Seattle TV

We have been saying "American TV is crap" quite a lot since we came here. But how would we change it? The first thing I would do is change the ratio of advertisements to programming. One of the reasons people watch DVDs and go to the cinema must be so they can watch something uninterrupted. This would probably improve people's ability to concentrate and probably raise the IQ of the general population. Make longer ad breaks but less frequently.

And is there no social consciousness or control of advertising here? America is concerned about increasing obesity and global warming yet in the typical ad break we'll see three different fast food chains promoting their latest greasy burger and another for a tractor lawn mower. After you've eaten your pizzas and burgers you can go out and mow your twenty square feet of lawn using a machine that in another country would be used to harvest the annual food crop.

Secondly, I would change the censorship rules. Censorship here means nudity, gratuitous violence and profanity is unacceptable on TV. This results in a ridiculous blurring out of women's breasts and buttocks if a woman is wearing say a thong bikini. If someone raises a middle finger in a rude gesture, the offending digit is blurred. One is left curious as to what next the censors will consider overtly sexual or inappropriate. Maybe a jiggling man boob.

Perhaps the use of blurring has a benefit in that it forces us to use our imaginations already rendered sluggish from watching too much television.

Dialogue that includes words such as "hell", and "damn" are dubbed so that an unconvincing "heck" and "darn" are substituted. Entire key scenes in films featuring sex or graphic violence are removed. For viewers who have seen the uncut work it feels like pedantry at its most pointless and absurd. In place of this I would use ratings such as are in place in Australia - for example, "the following film contains nudity and graphic violence" and leave it to parents to control their children's TV access rights.

Thirdly, and probably most significantly I would place stricter controls on the actual quality of programming and what is allowed to be produced and broadcast. American television shows what happens when you have a completely unregulated market: the quality drops and so does our darn IQs.

Orcas Island - famous for its lack of television