I can;t stand soap operas. I’ve never sat through a whole episode, and I can’t believe some people enjoy that slop.
I’m going with Good Luck Charlie. My sisters watch it all the time, and I despise the mother. She’s so irritating!
Well I can’t say I’ve seen them but these horrible exploitation reality shows on MTV like Super Sweet 16 and 16 and Pregnent make me want to throw up.
There is also a show over here in the UK named The Jeremy Kyle Show which is similar in format to The Jerry Springer Show but without the staged fights and a more serious outlook. They usually have some stereotypical council estate types or chavs in a situation which either involves a cheating boyfriend/girlfriend or finding out the father of a child with DNA results expected. It’s like the modern-day equivalent of a 1800s freak show in my eyes. Some of the guests on the show have annoying accents, scruffy clothes, bad teeth and often have some hilarious arguments. It is really embarrassing, I can’t imagine why anyone would volunteer to appear on that show. I don’t want to sound like I’m making fun of these people whatsoever by the way, I’m just describing my view on what the show is like.
I also cannot stand those live-action TV shows on Disney Channel because they all have the same format. Lame jokes, annoying characters, crap acting and that IRRITATING laugh track that plays when something isn’t even funny. My sister watches them all the time but I can’t trash her for having taste. I personally find those shows bloody ridiculous though.
MTV is a despicable scourge.
That it is. I can not believe in a TV show about pregnant teen agers. When did that become an accomplishment?
While I don’t watch that certain show, I’m glad it exists.
Because it doesn’t glamorize teenage pregnancy. Quite the opposite. The teens are absolutely miserable. It shows how difficult it is to hold a relationship as a teenage parent, how financially burdensome children are. How it makes school and family life extremely difficult.
Studies have shown that it’s actually one of the factors as to why teen pregnancy rates are going down.
I’m terribly sorry to say that my guilty pleasures Beavis & Butthead and Celebrity Deathmatch are MTV productions.
But I absolutely hate Jackass. While it’s fun (in a morbid way) to see them do physical stunts, some of the pranks are scatological in nature (my brother described to me a scene of an exploding volcano which is later revealed to be, uh, something else). Plus, it encourages irresponsible behaviour.
A great stunt show would be Nik Wallenda’s Danger By Design on Discovery Channel, which shows a true professional who carefully plans his stunts before attempting them. You get to see a lot of preparation, science (yes, folks, you need to know physics and trigonometry to be a death defier) and teamwork that go into his daredevil feats.
I’m sure Johnny Ob-Knox-cious-ville and his band of buttheads have safety consultants too, but they don’t give that impression to the viewers and a lot of their acts seem like spur-of-the-moment things.
Funnily enough, somebody I used to go to school with went on that because he’d cheated on his girlfriend. I find the show really irritating. Nobody has proper conversations, they just yell at each other until Jeremy Kyle yells at them. Sometimes people are accused of just plain criminal behaviour and you can’t help but wonder why they didn’t call the police (I suppose going on TV is a chance to publicly humilitate them). And sometimes its blatantly obvious that the programme makers are trying to rile the guests up into fighting.
Whoa, you know someonen who went on the show? Crazy!
Shows like this one you’re talking about and the American versions are just ugh. They’re not even helping the problem, they just make it way worse.
That is pretty much it. They just exploit them for TV audiences rather than help them.
Exactly, exploitation .That’s the word for this whole situation.
Some people are into schadenfreude really. Hence why soaps and Jeremy Kyle shows are popular. I think there’s a facebook group out there which basically says “No matter how awful my life becomes I will never go on Jeremy Kyle” somewhere though.
I’m not into that for my media consumption. I mean it’s practically a reason why I can’t get into SOAPS even. People are always being terrible to one another, and no-one’s happiness will last long- instead they’ll have to stick the character on a bus for that to happen and never see them again. I mean yeah good stories mean conflict but I kind of think there can be other ways besides people cheating on each other all the time with a serial killer or abuser perhaps cropping up here and there.
Sometimes people can have fun together without setting people on fire or cheating on their spouses! Just a thought.
In soaps it seems like almost everyone is terrible- and all the good people either have terrible things happen to them or even die. We see enough of that in real life. It’s not really emotionally satisfying to me even if it is ~realistic. (Though TBH one area being THAT messed up isn’t that realistic in all honesty. It makes you think that the police would build a station on site just to deal with all the domestic disturbances.)
Also soaps are about following a particular neighbourhood or area usually and so it really -never ends-. I’m kind of with Bryan (or was it Mike) who created ATLA on that one- a story that NEVER ends is just not enjoyable. At all.
Yeah, I dislike how constantly miserable soaps are. I know that they sometimes throw in the odd comedy moment to try and lighten things up, but its still too miserable to be enjoyable. And the never-ending thing is a problem- it means that unlike other stories they don’t really plan out character arcs. I mean, they only plan ahead a year or so, and have to adapt the story to the needs of the cast, who might not renew their contracts. So you end up with stupid stuff like Eastenders, where characters rarely learn from their mistakes and couples get together and break up again about twenty times. It’s especially annoying when they forget horrible things they’ve done to each other and act like a character’s a good guy when they’ve done things that in real life would make them the most hated person in the community.
My sister watches Eastenders, so I’ve ended up seeing quite a bit of it. I find it really hard to watch some of the storylines though. They’ve been dragging out a story about a teenage girl who wants her baby out of social services for months now, and its relentlessly miserable and unrealistic. You can’t even defend it as social commentary because it doesn’t really reflect people’s experiences.
I feel the same way. One thing that makes me laugh is when the characters act shocked when young hoodlums are causing a mild distrubance, as though they don’t live the murder hotspot of the UK. Like, get your priorities straight.
As for the whole ‘never-ending’ story thing, I feel like that’s a problem superhero comics suffer from. I kind of liked The Dark Knight Rises because it at least gave Bruce Wayne an ending. That said, comics at least have the advantage of reboots and alternate universe scenarios to stop things from becoming too stale. And at least they have exciting adventures rather than episode after episode of domestic misery.
No offense to its many fans, but I always thought As the World Turns was overrated. Though I respect the creators of the show, they made a new episode almost everyday for 54 years. That’s a long running show and they had a new episode almost every day! But I always found it boring and a drag to watch, but I can’t believe it went on that long and had a new episode every day.
This is the first I’ve heard of that show, and it does look kind of boring. I guess managing to keep it going for so long is impressive.
Speaking of shows with many fans, I didn’t realise how many people liked the cartoon Arthur. I was really surprised when I looked it up on the internet one day and found out loads of people love it. But I never liked it as a kid. I found the characters annoying and hypocritical (like, one episode they’d do something bad, the next episode they’d be lecturing their friend for doing something bad as though they were holier-than-thou). And I found a lot of the episodes just plain boring and unfunny. But I guess it’s not one of the worst shows ever. I hear it sometimes tackles difficult subject matter, so I guess they get some credit for that. I don’t think I’ll ever understand the show’s appeal though.
Aw. weird character designs aside, I loved Arthur!
Seeing how many people loved it made me reconsider my stance a bit. It’s still not to my liking, but I don’t find it as annoying as I used to. Plus Neil Gaiman appeared in it once, which is a plus 
The character designs are a bit weird aren’t they? I used to get confused by Arthur and Brain- I couldn’t figure out if they were supposed to be mice or bears. I think it’s funny how the very first Arthur book is about how much he hates his aardvark nose, because its completely disappeared since.
I had one of those Living Book CDs of one of the Arthur books as a kid that was pretty cool though.
Yes! Anthromorphic animals always freak me out.
Even those you see in Disney films?
Well, I honestly can’t think of any. Except A Bug’s Life and Winnie the Pooh, both of which I love. Well, Chicken Little. But that’s just dumb.
The worst tv-shows are Cartoon shows.