families with lots of kids and documentaries about them

Amongst all the mind-rotting crap that I pay a hundred bucks a month for, the so-called Discovery Health channel sucked me in. No, not for the commericals for various home products... but the spate of shows about families with huge amounts of kids.

Now, I would not be a great parent. If I had a kid he would be the one the other kids aren't allowed to play with, or at least not at his house. He'd be the kid allowed to watch anything on TV and the accompanying earthy vocabulary etc.

Having lots of kids due to a fertility clinic... ok, it happens. I can relate a little bit to that family because there are aspects of their life in the TV show that were even remotely familiar.

But this other one that has the perma-pregnant woman and her daughters in the dowdy frocks with the home schooling... wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee. The whole sickeningly sweet on-fire-for-god thing is a little much to watch, along with the fourteen (or was it fifteen... or sixteen...) little fashion violations. Talk about a case for spaying and neutering.

But its refreshing to see these families trot out their life stories for whatever is in it for them. Now, this might sound jaded or whatever, but its the way things seem to work in the 500-channel universe. Reality TV has to fill it because you can only cost-effectively create just so much drama, right?

I've seen how it works. See, way back in the late 1990's boy met boy. (I was one of 'em so LISTEN UP, m'kay?) We decided to go get civil unioned in Vermont. Seems our justice of the peace was in cahoots with one of the cable channels and the producers of The Wedding Story contacted us to see about having our civil union be a show.

Now I need to ask a rhetorical question of my readers. Those of you who are divorced, what do you feel when you watch those wedding videos? I'm going to go out on a limb that if you had to choose between watching that and watching an hour of Barney, you'd proabably pick Barney, right?

We would have had a bunch of video of the trip from Minneapolis up to Vermont by way of Boston. It would have been boiled down to half an hour so that all of middle america could've said, "Hey Myrtle get back here in the trailer so you can watch these two faggots ensure they're gonna burn in hell." Or asked, "Which one's the woman? Shouldn't one of 'em be wearing a dress?!"

So when I got the fax from the producer of the show, I went home to my (now-) ex and said - do you want to do this. He left it up to me. I didn't want to be a sideshow. So we declined and did our thing privately without middle america and their TV's along for the ride.

But this is what entertainment is coming to. I saw the word "irritainment" this evening in the context of a blogger who puts the very public bits of his foreclosures out on the net for the world to see. I won't identify him because he's getting quite enough traffic!

The media mix has come a long way from, ok its summer time so its just going to be reruns on TV. Yeah, as if those three channels count for much of anything...

Oh well, back to the irritainment I'm watching now.