Friday Rant: Perceptions
December 5th, 2008
I am going to introduce a new weekly post called the Friday Rant. Join me every Friday as I rant about something new. It may come from something I watched or read. It may come from a life experience. It may be about my wife, but please don’t tell her about it. Or it may simply come from my crazy mind.
The first installment will be about the perception that main stream television has of the father. I am a huge couch potato and watch most of the prime time shows and I mentioned to my wife how bad the father is often portrayed. You have the dead beat dad who often disappears from the picture never to be heard from again. Now what is great about this is that in “TV” world this occurs so often that is not surprising to any of the characters involved and seems almost expected.
Billy woke up this morning, brushed his teeth, got dressed, went to school, came home to find out dad is gone, and discussed what he learned in school today.
There is no shock, no moment of sadness, just move on to more important plot lines. So, since the lack of dad is the norm, does the responsible dad get celebrated? Absolutely not, just the opposite, there is nothing worse then the visible father.
In sitcoms the father usually is over weight, not too attractive, and dumb. Granted he usually has a hot wife that he wouldn’t even be able to speak to in real life, but at what price? Dad is the clown that ends up the butt of all jokes. The wife and kids walk all over him and left alone he screws things up and gets into trouble.
Now the drama is far worse. Dad cheats on his wife, abuses his wife, while molesting his children, resulting in murdering the entire family and he even runs over the family pet as he tries to flee. If a family member does happen to survive that family member simply becomes a serial killer, rapist, and abuser of small animals who escapes jail because it is dad’s fault.
Man, I feel the love.
Join me next week for the newest installment of Friday Rant. And if you have ideas to feed the fire in my brain just chime in.
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This is one of my pet peeves. I hate how dad’s are treated on TV- especially the child-molesting, child-murdering fathers. We are told that we should not have children without a stable family (mom and dad) and then we are told that dad’s suck. This world is so effed up!
Great weekly series and I can’t wait to read more.
Kristina Brookes last blog post..My Extravagantly Indulgent Christmas Wishlist
My father gets very upset over how fathers are portrayed on television. Most of the time, as you said, they are either villain or clown.
I’m guessing that these shows are watched more by women. What do you think?
I know that I can’t watch the Life Time Channel- Television for Women. Every show on there makes me angry at men.
Hollywood tells lies. Once you truly realise that, you’ll be happier.
Hit that ‘off’ button, and find something more profitable to do.
As Lorri said, a lot of TV programming is aimed at women, and is thus 1. a fantasy and 2. extremely biased, to a laughable degree.