It's Showtime!

Imagine this: next fall, NBC's Thursday night line-up will showcase your standard Hollywood balloo, including but not limited to a whole-hearted family citcom (young, thin wife marries old balding fat guy) followed by your typical one-hour teen soap (boy meets girl, girl is oblivious to boy's flirtations, boy gets over girl, girl falls for boy...), and--the #1 New Show of the Year-- "TV on TV," a stimulating program in which the viewer watches other viewers watch TV. It's original! All-new! Never been done before!

And oh so realistic.

The thing is, you never see characters on TV actually watching TV in the show. Why?? Because it's boring, uneventful, and straight up a waste of time. Simply put, most Americans would not consider "go to work, come home, heat up dinner in the microwave, watch two hours of crap TV before going to bed" a plot-driven, interesting, event-filled life. So instead, we go through these motions ourselves and look to other, make-believe characters to live out the lives we so secretly desire.

Meanwhile, our asses are getting fatter, our brains our getting dumber, and family? friends? fun? Sorry, we just don't have the energy for all of that...

I say all of this only because I see it happening to myself. I work all day at a job that I love, but by the time I get home, it's 7, 8, 9 o'clock in the evening and I am completely wiped out. So I do what so many of us do in similar circumstances: I scramble up some eggs, grab a blanket, and make myself comfortable. Maybe, if I just lay still long enough, I'll have the energy to write, or return those phone calls, or go to that yoga class. Until then, there's always "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" or "Law and Order: Criminal Intent" to look forward to...

Now if I can only find that damn remote...