Things Should End

We usually watch "Survivor" on Thursdays at 7:00, but it wasn't on 'cuz of the bassitbaw on the Columbia Broadcasting System, so we wound up by default watching "That '70s Show" on Fox. It's a show that I used to think was pretty funny, and I still sometimes watch the syndicated reruns.

I hesitate to use the phrase "jumped the shark," because I find it to be an insufferably stupid phrase. But man-0h-man does someone need to put "That '70s Show" out of its misery. Kelso's gone. Foreman is gone, but everyone still hangs out at Foreman's house, so they can still have Foreman's parents on the show. It's not even remotely funny, Laura Prepon has gone blonde in spite of being so hot as a redhead, they've got some longhaired cipher as a placeholder for Foreman... I didn't crack a smile once.

It happens to every popular teevee show, I guess. I mean, have you seen "The Simpsons" lately? It is in this case especially painful to see what was, in its heyday, the greatest teevee show ever, a show that reached such giddy heights of pure hilarity wallow in such depths of craptacularity.

"ER," once so compelling and compulsively watchable, now so repetitive and ineptly written...

I guess the upside of some of my favorite shows ("Freaks & Geeks," "Firefly") being killed before they could get going is that they never had the chance for the slow descent into crap. It's sort of the TV corrolary to my world-famous "Upside of the Murder of John Lennon" theory*.


* That being, of course, that John Lennon's untimely death, tragic as it was, at least prevented the Beatles from inevitably reuniting for eight or nine Official Farewell Tours and becoming horrifying self-parody, a lá the Who and the Stones.