Can We Enhance It?

Behold, the technology magic show!



Look on as the helpless writer heaps math and science words on top of a steamy scene excreted from the script-o-matic. "Maybe we can use the Pradeep Sen method in order to see into the windows." The script-o-matic, a dehumanizing machine which turns once-inspired writers into prisoners churning out the same pre-digested copy week-after-week, makes for great formula television. I imagine the typical writing conditions to be somewhere between a porn shoot and the cellar where naked people are kept in the dark and amputated limb by limb by cannibals in The Road. This is not hyperbole.

The flurry of animations and keyboard clattering helps the terminology babble to dazzle the viewers until they are too disoriented to think about the scene.* A slight tingly feeling around the temple is normal. That's confusion. Don't worry, there's always a dumb guy in the scene who doesn't get what's happening so the writer can slap you in the face with his diction. No viewer left behind. If you do, somehow, start to fall behind you can use the musical tempo cues to know when something exciting is happening and start breathing out of your mouth.

These shows fall into the genre of drama, sometimes the sub-genre crime drama, but I think more apt terms might be procedural porn, or forensics fantasy. Were it actually dramatic, the emotional needs of the multi-dimensional characters would be fascinating enough. Viewers would never need be laid down to watch the mobile spin in each episode's obligatory laboratory scene. Unfortunately in order for the plot driven "drama" to be easily digested the characters need to be flat, and that precludes having emotional needs. The absence of need leaves a gap which is, apparently, filled by characters staring at computer screens going "blah blah blah enhance blah." Procedural porn continues to fascinate viewers and annoy me, particularly the quirky lab worker who exists to please the leads with her offbeat fashion and uncanny skillz with the com poo tah. Wait...quirky and smart? I stand corrected. Some characters have two dimensions!

This jargon-spitting speed-typing is the low budget equivalent to Michael Bay's incoherent spatial assault in the Transformer films. Or if you prefer, it's the high budget version of youtube jump cutting. It's the opposite of art and degrading to anyone who hasn't mentally checked out. If you're a regular viewer of Numb3ers, CSI:Doesn't Matter, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit or the show under some other title, I should break it down. You are watching a show where you are being fed formulaic shit, hit over the head, then powdered and put in a crib. You are the special victim. Somewhere a writer is having his passion buried under your stupidity. It is my hope he's able to configure each episode's permutations while wondering, is this Satire?


This is:


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