Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Fat to Chew

Commercials for prescription medication often say things like "tell your doctor if you have asthma or heart disease". Such statements are intended to alert patients of possible side effects associated with taking the advertised drug when one also suffers from a particular medical condition. But it doesn't make a lot of sense. After all, shouldn't your doctor be telling you that you have asthma or heart disease and not the other way around? What's a doctor for, anyway?

Television executives appear to have learned by now that fat, annoying guys who act stupid all the time can't stay married to intelligent, beautiful women. Not long ago, we were apparently supposed to believe this but the litany of programs purporting such a premise has diminished. Now we're merely expected to believe that in those roaring late Nineties and Early Noughties, corpulent dopes could not only attract a smart beauty with a great personality but remain married to her throughout the course of an seven or eight season run.

Of course a clever, attractive woman might dig an overweight guy. She might like a dopey guy. She might carry a torch for a guy who was supremely irritating and always screwed things up. But combine all of those traits and the notion that she would get married--and more critically, stay married--to such a person. Well, no wonder Reality TV did so well during that period. It was canned, contrived, forced, boring, reveled in ignorance, but it was easier to swallow than the fiction.

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