I’m sure that everything I like about the new NBC comedy The New Normal is what all the internet folks hate. I can hear the comment section entries now: “Why is Andrew Rannells SO effeminate?”, “Why does the ONE black character have to be SO sassy??”, “Oooo, the villification of Ellen Barkin’s conservative Nana” — WAH WAH WAH. I think all of that is just fine, because I’d rather watch a well scripted, well performed show where reality is heightened than regular ol’ boring life. I have a regular life — what I don’t have is a million dollar house on the west coast and the generic, WASPy adorableness of Justin Bartha to cuddle up to every night.
Remember back when the only entertainment criticism you heard was among your friends and family? And then discussion boards enabled tv show nerds from around the world to break open fan culture and analyze en masse. Now user generated content makes every loudmouth with a keyboard feel like one of the great debaters, except now every discussion ends with calling someone a n*gger.
Don’t get me wrong, nothing pleases me more than sitting around and analyzing a much beloved — or maligned — television program. I can analyze the fuck out of a show that I love; my weekly breakdowns of plot inconsistencies in the last 5 seasons of “True Blood” are truly epic, believe me. But I have learned to keep my thoughts and opinions out of the public forum, simply because it ruins the fun of part of watching television for me. I don’t want to think about how some midwestern t.v. station isn’t running “The New Normal” while I’m watching it, or how some some 21yo hipster in Brooklyn is smugly turning up her nose at “Girls” because, “My friends and I don’t talk like that” — I just want to enjoy the show and if I’m lucky, quote it incessantly to my friends for the next couple of weeks.
So now, I avoid the word “comment” on Hulu, Youtube, Rotten Tomatoes and any other site where I catch my programming, I recoil at the sight of a user generated review on Netflix and I simply back away from my RSS feed whenever I see an episode recap on ANY blog — there hasn’t been a good one of those since New York Magazine’s breakdown’s of “Gossip Girl” and “The Rachel Zoe Project”. Because being annoyed by stranger’s random opinions about entertainment has become the REAL new normal and I just can’t stand it, because I love television.
Currently Watching: “The New Normal”, s1/e2 on Hulu
Currently Wearing: Gray American Apparel underpants
