All Those Channels and Nothing On …

This is going to be one of those articles where I show my age. Monday night I was sitting at home with the family and we were watching “CSI:Miami”. And saw what is arguably the lamest episode they ever put out. In a nutshell, we found out that Wolf, who was kicked off the team in an earlier episode, decides he wants to be a cop after all, makes a predictable speech and comes back and makes another predictable speech to Horatio “Strike a Pose” Cain, who takes him back, all is forgiven. Yawn. But the real issue I had, was the case where the team is able to find a few trace amounts of blood on a boat, and from that are somehow able to get the Coast Guard to help them intercept a drug kingpin. No explanation of how they do that, shoot they don’t even explain how they knew where he was, but oh well. The real problem is that this ‘kingpin’, as soon as they say they know the victim was on his boat, gives up and confesses, not only that he is in fact a drug kingpin, but also that he murdered the victim. I guess Cain gave the guy one of those ‘Perry Mason’ type stares; you know, how Mason was able to get his client off by somehow arranging for The Real Killer^TM to take the stand in court, where the right tone of voice and a hard stare would produce a confession? David Caruso steals the act without so much as a nod to Raymond Burr.

So yeah, there’s a lot of shows where it’s obvious the writers just mail it in, and the same can be said for network news, but the whole thing about CSI was supposed to be all the cool ways forensics could solve cases. No need for soap opera storylines, car chases, ridiculous poses – well, OK, Caruso has always been big on posing whenever he saw a camera, but most of the people on the show don’t do that – the lab and Science were supposed to tell the story. No Science in this episode. Not much acting either, but oh well.

It seems that broadcast television in general has become as drab and low-quality as, say, the New York Times. According to AOL, the top shows right now are:

American Idol
Lost
Dancing With the Stars
24
The Sopranos

Let’s see now, two of the five have no plots whatsoever, one is available only on cable, and of the other 2, even their fans are saying the shows aren’t what they used to be.

Wowzers.

Is it just me, or does TV in general suck?