Reality Shows

Given our celebrity culture, I am frequently amazed at who we admire and of whom we are envious. Television influences us more than we realize-- which is why I confine my TV watching to sporting events and the occasional PBS special!

But I read about television and its shows, just in case I find something interesting, but mostly to justify my decided lack of interest. So there I was the other day, reading a review of a TV show-- and I found myself reading good writing! How did THAT happen?! Mary McNamara wrote an intelligent review of a show that is either unintelligent or unintelligible, I don't know which.

Here's the line that hooked me: "So it's true then. John Updike is dead and we are left with 'The Real Housewives of Orange County'." Well, yes, and we were left with them even when Updike was alive, but even he could not have written about them in any way that was redeeming.

But curiously, even as she skewers those lamentable housewives (who admits to be being a "housewife" any more?; and is this what "housewifery" has come to?), McNamara is almost sympathetic in her prose: "They embody the moral, spiritual and intellectual anorexia that writers have grappled with for years, but in terms a child can understand. Cheever for Dummies." "Hedda Gabler left the building years ago; these heroines are tragic only in their lack of consciousness." "[T]hese women will no doubt remain right where we want them to be: trapped in the fabulous shabbiness of their lives, having conversations that run back and forth like trained rats along dim and narrow mazes of the mundane. Which is precisely why we will always need our poets."

Ah, yes, our poets... Surely emptiness and vacuity are not confined to Orange County and its families (for don't vacuous men find vacuous women attractive?). Maybe the OC is more like a cultural Void into which vacuity flows and collects? But which poet among us can make meaninglessness meaningful?

McNamara did not seem to know one. I don't. I'm waiting for the "Real Bards of Orange County" on PBS...