Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Entertainment Weekly Has Lost Its Mind

The cover story of this week's EW is "TV is King!" They say we're in a golden age of television. Fair enough. With so many more channels and outlets, we're almost guaranteed there will always be something worthwhile on to watch -- you're simply more likely to have a good show when there are 1000 shows to choose from at any moment as opposed to the 70 the three networks used to offer in primetime. EW promises to list the 84 Best Shows. Well, okay. That's not being very discriminating, but certainly you can list 84 shows from all of TV history, especially when you include every part of the day and not just primetime. The Honeymooners, Your Show of Shows, Seinfeld, Sesame Street, Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, The Mary Tyler Moore Show -- they start to come pretty quickly, right? But my assumption was wrong. EW is listing 84 shows on RIGHT NOW. They also immediately apologize for not including shows like The Wire and Deadwood because EW decided that technically they're not on right now. In short, EW lists damn near every TV show of any sort that you can think of that's on the air. How wimpy can you get? "We;ve picked and sorted our favorite series," they say. No they haven't. They've listed EVERYTHING. Everything from Bones to Invasion to imports like Kath & Kim to HGTV Designed to Sell to Dog Whisperer to Cheerleader Nation and on and on. Why not just print the primetime TV grid and tell people: these are the shows currently on the air. It would have saved them a lot of time.

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