make another potato by sitting there.  So if you got a friend to watch your show with you, you're being productive.  Two couch potatoes.

[Buster's Uncle]

Happy Days had jumped the shark years before -actually another one that was profoundly different and better first season (when it was a blatant ripoff of American Graffiti), but not my point- when Richie wasn't on the show and Jenny Piccolo was.  I didn't see Fonzie jump, because I'd been gone for about four years, then, and everybody else was suckers.

[bvanevery]

I was too young to have great analytic thought other than "Fonzie is cool".  I did wonder what he was doing jumping a shark though.

[Green1]

I do not really watch TV.

I find it expensive and they put way too many ads on them.

That said, I am fed a steady diet of Food Network, one of my lady's favorite networks.

What gets me mad is it does not represent cooking for what it is. You never see a dish being washed and the kitchens are spacious. It shows those that cook as rock stars and any judges as "culinary experts" far beyond mere mortals.

But, the truth is most cooking gigs are greasy, dirty, assembly line type jobs with zero room for creativity unless you are the owner or a great name chef with the owner out of your hair. It's long hours and zero autonomy. And, if you are not careful cooking and storing food, you can make people sick.

It makes me wonder if the food shows are just mind control for lobbies like the National Restaurant Association to bring in cheap employees. That or just a long ad to make bored, middle class ladies to buy more kitchen stuff to live dreams of being a kitchen rock star.

But I do watch it. You see people from New Orleans there all the time.

That, and Mrs. Green will kill me if I change it....

[bvanevery]

I think a lot of people actually like to cook.  My Mom does and she's very good at it.  Lucky me when I visit!  I can perform passably in the kitchen if I want to, but I do not like to cook the way she does.  I just get the job done, and it shows in the simplicity of my results.