Sharon and I recently moved to a new house, which resulted in a switch from Speakeasy DSL to RCN cable. As a result, we now have a TV signal coming into our house. Strangely, I don’t think I have ever lived in a building with a cable connection, except for a 6 month stint in graduate school when I was busy enough building robots that I don’t remember what room my roommates had the TV in.
But now, I get to explore television as a visitor from the mid-80s. Here’s what I remember from 1984 or so:

• The Jeffersons: a show about a family with the last name “Jefferson”
• Rhoda: a show about a woman named “Rhoda”
• The Dukes of Hazzard: a show about a family with the last name “Duke” who live in Hazzard County. To liven things up, these Dukes engage in hazardous motoring in an orange car. This makes the name of the show a pun.

Now, show titles are abbreviated: CSI, ER, 24, NCIS. I don’t know what these shows are about, but from the ads I’ve seen, they’re about law enforcement and medical emergencies. We now have multiple editions, like CSI: Miami and CSI: New York. There appear to be a lot of shows about law enforcement, but that may be just an illusion induced by shows with opaque titles like Naruto (from a tv.com summary, I gather: a demon fox, an evil spirit trapped inside a baby, and “shinobi,” which is a word I don’t know). With the exception of the evil spirit trapped in the baby, which is creepy, these are trends that I expect to see in America, the land of the fearful, where Sarah Palin gets airtime. I’m happy to report that despite 150 channels, I don’t feel like I’ve missed much in the last 20 years.

However, I did discover something new that I didn’t expect: the glorification of the mistreatment of kids. One instantiation is “The Principal’s Office.” Pitched as a reality TV show on TruTV (I guess “tru” is the reality TV version of “true”), the episode I saw followed a high school principal around the halls as he caught kids beating on each other. The kids were taken to the principal’s office, where he yelled at them, and the kids squirmed in a mix of resentment and embarrassment. It’s obvious that the presence of a camera escalates the conflict between the kids and the principal, so we can safely assume that the goal of the show isn’t to document a good principal at work. All that leaves is a man yelling at kids. The “man yelling” part doesn’t bother me in the least, but I don’t like the “at kids” part. “Hey, troubled kid, if you let us humiliate you on national TV, we’ll give you $200.” (Review from the Boston Globe with some more details.)

The second show is one on FuelTV called Camp Woodward. It’s a thinly disguised advertisement for a sports camp in Pennsylvania that focuses on skateboarding, BMX and rollerblading. In the episode fraction I saw, one of the counselors explains that when he’s at home in Florida skateboarding by himself, he doesn’t throw tantrums, but when he’s trying to teach kids to skate, if he can’t land tricks, he gets angry and swears. Another section of the show details the tribulations of a 13-year-old who thinks his $100 for food has been stolen by rollerbladers. After being berated by his mom via cell phone, he finds his money in his shorts pocket. He repeats the lesson that he has learned that you should deposit all your money at the camp canteen as soon as you can, lest someone steal it.

Both of these shows mystify me– I don’t understand why suffering kids are now fair game for entertainment.

Morbid prediction: a reality show with the following theme will be produced in the next decade: life of a child soldier or life in a refugee camp. I think that’s the bottom, and I don’t see what else is going to stop us.