Sperm Donor + Vag Hag = Hollywood Gold

If you've turned on your television set (do they still call them "television sets" and, if so, do they still turn them on?) or gone to the cinema (I know they don't still call it that) recently, then you've most likely seen a TV show or a movie about at least one lazy, incompetent dumbshit, maybe two, hamhandedly having and/or raising a child, as a couple of rodeo clowns might do so after a month-long boozer.

Film:

Knocked Up
Juno
The Backup Plan
Expecting Mary

I'm sure I'm forgetting about some, or am ignorant of the existence of others. Please feel free to chime in, like a fucking doorbell, you ridiculous hottie, you.

Now, television's getting jealous, or getting smart, so they're coming out with "Raising Hope," featuring a hapless, white-trash dunderhead who wears opened plaid shirts and feeds his baby out of a rubber glove filled with milk.

Oh, men! How did we all make it into adulthood without mandated bike helmets?

Then, of course, there's all the "Didn't-Know-I-Was-Pregnant", "I'm-16-and-Pregnant", "My-Boo's-Pregnant", "I-Took-an-Extreme-Trembly-Shit-and-a-Motherfuckin-Baby-Fell-Out" choice television programs on MTV. Again, what's the common theme? Immature retards diddling around with same and the existence and future of a precious, precarious infant hangs in the balance.

We as a culture are, apparently, eating that shit up-- you know, like a pregnant chick. The question is, why? Why are we so fascinated by watching an ignorant bumpirate leaving a child asleep in a carseat outside a locked apartment door for twenty minutes? Is it shock value? Sure. Is it so we can nestle back into our couches and our choices and smugly report to all who care to listen, "Well, I would never do that!"

Of course not. And my mother would never forget to pick up my sister at school and my father would never run my foot over with the car.

Oh, wait.

I took a playwriting seminar in college, and it really was a seminal event (heh heh-- I used "seminar" and "seminal" in the same sentence, and, yes, I am still twelve) in my life as a writer. It was in this class where I learned about the importance of raising the stakes in comic and dramatic writing for the stage. Don't just make the main characters about to get divorced. Let them have a fourteen-year-old son who's a target masturbator with Aspergers and have Dad about to lose his job and let Mom pop Vicodin so much she calls them her "Little Vickies." Mix in pedophile Uncle Thad who has a beer gut, eczema, wears Bermuda shorts with the fly down all the time-- oh, and the house as about to be foreclosed on by the bank and NOW you've got yourself a show.

The stakes, motherfuckers, hath been raised.

So, maybe that's what this new phenomenon is about. I mean, television and film are both media formats that have been saturated with d-bags and bullshitfaces for decades upon decades. Remember "Married with Children"? That show was what it was, but, had the head writer (was there a head writer?) decided to throw a newborn baby into that mishegoss, well, he probably would have been fired. The times were.... different. Nobody was prepared to quite go there.

So why are we prepared to go there, and so frequently it seems, now? What's changed? My very smart and cutie-patootie'd wife suggested that we've now become thoroughly accustomed to the two-income family, and, with mom and dad off doing their job things, now our generation is growing up either being or feeling as if they are totally inept and not exactly up to the task of child-rearing.

I'm not sure if that's true, but I am becoming increasingly sure that Hollywood is trying to make us think that we, Generation-Y'ers (I'm 30 and so I still count. Barely.) inept and stupid and incapable of raising child, and all we are confronted with are similarly fucked up models on television and film. Now, granted, that's interesting to watch. There's nothing particularly interesting about watching two income-earners in their early thirties semi-successfully juggling work, fun, occasional intercourse, and parenting. I get that. We'd much rather watch 16-year-olds picking up their children by their feet as if they were gorilla babies.

Wouldn't we?

If You Took My TV Away...

...I would cry.

And I didn't even cry at Aunt Mickey's funeral. But I would cry if you took my TV away.

Taking my TV away during the Olympics would be an especially cruel thing to do. If you took my TV away while the Olympics were on, I would not only cry, but I would set fire to your pubes and kick over all the gravestones of your ancestors and take a shit in your mailbox.

There would be Mad Apron. Mad, I tell you.

Some people are able to pinpoint exactly how much TV they watch in a given week. I really don't know how much TV I watch, and whether it's a lot or a little in comparison to, say, the average American my age or, say, the average 2-year-old. Honest to God-- last night, when my wife and I were driving home from a particularly putrid rehearsal, we passed a Scion xA being driven by a Brittany Spearsalike and there was a huge (for a car) TV screen, probably about eight inches playing some insipid children's crap to entertain her toddler in the back seat.

Her toddler, motherfuckers, her toddler. I'll bet, however much TV I watch, I watch less than that kid.

I enjoy an eclectic variety of programming.

COPS
The Today Show
Project Runway (love me my Tim Gunn)
Jeopardy!
Teen Mom (at least it's not "Jersey Shore")
Antiques Roadshow

Strangely enough, the only show on this list that I love unconditionally, without qualm or complaint, is COPS. I could watch COPS 24 hours a day, which I admit is a bit unsettling, but I like it for the same reason that the cops on it like being cops: because you never know what is going to happen, and even the most banal, benign situation can turn exciting in a heartbeat.

All the other shows that I watch, I watch with at least one great reservation. You know my beef with The Today Show, and that beef's name is (come on, say it with me now): "Meredith Vieira." Yes, we despise that leathery, sychophantic, post-menopausal twig-woman. Yes, we do.

Project Runway I am very much taken with. I love the drama, the cattiness, the gayness, the bleeped-out-ness, the Gunn-ness, I even love me some Klum-ness. But I cannot stand that product placement. The "Thank you, Mood!" and the Garnier hair salon, the Loreal Paris make-up room, the Bluefly.com accessory wall ("thoughtfully!") and the shots of the stupid HP compu-notepad in every fucking episode that none of the designers actually like using. The product-placement on that show is atrocious. Still, I make it work.

My problem with Jeopardy! is Alex Trebek, mostly. I don't particularly fancy his holier-than-thou attitude, and he's gay without being gay, and that's annoying to me. My biggest problem with the show, though, isn't even Alex, it's the terrible, awkward, stilted, painful interviews that he insists on conducting after the show returns from its first commercial break with the Aspergian, wall-eyed, socially-retarded contestants.

Alex: "So-- I understand that at one time you had a very interesting experience on a camping trip in the Kodiak Mountains..."

Dork With Ponytail and Buck-Teeth: "Um... well, yes, Alex. Actually, um, it was me and several of my Mensa compatriots... we, um, were doing a study on the effects of, er, high-altitude conditions on scrod and, well, um... one of us got a splinter and contracted AIDS and, well, we forgot the scrod back at our lab and we, er, ended up watching old "Golden Girls" episodes on my my friend's iPhone. Well, he's not actually my friend. But I secretly love him."

Fascinating. Will somebody please shove a pickle fork through my left eye now?

Teen Mom is almost the perfect show. It's got comedy, drama, little sluts running around half-dressed, behaving badly and screaming at their martini-loving mothers. What's not to like? However, there are far too many commercials. It's an hour show, and there's around sixteen minutes of actual content, if you can call it that. And that's not cool. Plus, if there's going to be that many goddamn commercials, they should all be for local gynecologists offices, Pampers, and Nuva-vag.

Antiques Roadshow is a show that I thoroughly enjoy, even though it tends to be soporific, and I admit that it's hard to justify liking a show that you can fall asleep during, but I really do love it. Maybe I'm just a sucker for an early 20th century 18-karat white gold Patek Philippe pocket watch, but I can't get enough of that shit. I don't like the following things about Antiques Roadshow:

1.) When people bring in shit that they think is old and find out it's fake. I know you'd think I'm the kind of asshole who would revel in other people's embarrassment, but really, I don't. I get so embarrassed for them it's hard for me to look at the TV.

2.) When people say, "Oh, I'd never sell it!" after hearing that their signed Babe Ruth jit-rag is worth $7.6 million dollars. Fuck you, you saggy old lizard-- of course you're going to sell it.

3.) The segments that they do half-way through the episode where Mark L. Walberg interviews some dried-up motherfucker about goddamn windmills or boot spurs or something. And who the fuck is Mark L. Walberg anyway?