TV Is Too Good!


by Don Mueller

I think that there's TOO MANY good programs on TV. Yep. You heard right. Every time you read the letter columns in the various TV guides, people are always griping about how bad TV is, and that there are too many lousy programs. But, since I say there are too many good programs, you certainly deserve an explanation.

All of us have a certain amount of time to watch TV. There's passive watching, which is defined as having the TV on in the background while you're doing another activity. An example would be listening to Jay Leno's monologue as you're doing the dishes. Then there's active watching. That means you sit there through an entire program and take it in as if you were in a movie theater. For the purposes of this argument, I'll be talking about programs that I actively watch.

These days with all of the many cable channels and 24 hour programming, there's certainly plenty to choose from. In one week, you have a choice of 8750 different programs to choose from. How many of those would you actively want to watch? In my own case, I would count only 6 shows out of the 8750 that I would consider actually worth my valuable time to actively watch. The rest of the shows are too dumb to be worth my consideration! Now true, 6 shows out of 8750 is only a minuscule .068 percent, which might indicate that most TV programming is lousy, which it is. But you see, out of the 6 good programs per week that are worth watching, I only have time to actively watch 4 shows a week, which means that I miss 2 good TV shows a week. So you see, RELATIVE TO THE AMOUNT OF TIME THAT I HAVE, There's TOO MANY good TV programs on the air! I rest my case!


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