America’s Got Talent?

Today, while enjoying a cup of Greek yogurt and a Clif bar for breakfast during my mid-morning lunch break, for no reason other than because it was there, I began flipping through the pages of an Entertainment Weekly Magazine. Toward the end of this periodical in which I haven’t laid eyes on for a very long time and now I know why, I found the listing for the Top 25 Television Shows in America. As my eyes scroll down the list I was shocked.

The next thing I did was grabbed a pen and made marks beside each of the shows. I had two sets of marks, one was for shows that were reality or talent based and the other mark was for shows that actually had real writing. I began to laugh as I looked at the title of the article as it read, ‘America’s Got Talent’. Not only was that the main title, it was the number one show on television for the week.

Out of the top twenty five shows, fifteen of them were reality/talent based and only ten were shows produced from actual thought and writing. That means sixty percent of the most watched shows are shows in which we as people are watching other people do random whatever that has been recorded by a video camera. America likes to be entertained. Dance for us monkey! Oh wait, dance for us you once very popular for some reason kind of monkey!

But that is the Soap Box for a street corner of another day. Today’s box that I am climbing on is about ‘talent’. If America really had some, wouldn’t we be creating new ideas all the time? Meaning, instead of just vomiting up a no nothing dance-a-thon or, dare I say it, American Idol #27, why can’t we make something of value? Give me something that I can grab onto. Give me something that has a story. I don’t care if the story is lame. I would rather have a show with a lame story than Bobo, the dancing celebrity.