Television

I don't even know where to begin.

In the 2 years that I have had Netflix and been able to *ahem* download almost anything, the amount of TV I have watched has skyrocketed. It's just so convenient. We live in a world where all the entertainment you need is at the click of a mouse. Just a few weeks ago I re-watched all 5 seasons of Breaking Bad within the span of a couple days.

That is where I have a problem.

While this amount of convenience is, well, convenient, it can be somewhat soul-sucking to say the least. Even now I have my Netflix tab open and I'm forcing myself to do this assignment instead of watching the entire new season of Orange is the New Black that was uploaded just a couple of days ago. It's like falling into a deep and dark dungeon that I can never escape. I'll be doing homework and maybe I'll take a break to watch a cute little episode of Avatar or Bob's Burgers, but then suddenly I'm at the end of the episode and another will be playing automatically in 13 seconds but I'm not exiting the window (Why aren't you exiting, Liz?!). No, one episode becomes two becomes three becomes the whole season and suddenly I have no work done and it's 3 in the morning and I am the one who has to wake up in the morning for school.

That is the troublesome relationship I have with TV. It takes me on a downward spiral worse than crack. But it isn't crack, it's the magical land of Westeros, or the fabulous life of NY socialites, or Tim Gunn. So why is it such a problem?

For me, I get sucked into an endless black hole of TV whenever I open my laptop. And half of the time, it's not even quality TV that I would regularly watch. Once I watched an entire season of Keeping Up with the Kardashians just because it was there. I don't even like the Kardashians, it was just really convenient for me to watch. This is where I start to draw the line. TV can be wonderful, just like movies or any other form of entertainment. But the minute I start reducing myself to fake-tanned, bottom-feeding trash reality shows then it becomes an issue.

TV, like movies, should be well-imagined, well-filmed, well-acted, well-written entertainment. But more and more as I scroll through my Netflix feed I see shows like the Kardashians, Jersey Shore, Khloe and Kourtney Take Miami, any of The Real Housewives, the list goes on. These kinds of shows are awful, they aren't reality shows that even merit their contestants based on talent like Project Runway or Chopped, they instead glorify stereotyped, catty, trashy women and stupid drama. And yet these are the shows in the 'most popular' section, these are the shows even I'm tempted to click on everyday. Something about these shows are so captivatingly terrible that everyone wants to watch them, the people in them are viewed as stars, and are making millions of dollars.

I'm going to stop supporting shows like that, as tempting as they may be. I'd rather sit down and watch something that has decent quality and effort put into it, instead of exploiting dumb people for entertainment value. In fact, I may just check into rehab and stop watching so much TV altogether (if that's possible).