Missoula News

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Sick Kids at Home: Paging Dr. Television

By Bob Wire, 3-01-11

"Don't worry, Mr. Wire, we'll keep the noise down. I promise!"

Lord deliver me from the Disney Channel. And iCarly. And SpongeBob. Of the last seven school days, I have had a sick child home for five of them. First Speaker, and now Rusty. Some kind of creeping crud that’s “going around,” according to the middle school front desk women I’m getting to know so well. Not much I can do but make them comfortable, push the juice, and keep those instant mashed potatoes comin’.

These are the times when a parent (well, a parent as shallow as me) uses the TV as a handy hypnotist. When that TV’s on and the kids are watching, Barb and I could be having sex openly on the living room floor and the kids would not even notice. (Note to self: vacuum living room today.) Normally that kind of total absorption in the idiot box annoys me, but when I’ve got work to do and they’re home sick, I get ‘em bundled up on the living room couch and hand them the remote. By the time Barb comes home from her office, you could fry eggs on the back of that TV set.

I try to encourage the kids to at least watch educational shows like “Jeopardy!” or “Pawn Stars.” Sometimes we get lucky and somebody comes down sick during Shark Week. But their preference is for the shrill, repetitive assault on the senses offered up by iCarly, SpongeBob, and most every teen sitcom on the Disney Channel, or as I like to call it, the Overactors’ Breeding Ground.

You might think this is just another curmudgeonly call for “Leave It To Beaver” to return to the screen in all its black and white glory, but you’d be missing the point. These kid-oriented shows are tolerable in small doses, like Larry the Cable Guy, but a steady diet of short-attention-span bombast has me ready to pull my hair out and go all Charlie Sheen on their ass.

In case you haven’t seen the bill of fare on the Disney Channel, let me give you the rundown. The demographic is roughly 8-to-14-year olds who have ADD, HDAD, and eat five bowls of Apple Jacks every morning. Disney’s big shows are The Wizards of Waverly Place, Good Luck Charlie, The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, and of course Hannah Montana. These are all live action, three-camera sitcoms in the tradition of everything from “The Honeymooners” to “Seinfeld.” What makes these Disney offerings unwatchable to anyone with a driver’s license is that the sets, stories, dialog and acting are so overblown and frenetic, they make “I Love Lucy” look like a subtle character study by comparison.

One common theme of these shows is a big draw for the kids: All Adults Are Idiots. Grownups in the shows are thick, clueless, gullible and oblivious. And usually rich, judging from the lavish homes or apartments and trend-setting wardrobes. The kids are all attractive or nerdy, and the girls all look and talk like they’re in grad school. I suppose this all feeds into the fantasy world of your average young teen. There’s rarely any punishment more severe than the confiscation of a cell phone or the wag of a finger, even though the kids’ schemes frequently blow up into felony-level mischief. But they always outsmart their parents, always manage to achieve their ridiculous goals, and never clean up after themselves.

But it’s not the far-fetched situations that wear me down, it’s the jaw-clenching intensity of it all. It’s a nonstop fusillade of shameless hamboning, and the young actors are fed dialogue that is harder to swallow than a Lindsey Lohan anti-drug PSA. And it’s all done at top volume, with lots of repetition, to the relentless guffaws of a studio audience that sounds like they’ve been chowing down on psilocybin sandwiches.

Having these shows running all day on the family TV is like having Reverend Horton Heat playing a set in our kitchen while I’m trying to make dinner. The nonstop energy rubs my nerves raw, and when I ask them to watch something else for a while, they switch over to SpongeBob, which ratchets things up even further. There is so much screaming, I sometimes have to check and see they’re not watching live births on the Discovery Channel. And the repetitiveness! It’s enough to make me want to travel directly to Bikini Bottom with a spear gun and put an end to SpongeBob and his oafish friend Patrick once and for all.

SpongeBob’s creators are obviously catering to the hyperactive crowd. The fact that the sponsors are Ritalin and Adderall leaves no doubt. They should probably run Scotch ads for the adults who happen to be watching. You only have to take in about ten minutes of this cartoon to realize that the episodes must be written by deaf acid casualties on a crank bender.

Now, I’m not saying that I would prefer my kids to listen to NPR and watch endless droning episodes of “Nova” on PBS when they’re sick. I would just prefers something on TV that holds their attention without constantly shrieking for mine. Something like this:

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