Sitcoms

The best part of a routine life is there is always a new episode waiting for you on the television set. It does not matter how pathetic the in-law drama or the crime solving all mighty multi-(sci-fi)-gadget-ed hero/heroin of the act is. It is what makes a regular-all-alike-daily life adventurous and audacious. No, I do not mean to support or justify the cons and pros of these sitcoms. But it merely provides the lonesome, less outgoing teen or too-tired-to-meet-her-gossip-friend housewife or the 9-to-5 working class metropolitan fatigue feeling cyborg with miniscule of entertainment. Is it really that hard for us all to believe that the people that work the whole day and have been following the same regime for the last few months find it relaxing to watch mindless and unfathomable sitcoms? There was a time I always wanted to know if people are really that childish to watch some in-studio sitcom posing to be a military campus or are they proven to be so much incompatible to distinguish between the funny and unjustifiably torturous mind shirkers or rather have gone completely insane so as to believe in a joint family with no aging members keeping useless secrets and problems to themselves just for the shake of completing thousands of continuous episodes that most of the time do not even follow the chronology of the events such as ‘death’. And I think I found these people aren’t insane or acting dumb or childish. They are simply trying to figure out a reason not to do anything else when you can mindlessly watch a play of words and characters that makes no impact whatsoever. There might be thousands of other explanations and reasons for people watching sitcoms but I prefer to believe that each one even though may provide a personalized rationality for these occurrences, they all are just making a effort to create a space and time block for their brains and/or minds to not work. So I realized this is mere an argumental discussion for the text book based definition for relaxation which eventually may lead to entertainment. Now the ‘relaxation-eventually-leads-to-entertainment’ expression might be too much for many. But over a course of time when your mind feels free of all the clutches that couple it with an over active brain it’s a basic form of relief. This relief is cost effective and refreshing like superior cup of brewing coffee. That leads us to feeling of being entertained rather than being only tranquilized or relaxed. Importantly so, people do not merely prefer their judgment on taste of high quality edutainment but just …do nothing and be peaceful. Another rational explanation I found to be realistically believable is that people tend to watch whatever the idiot box has to offer between their individually independent free time. By that I mean distinguishing the spectators with age, sex and other such differentiating analogies. Housewives and a lot of family men prefer the only free time to saas-bahu sitcoms i.e. 9 to 11 pm slot or the primetime. In fact the husbands fancy watching a decent or indecent English movie for that matter over the crappy sitcoms but they choose not to argue over worse or worst. However, with time, little do family men realize that they’ve been already addicted themselves to saas-bahu sitcoms. Kids are on the bull’s eye for Saturday and Sunday mornings with kiddie stuff which seemingly has changed and transformed to more religious – spiritual stuff. Grandmothers and local dialect fanatics have a mid-afternoon to evening slot that most of the time is a rerun of late primetimes that tend to be sing lullabies to the old ones. Now some channels do not provide preference; these are for the die-hards. The real geeky stuff is on all day, all time. National geographic, the animal planet, the history channel, the discovery channel or CNBC TV18, etc. constitute such demographic. No matter what the reason is, I realized its all with a specific rational argument on the watcher’s part. Steal of the deal is, sitcoms no matter which ones have found a way into our daily lives and are fixated such that they look no different that our routines.