Tag: Television

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PBS’s Cabin Country

What the heck is PBS doing showing “Cabin Country”?

The show starts off with this cute graphic of a gun’s telescopic site aiming at various harmless animals. Words like “adventure” and “sportsmanship” glide across the screen.

Euphemism of the day: “over-gun”. Apparently, Americans tend to “over-gun”, which means that they like to hunt with huge powerful weapons that they can’t handle or aim correctly. “Big bore” Magnums, apparently.

“Bullet placement”. A weapon that is “comfortable for you”. What I love is the fashion sense. These men wear camouflage, right, so that animals can’t see them. But then they wear big orange vests over top so that other hunters won’t shoot them.

This show looked pretty authentic, so I started looking forward to seeing an animal get killed. Disappointment! They don’t show the manly hunters actually putting a bullet into the buck’s head. They show the hunter firing and then you see them talking about the excitement of the kill, and then they go to the buck and worship it for a while. Funny that they don’t stand there going, “geez, what a pathetic little weak buck. Look at him? Little feller, isn’t he? Not very scary looking at all. I mock you, wimpy buck!”

Oh no. They go, “look at him! He’s huge. Look at those magnificent antlers! What a babe!”

One of the hunters actually said, after killing another “nice” buck, “this’ll be a great story for the grandkids. I can’t wait to tell my daughter and all her friends…”

They deceive the bucks into approaching their lairs by rattling antlers together to make them think there is a fight going on. Then they shoot them. With guns. It’s bizarre. This makes the hunters feel manly and helps these sensitive men get “close to nature”.

Why don’t they at least have the honesty and decency to show the bullet going into the buck’s head? Come on—I want to see it. I want to know what we’re really dealing with here. What does it actually feel like to see a magnificent critter like that get his brains blasted out? What does it look like? Maybe I’m missing something. Or are they worried that the deer might not die quickly. Then the animal rights activists will jump out of the forest in their camouflage outfits with their orange vests and shout, “animal abuse!”

I am not, by the way, any kind of animal rights activist. I’m not even vegetarian. I just don’t like guns, and I don’t like the crappy attitude a lot of hunters have – that “culling” is necessary for ecological balance—and I don’t like that crap about how much they adore nature, before blowing it’s brains out. Let’s have it out plain and simple—tell us what you really feel:

“I like to kill”.

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The “High-Quality” TV Show

The networks argue that there have been fewer and fewer local programs and that viewers much prefer to watch what the networks have to offer anyway. The networks, also noting the continued loss of their audience to cable TV, say they need to accrue more control to be able to afford the high-quality shows the viewing public expects of them. NY Times, April 23, 2001

I love that last line: “The high-quality shows”… like the Bette Midler Show? Two Guys and Girl? The Geena Davis Show? Donny and Marie? “Veronica’s Closet”? Mr. Ed? “Family Law”? “Survivor”? “Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire”? Reminds me of Eli Lilly’s claims that women and physicians simply demanded that they repackage Prozac as pastel-coloured “Sarafem”, as a treatment for a mythical disorder called PMDD (PreMenstrual Dyphoric Dysfunction).

What people want? Or what insiders demand? What friends and cronies can arrange?

“What About Raymond” is produced by a company owned by David Letterman. “Veronica’s Closet” is owned by the makers of “Friends”. Disney, which owns ABC, also owns Touchstone Television, which produced “Once and Again”. All of these shows might well have been cancelled had it not been for the connections to the right people. What about all the children’s shows with tie-ins to toy manufacturers and fast-food outlets and record companies? What about idiotic “reality” shows that are simply extremely cheap to produce?

It’s one thing to be a greedy corporation. It’s one thing to be greedy and dishonest. But when corporations try to tell us that we really want the tackiest, most exploitive, and stupid products– nay, that we demand these idiocies… It reminds me of when I complained to the post office about the crap they stick in my mail box every day. They actually tried, with a straight face, to tell me that most people actually want the information in those fliers.

My response is always this: if you really believe that, would you agree to abide by the results of a poll of what people really want?

The question is, should people have a choice about the crap that gets stuffed into their mailboxes, or on their tv screen, or their computer desktops?