The Ridiculous Extent of Morbidity in Television

It was around 2.45pm when I was sitting in the living-room drinking a cup of tea for breakfast and lunch, slumped in a chair with a depressed and tired mind. The night before I was drinking in the city, a place I fucking despise but still hypocritically enjoy going to, and although there was no hangover this day, there were a lot of regrettable things I had done to reflect on and think about.

On this particular day I was more tired than usual, because of a retarded bike trip to a girl's house at 4 o'clock in the morning. She was leaving to go overseas to study there, and I didn't say goodbye to her properly when our taxi dropped by her house. It was predictable that I would stand in front of her house, bike on the ground, trying to sum up the courage to go knock on her window. And that's exactly what I did before getting on my bike and turning around. So, when I woke up in the afternoon after having at least 5 or 6 irritatingly confusing, alcohol-fueled dreams, I had a handful of things to think about.

Pissed off that The Blues Brothers was rolling its credits when the TV guide clearly stated it finished at 3 o'clock, I searched the 2 – 3 section in hopes of finding some other light-hearted 90's movies dedicated to stay-at-home mums. While glancing at the TV screen occasionally and being surprised by the large amount of cameo appearances (B.B. King, James Brown, Ray Charles, Bo Diddley, Isaac Hayes), I looked down at the night-time programs starting from 8.30. This is around the time the Prime network has that 10 second intermission where their bear mascot, who is never seen in any other place relating to anything, appears on the screen in some colorful bedroom telling the children viewers to fuck off and go to sleep. And this is why: three out of the five free-viewing television stations have TV programs, all at the same time, about murder. The blurb for a show on the ABC network reads: “[character] reinvestigates the death of a vagrant after a second murder raises doubts... (etc.)”. A program on the Ten network reads “what seems like a standard missing-person's case becomes more and more complicated as...”. A blurb for a program on the Prime network reads “Mrs. Barton finds her husband dead at the top of the fields tangled in a fence”, which is so gruesome that it is actually laughable. In fact, I found the relentlessly straightforward Law & Order blurb “A woman's body is found in a city garden” to be hilarious.

So, this is what people consider entertainment. These are the TV shows that people watch on a quiet Friday night while cooking their dinner, eating their dinner, writing down the groceries they need on a shopping list. The desensitization of people is global dark humour.