state of the television

I've been known to have a love/hate relationship with the TV shows that I watch...it's kind of unavoidable considering how involved and emotionally invested I get. I tend to take it a little hard when storylines suck, when characters are being butchered, and when I just perceive the writers and producers and actors to just not be doing a good job. And on the flipside, when things are good, TV can make me incredibly happy.

Lately though? I feel as though I've been let down so much that I'm actually starting to not care. The OC has become completely uninteresting, Alias is still a shell of its former self, Desperate Housewives is getting tiring, and Joan of Arcadia ruined Adam, one of my favorite characters. I'm not even mentioning that Rory on Gilmore Girls has been long on her way to annoying-Joey-Potter-perfection, and that there's a serious dearth of science-fiction/fantasy shows on the air right now (you can argue with me on this, but I don't feel as if Alias and Lost really count...not yet anyway).

Man, I can't help but miss my high school days when I first started getting obsessed with TV. This was right before reality TV took over, when I felt like the networks had their own personalities. CBS was for older adults, with shows like Touched By an Angel; NBC was Must-See TV, ER, and the West Wing; FOX had all the edgier stuff like the X-files, Dark Angel, and 90210; UPN was home to African-American sitcoms and the WWF; ABC was kind of floundering with a lot of family sitcoms and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire; and the WB targeted teens and young adults, and did a damn job of it.

I watched almost every single show that aired on the WB during my junior and senior years of high school: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Roswell, Felicity, Dawson's Creek, Jack & Jill, Popular, Charmed, Gilmore Girls, Grosse Pointe...add that to the X-files and Dark Angel and well, it was just a good time to be a teen and scifi/fantasy fan who likes TV.

I mean, that's not to say that I'd want to still be watching those kinds of teen shows now...I mean, One Tree Hill, Everwood, and Smallville are continuing the WB teen tradition and I'm not interested in any of them. But I'm not interested in all of the traditionally adult shows like CSI or Law and Order or any medical drama either. I guess part of the problem is that I don't identify with the main age groups anymore...I'm out of high school (and college, almost), but I'm not a working person with a family either. And I definitely miss the scifi/fantasy...there hasn't been anything good since Firefly and Jake 2.0 and Wonderfalls, all which were cancelled.

I do seem to still care enough about TV to write monumentally long posts like this one though...