I'm proud to say that I cancelled my premium cable TV service. I kept the Basic service only to watch public television and football.

TV comedy shows are not funny. Toilet jokes and phoney laughtracks have put me off of the poorly written plots.

Drama shows are mostly about people that I don't care about.

TV commercials are longer and increasingly stupid (they are aimed at an audience of idiots).

Havrilesky is dead on in her commentary, but ignores one crucial point. Who do you think is paying for our TV shows? Advertisers, mostly. Of course they'd prefer shows that promote crass materialism, and the "you can never have enough" mindset. Do you think Visa or Mastercard sheds a tear when someone runs up their credit card trying to keep up with the TV Joneses? Plus as the luxury goods sector accounts for more and more of the economy, lucrative product placement contracts require rich characters. What company wants to see their product surrounded by squalor, or even normality?

The premium channels may avoid the advertising trap, but they cater to a wealthier crowd anyway, and they follow general trends.

One show not mentioned, that perhaps bears some discussion, is Heroes, where superhero characters are drawn from all strata of society, something that I think gives the show some of its charm

I think part of it is laziness combined with our cultural values. Money is the Deus Ex Machina. Rich characters can do anything, have anything, go anywhere, etc..

Two great HH columns in one day. What a treat.

you looked at the advertising on Salon? What a load of hypocritical crap.

if you subscribe, there isn't any...

I canceled my cable service altogether, and discarded my television. Television viewing causes cognitive deficits in out of proportion to exposure. Studies show that the flickering images of television contributes to neurological problems in children under five years of age. I urge others to destroy their televisions also.

For substitute drivel, I read Salon online.

Uhhhhhhhh, what about Dynasty - this is nothing new really.

Or Beverly Hills 90210?

Or Melrose Place? Guess I could go on. This is definitely nothing new - look at the shows from the fifties - they were always rich.

Heather H. gets paid for her words, you don't.

Keep 'em coming, Heather!

is the message really that we should all find it very important to be so very rich and so very pretty?

in a way, i think that these shows accomplish the opposite.

the message that i see when i see shows featuring beautiful, vapid, moneyed people: class mobility doesn't work. those who reach for the sky will fall flat on their asses. don't try to be in a position of power, because you'll come to regret it.

I'm afraid most of these shows are really not going to be that good.

I really don't care if a TV show is about rich people, middle class people or poor people as long it engages me. Most of the shows about the rich or upper middle class do not engage me. I'm not stupid. I know damn well that money can be fun, and rich people can be clueless, but so can people from other tiers of life.

Oddly enough the only shows about the well off that interest me anymore are the lawyer shows, like Boston Legal. These people have money, but they are also edgy, work like dogs, and are actually interesting sometimes.

Shows based merely on the premise that the characters are rich and good looking are boring after 3 episodes, but let's face it - a show about a middle-class family would probably have to include the endless disatisfaction that pervades middle-class life these days, and that would be pretty depressing. It's no longer enough to have a house in a decent neighborhood, healthy kids, and a working car. It always has to be more money, more control, better models of kids, better models of cars. I opted out of that life six years ago, so just thinking about it makes me tired, and it probably makes the average Hollywood writer tired, too. Let's face it - good comedy is hard to come by these days unless you are talking about the Daily Show.

Opinion time - are the rich more boring than ever? I mean I see pictures of the gilded age and even the young and restless of the 20's, and they were a hoot. Good clothes, over the top weddings, beautiful cars. All rich people just look the same these days. Is because there just isn't anything good to buy anymore? I mean we all know that even expensive cars are pretty lame, but is there no good fashion anymore? Are the rich with taste in hiding? Because I look at the rich rock stars and Hollywood stars and they dress boring, drive boring cars and their houses all look the same inside and out (if TV is any indication). Having a pop machine in your kitchen seems to be the height of class. Ah, maybe I'm just getting old and cranky. Good night.

One thing that I'd be interested in reading that I haven't seen done properly is the growing movement of people who have realized that *everything* on modern TV is garbage. The quality of TV either has declined drastically, or it's stayed the same, and there are more of us waking up to realize it.

Growing up, I couldn't image a home setting without a TV. I didn't know a single person that didn't leave a TV on in their house, sometimes multiple TV's, during all waking hours.

Today, in all honesty, the only people I know who watch TV of any kind are my parents. I don't know a single person, other than them, that watches TV (in the sense of broadcast TV or cable).

This is striking. There's something going as more and more of us move online (and outside!) to get our entertainment, and don't consume any TV whatsoever. As fewer people watch TV, guess who the die-hard viewers are: lower and middle class, less educated people. That's why now, TV as a concept is becoming more absurd with each passing season (especially the concept of cable TV... paying a monopoly to pipe advertising into your house! That's crazy!).

Expect TV to be even more crude and dumbed down in the future, as TV's viewing audience continues to shrink, and compartmentalize (ie: poor and/or undereducated).