Somewhere between Ward Cleaver and Billy Ray Cyrus....

While we do limit TV time, it is watched. Think of me what you will. I grew up on it, and feel as adjusted as my peers who were denied it. My two are past the little kid shows with their mind numbing sing alongs and are now into the “tween/teen” shows heavily rotated on Disney and Nickelodeon. At 10 and 12, Sons1 and 2 have hit the demographic for this huge wave of kids programming out there filled with creative, ingenious, and at times flat out sneaky and obnoxious kids. Primetime TV is overrun with idiotic reality shows. Truly crackling, scripted dialogue appears the domain of 13 year olds now. There must be over a hundred shows. Employment in the youth acting marketing has got to be like 99%.

Mine are big fans of shows like Suite Life, iCarly, I’m in the Band, etc. It’s fairly easy for me to monitor the programs since our laundry room is on the same level as the rec room. (I’ve been told by the 10 yr old they are now too old to have a “play room.”). As if unceasing laundry weren’t penance enough for my desire to parent, I get to do it listening to Alex cast spells on Wizards of Waverly Place, Zach demean his twin Cody on Suite Life, and Carly and her buds create their web show. Um… kids of TV land… where the hell are your parents?

Remember when parents seemed to have brains on TV? While it disturbed me the kids never mentioned their deceased parents, I will say Mike and Carol Brady were bastions of calm logic. Donna Reed and June Cleaver were overly ideal, but seriously Wilma Flintstone had a better grip on Pebbles than these MIA parents. Lucy Ricardo showed crazy judgment, but you got the impression Little Ricky saw her, or at least thought about her, from time to time. The shows my kids watch, though, are filled with absent-minded or totally absentee parents. I know divorce rates are high, but they have a disproportionate number of single moms who are all painted as easily bamboozled morons. By and large, parents are either never mentioned, or shown as complete buffoons. TV Producers- could you cut us a LITTLE slack?

If you’re not up on your programming for 9-14 year olds, let me help:

Zack & Cody lived the “Suite Life” with their on-site hotel manager mother. It was weird enough they never ever mentioned a dad. Then one day, the gurus at Disney TV decided they shouldn’t live in a hotel with just their mom. Right. They should live on a cruise ship WITHOUT their mom. See that right there is better TV.

“I’m in the Band” follows the travails of a 15 year old boy who convinces his single mom to take in an aging, faded trio of heavy metal musicians from the band “Iron Weasel.” I don’t know about you, but I have just a wee bit of a hard time picturing single moms I know opening their home to three washed up musicians as “role models” for their sons. Has this woman never seen VH1’s Behind the Music?

“Hannah Montana” lives with her father, and to their credit they did address more than once that her mom is deceased. The bad news is she’s supervised by her father, Billy Ray Cyrus. Moving right along…

Not to be outdone by their mouse eared colleagues, the fine folks at Nickelodeon bring you their own unchaperoned programming for pre through high school. Good luck scaring up some parents there. And they start their characters off on the solo path at a tender age. Case in point, Dora wanders off with her backpack and inane singing map. They call it “exploring” but she’s a bigger flight risk than a mob kingpin or the dementia patients with whom I volunteer. Perhaps if she stayed with adults, she wouldn’t be perpetually lost? I think los padres de Dora need one of those kid leashes. And can someone please call the cops on the sticky-fingered fox?

Fast forward to teen years, and over on “Zoey 101,” Zoey goes to the boarding school Pacific Coast Academy. In this case, they rarely encounter any adult supervision unless entering a classroom. No one seems to remind them about being respectful, calling their parents, or even that they have parents. What would Mrs. Garrett think? The remaining “Facts of Life” jokes are just too easy, as they were learned by the marginally-supervised teen star, Jamie Lynn Spears. Cancelled, the show lives on in chaperone-less reruns.

And iCarly… where to begin? If you haven’t seen the show, it’s about a teen girl who lives with her brother in a gaping loft apartment creating webisodes of her online show all afternoon. Because each teen girl should be up in her bedroom-turned-web-studio with lights, a mic, a green screen, and way too much free time. And have you noticed the bar? I know we are supposed to suspend reality, and that cartoons in our impressionable youth were violent blah blah blah. Cry me a river. Did any of you actually try to move an anvil off a cliff to squash a neighbor? I’m thinking no. I am thinking there are a lot of kids who think it’s perfectly normally to shoot TV shows from your room. And what says youth safety like web cams in a bedroom?

I’m sure to my kids, I will sound lame; so be it. I simply think there has to be some happy medium between Father Knows Best and Bill Ray Cyrus. There has to be. If not as a civilization, we’re screwed. Until such scripted examples for the kids, I guess I’ll steer them toward Wizards of Waverly Place, where the parents are only half-moronic and shown as hardworking in the restaurant they own. A mom tired from managing a family business that lets her kids out of sight maybe five minutes longer than she should, but sends thunderbolts when crossed? Yeah, there’s one who’s real to me.

Explosive Soda and The Idiots Who Clean It

I tend to watch a lot of TV. Calling it watching probably isn’t right. I always have it on, like white noise for the most part, with intermittent spurts of attention. Because of the shows I choose, I am graced to be in an ad demographic of people who like the finer things. There are men’s suit retailers, paving stones for 2 acre outdoor kitchens and pools, and two German automakers. I find that last one ironic because the History Channel runs many shows about German war crimes in World War II, but we’ll take an uneasy pass on that. On certain occasions, like sick days, snow days and day-camp free days, I’m home midday with TV playing. It is then that I get a look inside the dumbest person on the planet: the vapid, apparently valium-induced, stereotyped, suburban housewife.

This smiling jackass apparently adores when her impish children shoot explosive soda bottles all over the kitchen. She’s actually dumb enough to buy bright red and orange soda in two liter bottles to equip them. Why doesn’t she just give them flamethrowers? She always lets her dog outside when it’s muddy, right after the floor is cleaned. Oddly though, the kitchen is brightly lit because it is always sunny. What are the kids running golden retrievers down Slip & Slides at a construction site? Maybe I should be impressed that her dog returns when let out unlike mine. Her floors are always bright white. It apparently never clicks in her pea-brain that she is raising reckless slobs, so she continues to buy white carpets and install white tile and grout.

Once the spill, mud, or downed-tree in the kitchen is realized, she takes just one paper towel and wipes away the hazmat incident with a sly smile and gentle sigh. A peak inside those always-clean double ovens would surely reveal a vat of Xanax. Those towels must be strong enough to clean the Gulf oil spill if just one can wipe up two liters of Hawaiian Punch. Of course, I’m forgetting she has the aid of one spray of whatever cleaner is in the bottle. Because we all just shoot one spray, and use one towel when a box of cherry Jell-O mix gets on the counter. If the now super-cut looking Mr. Clean is making her that happy, there’s more to her afternoon delight than the Magic Eraser.


Then, there’s the omnipresent idiot spouse. If these women are so smart and smug, why did they marry such morons? They couldn’t have picked a better choice for life and parenting partner? This one really gets to me because I have sons who will one day be husbands. I cringe that they may be so clueless. They are slobs now, but I am hoping they follow my husband’s lead. He cleans any slight mess ASAP, using ½ a roll of paper towels in one grab and ½ a liter of bleach cleanser. His approach is to scrub the slightest mess into oblivion. My poor dogs must have Kevlar paws to walk those floors. It is obvious I do not buy the indestructible paper towels. Self hand slap: Bad wife. Bad Mom.

As a last comment of critique, I have also noted that these women all live in the suburbs. To my city dwelling friends, kudos on not being subject to such stereotypes and whirling blenders whipping up strawberry smoothies with no lids on them. You must be bright enough to avoid these messes, or maybe you scream like banshees and therefore would not make good fodder as a calm-mom cleaning jackass.

I can not imagine how ad after ad is pitched AND green-lighted with these farces of moms at the helm. The ONLY believable part is that the kids just stand there. Mine could shatter a window and just stand there. If they spill sticky orange juice, they walk four rooms to tell me it’s spilled, as opposed to using the cleaning products they just passed.

Well, just a few more hours before I head home from the office. I’ll get home and try a preemptive strike in which I’ll make sure any product with food coloring is locked in a secure position, and an old towel is by the back door for dirty paws. I’ll leave the TV off until all single-paper-towel-wielding-idiot commercials are off the air. (They appear to end at 8pm, so the Stepford wife demographic must get tons of rest.) Then I’ll move through the house to accidents heretofore undetected, and a night of less than happy reactions to these domestic toxic adventures.