Watching Smallville the other day — yes, I’m still doing that, they don’t have patches for it or anything — I was struck by how the show has never done anything surprising ever. It often teases you, makes you think “oooh, Clark’s going to do something shocking” or somesuch, and then it takes a quick turn back into conventional-land and things go on in much the same way they did last week and will do next week.

A good show should bring you to a point where you say “They’ll never do that”, pretend to fake out of it, then damn well do it anyway. I’m getting sick of watching TV that seems like it was put together by statistics. It’s still better than reality TV, just not by much.

Speaking of the foul scourge that is Reality TV, I heard a reality TV star talking about how this new… phenomenon… was so much better than written dramas because no writer could possibly come up with the stuff that just happens naturally on reality TV. I suspect she got confused with “would want to”. If there are really people in this world who enjoy a bunch of losers — and by losers I mean the sort of people who’d agree to go on TV and eat slugs/get locked up for weeks/live on an island — doing the same old crap that we do at home, but with close-ups, then I’m saddened.

Well.

On a lighter side, my brother has gone on holidays for a week. This is very sad. Not because I’ll miss him, but because he’s taken the Xbox. So I might write more reviews this week. I’m trying to review a computer game but they’re trickier than other reviews. It might end up just like a film review with an extra section at the end saying — oh, and the person on the screen moved where I told them to. Hmmm.

319

This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Sunday, December 5th, 2004. It concerns such pressing issues as . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.