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 Favorite TV Show-Deep Space Nine easily makes the list as
one of my favorites. And it is blatantly superior to Paramount's other Star Trek
spin-off Voyager. It looks like after seven seasons this much abused, much maligned,
and much sabotaged show is finally coming to an end. This show, started the same time as
one of my other favorites Babylon 5, and stars Avery
Brooks, of Spenser for Hire  (Another Classic Show) fame, this
guy is one of my favorite actors. A classic, Shakespearean actor, when he is on, he
is on. However, I have not always cared for him in this show, his acting in
the early seasons, bordered not just on the self conscious, but the down right bad.
He seemed very uptight and unsure in the role. However, in the past few seasons he's
blossomed in this role. And the show has blossomed.
This has grown into a great science
fiction show, however due to the fact that this show has jumped around so much in
syndication its almost impossible to find, add to that the bad hours it gets in
Syndication and the lousy editing, it's virtually disappeared.
My local station (what a bunch of boobs, they mess up the
audio, butcher the show to squeeze more commercials in, went so far as to put ads on
during the show. Just a lousy station on numerous shows. Baltimore's channel 45 and 54
respectively. Owned by a Baltimore company (conglomerate) which has been acquiring a rash
of stations in the last couple of years. The Sinclair Broadcasting Group (boo!! hiss!!)
under their leadership these stations have just become plain bad.
And while we're on the
subject of Sinclair broadcasting how about taking the porno commercials off, this isn't
cable you know. Don't get me wrong I'm all in favor of sex, but not where kids can have
easy access to it. Not where kids can be shaped by it. I'm not a father, I'm just a man and a human being, who
remembers the joy TV gave me in my formative years. We had Underdog and Rocky and
Bullwinkle and Speed Racer when I got home from school on the weekdays, now kids have
Ricky lake and Jerry Springer and Change of Heart. On weekends, on Saturdays, every
network carried a whole day full of cartoons, positive proactive fun programs, like
Shazam, Fat Albert, Lone ranger, Super Friends, the old black and white Superman. Now do
you know what children have on Saturdays, they have news, and talkshows, and infomercials.
They have greed, they have a company's greed and a society's cynicism. And
I blame the networks, and I blame companies like Sinclair, all of us, every single one,
have to make choices in our life. Whether to be part of the problem, or part of the
solution. Too often when you get a group of people together, a company, a mob, a
senate, a Supreme Court, it
becomes very easy to pass the buck, to try and distance yourself from the choices you
make, to surrender individual mores of right and wrong to some fabricated group persona.
To use the shield of the many, to justify the crimes of the one. But in the end it's the
same thing, it's a mob mentality, where we do questionable things because we are too
afraid to exert our individuality, our morality, and say... this is wrong. This is
repugnant. this is not acceptable.
Another
thing that kills me, selling sex is illegal when some poor teenager, some poor individual,
does it to one guy in a hotel room, but somehow when a company sells it, solicits it, over
the airwaves to millions, that's business. Do you see, do you see how
the individual morality is swallowed, corrupted, bastardized in the interest of some group
morality. When fox makes money doing shows on prostitutes, doesn't that make them pimps.
We call an individual who profits off a woman selling herself, a pimp. But when a Sinclair
Broadcasting does it, when a fox does it we call it ratings. We call it policy. We
call it acceptable, and it's not.
It's a crock,
companies like Sinclair, media companies, need to be held accountable. Not tobacco
companies, not gun manufacturers. You want to do something right, look at your television,
find what offends you, and stand against it. Write letters, complain. Complain to
the stations, complain to your representatives, complain to the FCC. And more importantly,
if you own mutual funds, or if you own stocks, if you are invested in these companies,
pull your money. Hit them with the only language a mob understands, reprisals on a
personal level. Name, names, and point fingers. Bring the individuals behind the
policy into the light, and watch them scurry like cockroaches.
Whenever I think of just
plain bad companies, immoral companies. I always tend to remember one saying, it goes:
"whatever you do, do with all your might". And you can always tell people or
companies that don't live by this motto, this call to excellence. And you can also tell
the ones who do.
So yes, thanks to immoral companies, more and more quality programming vanishes
off of television. To be replaced no doubt with more infomercials, and more
telephone hookers. DS9 breathes its last this summer, and ,thanks to
Sinclair, virtually no one has been able to see the last season, unless, like me, you're
an insomniac and stay up till 1 in the morning. But hopefully like the
original Star Trek and like Babylon 5, it can find a new life after its
death. Doing movies, or
specials, for one of the few quality motivated stations left. TNT.
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