Home on maternity leave, I have been watching an inordinate amount of television and so have developed an excessive amount of opinions about it.
They can be boiled down to one sentiment: Generally, TV sucks. Shows suck, commercials suck, broadcast news really sucks. But it has become my primary connection to the outside world, so I probably suck by now too.
Most irritating is how commercials portray father figures as complete idiots. I suppose the target audience are the women who control the family purse strings, especially those who think they are superior to their husbands, and if a sales pitch confirms for them that suffering these morons can be assuaged by a certain product, then they're going to buy it.
The worst offender is the Oscar Mayer Selects cold cuts commercials. Daddy is played by Ben Weber, who always will be Skipper from "Sex and the City" for me but who tries to Facebook-friend the babysitter and drives a lawnmower inside a store in these ads.
He is a complete doofus. His wife clearly thinks so, as evidenced by her tone of "No" when he tries on a pair of skinny jeans, which makes saying "Yes" to these preservative-free meat scraps so much more poignant.
It's also clear that the only thing holding their marriage together is the sex, evidenced by a make-out session in the family van.
He has become the ultimate Oscar Mayer wiener.
When did this happen? When did we go from "Father Knows Best," which was perhaps a sexist overgeneralization, to "Father Was Hardly Smart Enough to Know Where to Put It to Make You in the First Place"? Methinks the pendulum has swungeth too far.
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