I can’t even finish a magazine these days. I have my precious Oprah and New Yorker still wrapped in plastic on my coffee table getting bleached by the sun that’s pouring in from the window. This is a new low.
I used to be a bookworm. I negotiated for a book allowance from my mother during my younger years because I would read a novel a week. My dad warned me sternly to not turn into a nerd or he would disown me. He was very wary of my reading habit.
This is probably why he started bringing home Us Weekly and People magazine. He was an elite saboteur when it came to the actual smart things in life. Soon I was following lives of celebrities like I had a pop quiz on it.
Here is my downward cycle in a nutshell: People magazine, In Style, blogs, then finally Apple apps. However, nothing eroded my brain more than television. Have you ever seen someone watch a TV show and research about it on the Internet at the same time? That’s me. Every day. If there’s TB for the lungs, there’s TV for the mind. I have the attention span of Liz Taylor in a white dress. I needed to know everything in the world about the irrelevant. I read my books on my iPad… I feel like I’m reading from a television screen.
I knew I was in deep when I cancelled a spa appointment to finish two episodes of Top Chef, playing on my easily pausable DVD player. I mean seriously, when you have enough time to actually make a spa appointment, then cancel it to watch a reality show, its really time to reassess your life.
The fiancé calls me Lazy Lopez. I retort in my new hermetic state: “At least I’m not Crazy Lopez.” He knows what he has is a total Hobson’s Choice, but he learns to deal with it. I can imagine the irritation he gets when he comes home and sees me lolling on the couch with a pint of ice cream balanced on my stomach as I watch Project Runway. I always tell myself: he’s just jealous.
It’s hard to believe that it was only five years ago when I hooked up a TV set in my room. I refused to watch TV after my efforts to become an actress were thwarted. It was too painful seeing other people act.
Years of therapy later I was over it. By then all the TV sets had had liposuction and turned into flat screens. The first thing I did was pop in the first season DVD of The OC. I was still not ready for cable. Baby steps. I was curious why, after I had left the world of Dynasty (the last TV show I really followed then), would the world embrace the zeitgeist with kids from Orange County. I needed to know. I needed to understand how a prime-time soap operated without Bob Mackie.
An hour later, I was hooked.
It’s the old formula of a poor kid who really wasn’t so poor hooking up with some rich kids who weren’t really that rich, Welcome to the OC bitch. I followed the show even when it got bad. Who cannot love Seth’s mom? She became an alcoholic, drinking Chardonnays in the afternoon and being too sauced to cook despite being the CEO of her father’s real estate company. Or how Ryan became a cage fighter to deal with depression and anger issues; or how Summer got into Brown. And how Marissa dies (I know, I thought she was dead too in the first episode of season one… residual character formation from her role in The Sixth Sense).
The OC became my gateway show.
Then Bea got me into Veronica Mars. Behold! More shady rich kids who were not so rich bullying blue collar Veronica, this time in a fictitious town called Neptune — I can never tire of this modern Dickensian concept. I was starting to see a pattern here. Gossip Girl became my ultimate pet. They were Dynasty-rich!
It was almost my toxic relationship with television aligned with the dawn of the second golden age of television that soon eclipsed the efforts of cinema. Now with the birth of shitty 3D movies and amazing plasma television sets, it’s not hard to guess what team I’m on.
There is one season that counts for me and we don’t even have it in our country: fall. While all my friends are planning exotic vacations to the Dalmatian Islands and Mustique, I’m preparing for my fall TV show lineup. Here is my goodbye cruel world package:
• Gossip Girl: Unless they hire Jackie Collins to write this season instead of some gay guys who want to be Blair there is not a chance that this show will survive. Chuck has to lose the Batman voice. Blair has to stop looking like a Cabbage Patch doll. Serena has to stop being such a weepy ho. I still love it but I hope that I don’t end up watching it out of habit.
• The Good Wife: She needs to knock boots with her boss already.
• Modern Family: This era’s Arrested Development. In TV world, eras go by two-season increments. Let’s not get TV black widow Charlize Theron to guests, please.
• Law and Order SVU: Deal with it. It’s as old as the Pomeranian that I got in college. The dog is now blind. But SVU is still here. It has the most random cast: Ice-T who looks like drug dealer, Christopher Meloni who looks like a midnight rapist and Mariska Hargitay who is the daughter of Jayne Mansfield all fighting crime together. This is when heinous becomes brilliant. It helps me go to sleep. Dying to see Law and Order: Los Angeles.
• Grey’s Anatomy: It’s like really good marshmallow. It has lots of sugar without any nutritional value. But I lap it up anyway. This show makes me miss Scrubs, Grey’s brother with a personality and a learning disability.
• The Mentalist: The real question is why Simon Baker has creepy eyebrows and still passes off as cute. Anyway this show is good for making something out of my paranoia.
• Blue Bloods: The name alone is enough for me. I did endure Dirty, Sexy Money. Can’t wait for this new show.
• 30 Rock: Here’s to having some hope that this season will actually make me laugh. Last season was a total “what the what?”
• Mad Men: It puts the fun in dysfunction. This is how a TV show should be. It gets better and better by the season.
Entourage: The final full season for the boys from Queens. It is the death of wit and excess and the birth of emotional vampire shows. I refused Twilight; I will refuse True Blood.
• How to Make It in America: The world’s most underrated show. It makes me miss my 20s and New York — two things I don’t really miss under normal circumstances.
• Real Housewives of New York: It’s a show that reflects how the socialites here in Manila think they’re Pat Buckley while they dine with obscure Russian fashion designers. This is the Noo Yawk version, the ladies social climbing with the Lohans. I’ll miss fame whore Bethanny as she has moved on to better things like having her own show, a cover shoot with her week-old baby that still looks like a raisin while talking about her sauced-up father. Pure class.
So, here’s to another season of missing out on those Kodak moments.