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Is It Good for You? Just Call It "Must-Flee TV"By Rick Horowitz It's all much too much, he's thinking. The seaminess, the sordidness, the altogether greasy feeling that comes from spending his days peeping through the national keyhole. Tonight, it's different. Tonight, he puts down the transcripts. He tosses aside the scandal-soaked newspapers, the ever-more-lurid magazine accounts. Tonight he opts for wholesomeness! He climbs the stairs, fluffs the pillows and settles in for an evening of: televised sports. It's a magical season, the experts have been saying -- not just because of all those incredible athletic feats, but as an escape from all this other business, too, this business that does nothing but lower our standards and coarsen our culture. He's all for culture and standards, absolutely, though he's not so sure about the experts. For most of the season, he realizes, he's been perfectly able to root and rot simultaneously. Tonight, though, an escape is exactly what he needs, and the network is happy to have him. In fact, the network is so happy to have him, and so eager to entice him back, that it takes advantage of every break in the action to promote other shows it'll be offering on other evenings. Sometimes there are two, three, even four promotions in quick succession; it's all he can do to keep all the details straight, to remember which enticing highlight belongs to which particularly inviting show. In the first highlight, a beautiful woman is standing there in her brassiere. Actually, when the highlight begins, she's standing there in her shirt, but the man she's with -- the star of the show -- helps her unbutton her shirt; then she's standing there in her brassiere. In the next scene, she's lying on the bed waiting for him, while he's in the bathroom preparing himself and comparing his imminent encounter to walking on the moon. In the final scene, the woman is still lying there, and the star of the show is in the room, too, and he's leaping at her -- only now he's wearing a space suit. That's the first one. In the second one, a man and a woman are having an argument on the job. They're arguing about which one of them wants to see the other one of them naked, and how badly each of them wants that. Finally -- in frustration or sarcasm or something else entirely, one of them shouts, "I really want to see you naked!" -- just as a third person enters the room. That's supposed to be the funny part -- the third person entering the room at just the right moment -- and the prerecorded audience finds it particularly amusing. That's the second one. The third one is another office scene. There's a man at a desk complaining about how bad things are, and how things can't possibly get any worse, when another man comes in and announces that the first man has to collect urine samples from everybody. That's the third one. The last one -- he's starting to get a bit fuzzy-headed now, but he's pretty sure it's the last one -- takes place over food somewhere. Somebody is saying something about somebody having a problem, and somebody else reaches into her bowl of pasta, holds up a limp and lifeless piece of spaghetti and says she knows exactly what the problem is. (This is not a cooking show.) That's the fourth one. They'll be heading back to the ballgame any time now. At the top of the stairs, surrounded by pillows, he turns up the volume and he smiles. Isn't it nice to get away from all that seamy, sordid stuff? Posted
10/9/98. Fresh stuff right here twice
weekly!
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