So, did you all have a good vacation?
OK, enough idle chitchat. I have a theory I wish to expound upon. Whenever I go home from college, I tend to spend an inordinate amount of time watching television. I guess the simple pleasures and hometown charms of good ol’ Junction City just don’t fill me with the same sense of wonder and whimsy they used to. Of course, when you come from a town where the only thing open after 10 p.m. is the Chevron (except on Sundays) and the biggest thing happening on a Saturday night involves a shotgun, a flashlight and a large, ditch-dwelling vermin known as a nutria, cable television will beat hometown charm any day of the week.
So television it was. I have an overpowering distaste for the medium, stemming from the poor quality of writing, the irritating repetition of clichés and the nagging suspicion that I am being hypnotized through the subliminal coordination of flashing lights emitting from the screen. But this usually passes after a few minutes.
Through these bouts of television I always discover anew a fact that is often considered common knowledge: Ninety percent of everything is crap. With this in mind, the key is to find out what is worthwhile. So I came up with a hard and fast rule for watching television that seems to work with a decent level of accuracy (this is the theory I was speaking of above. You remember, right? Right?). The rule is: Animated sitcoms are the best-written and funniest shows on television. Can we all agree on that? Good.
Proof of this theory is pretty easy to come by. Think of all of the animated television shows that have been on the air in the past five years. How many of them sucked? I rest my case. It is possible to come up with a few bad apples in the bunch, but these are in the minority. Imagine that — a form of television in which the good outweighs the bad. And thanks to the wonders of digital technology, I no longer have to actually watch television on a regular basis in order to enjoy the cream of this particular crop. The boom of television shows being released on DVD has brought with it the pleasures of commercial-free viewing of good television at my convenience. And nothing pads out a DVD collection like a few well chosen box sets.
It has in fact come to the point where I no longer have to watch television stations to see the shows I like. Buying the DVDs of my favorite shows has actually lowered the amount of television I watch to almost nonexistent levels. Funny how the world works.
While there are plenty of shows out there worth watching, a few stand out far above the rest. “Futurama” stands out for its endlessly inventive writing and appealing visual style, even if it does start to falter a bit in its final season. “Family Guy” is like “All in the Family” on a three-day crack-bender and has actually come up with a new sort of visual gag — the brief flashback — that I do not believe I’ve ever seen on television. These shows are of course followers to that godhead of animated television, “The Simpsons,” about which nothing more really needs to be said. These shows actually seem to work better on the DVD format than on television because their scattershot approach to comedy makes them endlessly watchable.
A few other shows stand out, such as the understated humor of “King of the Hill” or any number of oddities found on Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim” programming. Another show I’ve recently gotten into is “Invader Zim,” a Nickelodeon program that has been released on DVD. The show is more kid oriented than most of the shows mentioned above, but this hardly detracts from its values. It is one of those rare children’s shows that doesn’t insult the intelligence of its audience, nor does it create a sugar-coated view of the childhood it depicts. Instead, it imagines childhood, particularly public education, as a freakish sci-fi world full of equally freakish children.
Some of the plot lines even push the boundaries of children’s programming. In the episode “Dark Harvest,” the diminutive alien invader of the show’s title steals the organs of his fellow students at the public school he is hiding out in. The purpose of this is to look as much like a real human as possible so he can pass a health examination. The show actually condenses an entire horror film plot into fifteen minutes, yet remains funny enough to be palatable for children. Check it out, it will be worth your while.

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