Once upon a time, a person could turn on their television and be entertained by actors performing in a show filled with comedy, mystery or intrigue. “I Love Lucy,” “Sherlock Holmes Series,” or “Masterpiece Theatre,” made us laugh, cry and use our brain to solve a problem.
Today, the entertainment industry has hit an all time low in how it entertains its viewers. Go turn on your television and you’ll find nothing but reality show after reality show. First, you have the dating shows where one person must choose from ten in the hopes of finding love. Each of the guys and the gals use the same pick up lines for each show. Then you have the various talent shows where instead of encouraging a person to practice their talent, they belittle them before a million people, believing its entertainment. What ever happened to a talented individual paying their dues by performing in the dive clubs, honky-tonks, local fairs while living on the road, honing their craft before a live audience as they struggle to become discovered? The young person who is chosen is thrust into an industry filled with thieves who rip them off and leave them high on drugs, that’s not fame that’s being taken advantage of by shifty individuals.
What’s with the lifestyle changing shows? Have we as a society plummeted so low that we enjoy watching someone else suffer with their self indulgence, hoarding addiction, weight gain and loss struggle? What about the star studded drug rehab shows? These shows are like watching a different version of the Jerry Springer show without Jerry at the helm. We’re not interested in watching someone break down on camera about their childhood, their broken marriage or cheating spouse. We have our own drama to deal with, why shove someone else’s drama down our throats; it’s not entertaining, it’s annoying.
Instead of providing us with real entertainment, the industry believes that a show about a young woman in search of the perfect bridal gown, or a show about the antics of a high maintenance nail shop owner is entertainment. We can’t forget the supernatural and those hoax shows where we might find a ghost or spirit that will tell us the winning lottery numbers to the future. How many different varieties of a survival show do we have to watch before we scream for something that will entertain us?
Has the entertainment business truly lost their perspective in what is entertaining? Where are all the script writers who grew up watching entertaining movies, comedy skits, or reading murder mysteries and dreamed of following in their footsteps? Where are the script writers who craved to enter the industry to create the new exciting Capra movie? What about the comedians who craved to follow in Lucy Ricardo’s foot steps? Instead of talented writers, we have lazy script writers who have no creativity or motivation to produce viable storylines, amazing plots or comedic dialogue; instead they expect us to watch cookie cutter shows based on the every day life events. Geeez, and I thought television was to help us escape reality by capturing our attention in order to escape into shows that make us laugh, make us cry or make us THINK!
Parents, who are so busy with their own lives, seem to fail at keeping up with what their children are watching, much less reading these days. There are shows targeting children with underlining political and social propaganda messages weaved into dialogue to encourage your children to make you feel guilty about a subject.
Just about every show on television has sex, violence and foul language these days. Where are the shows that a family, including children can sit together and enjoy quality time while watching a show? The creative juice machine of the entertainment industry must be broken because all we, the consumer, are being offered as entertainment are mindless activity shows that have no substance, no ability to escape everyday life and enjoy a simple one hour of entertainment. No wonder people have turned away from watching television. Why bother spending money for cable when every channel has the same nonsense.
Many have turned away from going to the movie theater too. This is because just about every movie has too much violence, sex, and way to much of the foul language. What ever happened to leaving certain things up to the imagination of the viewer? We don’t need to see two people in bed banging each other in different positions to know that they are having sex. The old entertainment industry would have left that up to our imagination and still have a winning movie on your hands. We don’t need to see so much violence and blood either. Do the script writers or producers really think this is necessary? As a consumer who enjoys a good movie or television show, I can tell you we don’t.
The entertainment industry is now driven by corporate America and politics. It’s no longer an industry filled with creative individuals inspired by their own imagination; instead it’s driven by those who have their hands in the pocket of every politician in Washington, DC. Their main objective is to create a society who is ignorant of creativity and incapable of creating anything new. They remake old classics that don’t even come close to the magic that made it a classic. Industry executives are so busy they ask for what’s called a treatment instead of a full script. They do this to encourage their writers to cherry pick (Steal) that treatment in order to legally steal that writer’s creative work. When a writer or studio steals another creative person’s work, they have diminished their own industry and encourage society to steal from each other. This isn’t just exclusive to the television and movie entertainment industry; it’s rampant in journalism, talk shows and the nightly news too.
When a writer’s words and scenes depict violence, brutal murders, or foul language, we encourage society to do the same. This is what is destroying the morale fabric of America. There are so many talented writers who have fresh new ideas for movies and television shows that actually entertain, but instead of giving them a break, they discourage them based on politics. Instead of fixing this problem, the industry encourages their sheeple writers to include political agenda’s into their dialogue. Why does this continue, because the American Consumer is to busy being brainwashed to realize they're being controlled by an industry not worthy of their hard earned money! This will continue until the actors return to being actors and not politicians, writers return to being creative individuals using their imagination to create new entertaining stories, and producers are more interested in having a real blockbuster, instead of a politically driven plot that is helping to destroy the America they claim to want to save.
After six years of not wasting my time with mainstream television or mainstream movies, I can truly say I haven’t missed much at all. For the very reasons I have outlined above, I’d rather read a book or watch a real movie classic DVD.
