Pretty People, Ugly Careers
We currently have an interesting contrast happening on network television. I thought about this as I watched the last fifteen minutes or so of “Private Practice” last night. That “sexy” soap opera masquerading as a “medical drama” is a perfect example of what turns me off of these types of shows. Namely, there is not one unattractive person in the main cast. The main character, Kate Walsh, is one of the prettiest 40+ year-old actresses on television. She looks like she spends an hour a day on her makeup, and has never worked a 12-hour shift in her life. Take a look at the cast picture above, and tell me if you’ll ever see a doctor’s staff meeting with that much pulsing sexuality. Dammit, look at them throb!
If course this all goes back to “Grey’s Anatomy”, which I actually gave a chance back during the first season. All I heard was how it was not a typical “ER” doctor show, and how it was more about the doctors and their lives. I think I even heard a murmur of “realism”. No, it still has the .0001% freak-show patients, unrealistic dialogue and the manufactured drama that REAL doctors would avoid like a strep-throated leper. OK, I understand the monotony and bureaucracy than runs rampant in real medical professions would not make riveting television. However, does everyone have to be so pretty? McDreamy, McSteamy, Pompeo and Heigl - they should all be awoken at 4am then forced to stand up for 10 hours straight before filming. At least the guys don’t shave, so there’s that. Also, Sandra Oh looks like she wasn’t baked long enough, so she’s a plus. For all the “Scrubs” hate that circulates the web, at least the cast was realistic - when the cute but awkward Sarah Chalke is your ringer, you are more realistic than most.
I call this trend “Pretty People, Ugly Careers”, and it is rampant in other television dramas. It is a major reason I do not watch network television. “Bones” is a veritable meat-market - do you really think those forensics dweebs would look that good? No, they would be the freaks who were first ostracized in high school and had to turn to either video games or corpses for love (believe me, I know). Furthermore, check out all the popular “police procedural porn” shows and their primary casts - “CSI“, “CSI: Miami“, “NCIS“, “The Mentalist“, etc. If you can’t get lost in Simon Baker’s eyes, then you are soulless automaton. All these shows follow a clear pattern: handsome main character, surrounded by:a) hot women, b) scruffy older men, and/or c) cute or handsome young hunks. Also, where’s the beef? 60% of all Americans are supposedly obese, yet you wouldn’t know it from watching scripted television. Based on averages, every single skinny person must be in Hollywood. Something is rotten here, my friends.
So let’s get back to how these shows contrast with popular reality shows. I’m not sure how someone can go from watching “Private Practice” to “Hole in the Wall” or, even worse, the basic cable trash bins like “Rock of Love”. What do you watch in between to cleanse your palette - “The Daily Show”? The mind’s ability to shift gears from something so unreal to something realistic is amazing. I would really like to see some brainwave analysis performed on a tight focus group. However, I wouldn’t be a good test subject - all I watch regularly is professional sports and the ultra-realistic “Lost” - viva la Hurley!
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At some point Hollywood concluded collectively that people must be beautiful to be on television, movies not nearly as much but there it is still fairly rampant. How do Normies like us even connect with people who look like that? And we wonder why our teen girls AND boys are vomiting with friends in the bathroom at school after eating their celery stalks for lunch.
Furthermore if you are not hot then you are autmatically relegated to the role of weird guy or girl. Consider all the famous fat male actors and the characters they play - not a normal person in the bunch.