Blind Prophecy

Well, last night I became one of those people.

To set up: On the way home I’d stopped by the mall to look for some good Halloween-ish movies. Mostly, it was a bust, but I saw Donnie Darko on sale and, well, it was highly recommended to me by the only other Buffy/Angel fans I know in Salt Lake. I also bought the new Laurell Hamilton book in the Anita Blake series because I have to wait until next week to get my next Astonishing X-Men and I needed a fix of somewhat guilty reading. Also, Hamilton is as close as I’m going to get to Halloween porn (offline anyway).

So I get home with my little bundle of goodies and flip through the television guide to see if there’s any reason I should wait to watch Donnie Darko. Now, I know it’s not the greatest show of all time, but I have been enjoying “Life As We Know It” for the past few weeks. What can I say, I think the guys are cute. It’s the biggest reason I watch “Smallville.” Shallow, perhaps, but at least I own it.

Anyway, I decide that I’ll wait until after the show to watch my movie. I flip open Incubus Dreams and ignore reruns of “Joey” and “Will & Grace.” Finally, the appointed time comes around (8 p.m. MST) and I flip over to my local ABC station to find… “Good Things Utah!” WTF? They had replaced the show with possibly the most vapid, banal daytime television talk show I’ve ever seen.

So I got the phone book out and dialed up the station (see? I’m about to become one of those people). I got no answer. So I went down to the basement and logged onto the super-slow home internet and wrote an angry letter to the programming people. By now, it was 8:30 or so, and I tried the station by phone again.

“ABC 4, how can I help you?”
“Hi, yeah, why aren’t you showing ‘Life As We Know It?’”
“It’ll be shown at 11:05, after Nightline, because of the sex.”
“Um, that’s f*cking stupid. You have no problem showing ‘Desperate Housewives’ twice a week during prime time.”
“Would you like to leave a comment on our comment line?”
“Yeah. I guess so. Thanks.”

So I left a comment saying pretty much the same thing on the official comment line. I did my best not to call them backward f*cking morons (or was that f*cking mormons?) – did threaten to stop watching their station altogether – and generally sounded like a petulant ass.

Anyway. Watched Donnie Darko after that and it made me feel better. When I have a chance to rewatch it under a better mood, I may add it to the list of favorite movies.

Finally, after DD, I flipped back to ABC at the appointed hour to see what the big fuss was all about with last night’s episode of “Life As We Know It.” By this point, I’m expecting to see such acts of sexual excess as to dazzle me with orgiastic energy. It was really, really tame. One… that’s right, one couple has sex, not on screen and not even close to as graphically as I’ve seen on a dozen other shows. Several characters talk about sex, sure, but that’s it… talk. And you know what, I was a teenage boy not that long ago. I talked about sex more than these three guys do. Hell, I still talk about sex more than these television characters do.

F*cking morons.

Filed under: livejournal by Jere Keys