Unreality TV

I spent a nearly worthless evening doing something I don’t do very much: Watching fiction on network television. Not quite sure what moved me to throw time down that particular hole tonight. Maybe I was just too lazy to reach for the remote. Anyway, my two selections on this eve were CSI: Miami and The China Syndrome.

Prior to this evening I had not sat through more than 5 consecutive minutes of a CSI episode. Now I know why. I’ve seen bits and pieces of the other CSI franchises: New York and Las Vegas. David Caruso fronts the Miami flavor, which is part of the problem. William Petersen and Gary Sinise front the other two. Petersen has genuine talent (great example of this is the original version of Red Dragon, called Manhunter) and Sinise is unpretty enough to look like a cop. Caruso comes off as a game show host with really bad lines. Some carrot-topped cracker more wooden and stiff than a chest of drawers, floundering his way through a script so slick it doesn’t stick to anything.

My real reason for detesting CSI: Miami isn’t Mr. Freckles. First, the older I get the more I object to the continued selling of homicide as entertainment. In between the scenes we get drive-by overhead money shots of glamorous Miami, false advertising at its finest. Second, when the crime happens a 20-something with 8% body fat shows up in a Hummer to test for epithelial cells and DNA, which is slung back to the lab for a complete return (with color photographs of the perp) within an hour or two. Apparently David Caruso yelling “Dammit, I need that right away!” tends to negate the laws of chemistry. In real life you get a chain-smoking, pot-bellied guy in an 8 year old Crown Victoria bitching the whole way through about getting yanked out of bed. Ah, but Ares, it’s just television, you say. Yes, I know that and you, the four readers of this blog, know that. But the mouth-breathing, front half of the intelligence bell curve, mental midgets that inhabit the larger portions of our world have a difficult time distinguishing between the two dimensional and the three dimensional worlds. Somehow, that notion tapers my entertainment gradient significantly. Damn I’m getting old.

The nugget that followed was The China Syndrome. I must have been really, really lazy to not reach for the remote when a Jane Fonda movie came on. My justification was that it got a bunch of Oscar nominations, I’d never seen it before, and I wanted to see just how much of a boogey man they made the power industry. Gotta love any movie where there are murderous goons at the beck and call of corporate white guys. Some of the freeway scenes were a little déjà vu, made me think I was watching CHiPS. Best part for me was when the fire department was at the scene of the car accident: It was Engine 51 and Squad 51. (“Dix, we’re gonna need and IV with ringers lactate.”) Then when the SWAT team arrives at the power plant it’s the same stinking van from the series. It was a prop-vehicle reunion.

According to Wikipedia, the movie came out twelve days before the Three Mile Island incident. In a shocking move that will never be replicated, the movie was actually pulled from some theaters because they didn’t want to look like they were profiting from it. If a similar movie were made today, and a melt down occurred two weeks later, there would be producers lined up out the door of the closest church, hitting their knees to thank god and slip big fat thank-you checks into the collection plate. Still, the movie must have had some effect. In 1979 we’d just gotten the economic crap kicked out of us by OPEC, yet we embraced the more expensive alternative. No reactors have been built since. Even knowing the plot devices were bogus I still got sucked into the movie a bit. There’s something about all things nuclear that is hard-wired (forgive me) into our fear centers. The movie reminded me of another one I saw as a kid called Special Bulletin. That movie scared the shit out of me. Mom, in case you’re reading this, I was probably too young to watch that one. It gave me cold sweat, toss-and-turn nightmares for months. I hope David Caruso doesn’t do the same thing.

Ares