Plugged in and ready to fall

Well, I’m into my second week at Skylight Financial and so far the experience has been relatively painless. I wasn’t all that thrilled about returning to the exciting world of customer support, but it’s not like I had a whole lot of options. The job market’s in worse condition than Paul F. Tompkin’s liver, so it’s like I basically had a choice between answering phone calls in an air-conditioned office, or break-dancing on the streets for hot meals. (Note: my b-boy moves aren’t quite smooth enough for the last option to be considered a viable career move. If I had to take it to the streets, I would get served both endlessly and mercilessly)

The people in the office seem okay for the most part. The only person I’m not too wild about is Rosalind, the sour-faced supervisor. She’s so relentlessly joyless and angry that I’m afraid to stand too close to her for fear of bring sucked into her swirling vortex of misery. I can’t help but wonder what could have happened in her life to make her such an unpleasant person.

Anyway, enough about my boring job, and on to what I really came hear to talk about; Last Comic Standing. After watching tonight’s episode, I only have four words to say.

Bret. Butler. Is. Awesome.

I loved that moment of pure, unfiltered honesty and emotion, when she threw her mic on the table and stormed out of the studio after Dan Naturman’s name wasn’t announced. Butler was fucking livid, and I think she had every right to be. I mean, am I alone in thinking that it’s not cool to bring the judges on the show and not bother telling them that the producers are the ones who really pick the comics?

Don’t get me wrong; I admire Peter Engel’s truly impressive contributions to television (After all, this is the underrated genius who gave us TNBC classics like Hang Time, and California Dreams), but he totally dropped the ball here. If he’d been upfront with the judges he could have avoided the whole “LCS is rigged!” controversy. I hear Drew Cary is still pissed about what happened. Apparently he went to the press with his complaints about the show soon after tonight’s episode was taped.

Watching Last Comic Standing reminded me of something that’s been bothering me for quite a while: People who say that they hate reality shows. I never understood this statement. I could understand someone saying, “I don’t like that particular reality show,” or “I think some of these shows are contrived and boring,” but lumping them all into the same category- regardless of content- as “the single worst thing to ever happen to television” is going too far.

It’s not like I’m some huge reality show nut. I couldn’t care less about The Bachelor, and even though I’ve seen a couple of seasons of Survivor, It’s not something that I would consider to be “appointment television.” In fact, I go out of my way to avoid 95% of the reality shows currently on TV because most of them just aren’t very good.

But to completely write off the entire genre as worthless crap borders on elitist snobbery. That’s like saying “Oh, I hate all sitcoms.” All sitcoms? Really? How is that possible when a sitcom could mean anything from Seinfeld, to, Black Adder, or The Office? They’re not all the same, so to make such a ridiculous generalization totally invalidates your opinion on…well, pretty much anything. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating, but the truth is that I have yet to hear a convincing argument against reality TV that doesn’t sound like uninformed, I’m-only-saying-this-because-it-makes-me-sound-more-intelligent bullshit.