I Finally Watched TV, And I Need To Wash My Eyeballs

I just returned from a relationship seminar. It’s something my husband and I try to make time for every few years. In our 15 years of marriage, we’ve been to one marriage retreat and two family retreats, just to reset, work on communication, and prioritize. Perhaps it makes it sound like we’re having marital issues, but really we go so we don’t have those issues hit us when we least expect it. We’re a military family, my husband has had more deployments than I can count, we come from two different cultural backgrounds, I didn’t grow up seeing a single successful relationship, ever, and we have two teenaged kids; the fact that we’ve made it this far is damn near a miracle! So when we have an opportunity to get some guidance, and disconnect from society, we take it.

The most surprising part, the part I always forget is coming, is sitting in the hotel room at the end of the day to watch tv and unwind. We don’t have cable at home. In fact, we have very few streaming services, and even less time to veg out in front of the tv, so it’s always entertaining to see what normal people are watching in their spare time.

Before we settled on Die Hard 2, and I will pick any Die Hard movie ANY day, we scrolled past a couple of disturbing options. I’m just wondering, are people REALLY out here watching this?! I’m not going to name shows, because we’ll probably just be fact checked and censored. Again. I just need to know, who on pedophile island is writing all of these television shows about teenaged kids drinking and having sex all the time?? Is this what the nerds who never had any friends think the cool kids were doing? I just don’t understand.

If your show or movie about adolescents is rated for mature adults and you don’t see anything wrong with that, ya done messed up somewhere. You zigged when you should have zagged. You need to go back to your parent’s basement, or your college dorm room futon and try again. That’s just not okay.

If you portray kids doing adult things, you’re a problem. If you produced an animated cartoon in which kids do adult things, you’re a freaking problem. I know adult cartoons are all the rage these days, but there’s a big difference between shows like Archer that portray adults in adult situations, or South Park which shows kids in children’s situations, and other shows that create a sexual, profanity laced, drug and alcohol fueled environment for teenagers and pretend like it’s the norm.

It’s NOT normal. Are there kids out there acting more mature than they really are? Absolutely, but the majority of kids are still just kids. In fact, it seems like a lot of them are watching these shows, listening to celebrities and entertainers on social media, and being exposed to concepts they’re simply not mature enough to handle or understand.

Professional athletes, a good portion of whom have never even finished high school, and celebrities, who magically manage to adopt all trans kids from foreign countries and want to dress like they’re 20 once they hit their sixties…these are the last people who should be sharing their opinions or shaping society. 

I enjoyed our relationship seminar and I learned a lot. But the trip was also a valuable reminder to maintain my distance from all things mainstream. Television is trash. Movies are trash. Hell, most of social media is trash. If you’ve just accepted that trash as the norm, I urge you to reconsider. If you don’t know whether or not your kid’s shows are trash, baby, they probably are!! I urge you to watch a few episodes and check for yourself!

Then I suggest you to start a letter writing campaign, make some calls, send emails. This is definitely a “can I speak to the manager” moment. These shows are literally shaping the minds of the next generation.

Your kids, nieces, nephews, and even you as an adult, would be better off watching old movies, or having an hour of reading time every night. You could have trivia activities after dinner. You could even watch the grass grow. Literally anything would be better than watching what passes for television entertainment these days.