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Jeez, I'm cranky. Even for me. But I seem to have a lot of company. People are just incredibly ticked off. They're alternately irked and furious. These are times that really try men's souls, and women's too. We've never lived through anything exactly like this before, and so we don't know quite how to behave.
We look to television for cues, but this is new to television, too. As usual, it's easier to carp about what TV is doing than to come up with an alternative course of action. I do think there's an intrinsic reassurance in the fact that TV just keeps going, keeps pouring out the sitcoms and the dramas, the huff and the fluff, the schlock and the slop.
I have referred to this as "the therapeutic effect of banality." It's like: "Oh, look, honey. Kellogg's has a new cereal with strawberries in it." Or "Oh boy, kitty litter that sparkles." These trivial and distracting messages come with trivial and distracting television programs attached: Somebody's pregnant on "Friends," and somebody's leaving "Judging Amy," and the brothers are battling again on "Frasier."
If you want to be reminded of the war on terrorism in prime time, you can go to Fox News or CNN or watch one of the network newsmagazines. But do you?
A jolt to reality
Frank Rich of The New York Times was certainly prescient when he predicted, soon after the tragic events in NewYork and Washington, that the audience would quickly lose its appetite for the so-called "reality" shows. Seldom has a trend come to so complete and abrupt a halt
"The Mole" is gone. However gorgeous it is to look at, CBS's latest "Survivor" series, shot...