Column: TV Oprah should endorse
Published March 23, 2010
Due to office politics that are outside the scope of this article, I have watched Oprah every Monday during work since the start of 2010. As an uninitiated Oprah viewer, I was unaware she routinely dedicates entire episodes of her show to advertising other shows. For instance, a few weeks ago Jerry Seinfeld came on and spent the whole episode showing clips from and chatting about his semi-ridiculous new show, "The Marriage Ref."
I could call Oprah out on her laziness, but being the opportunist that I am, I will instead implore Harpo Studios to produce and shamelessly promote these hit TV shows of mine:
"Kiddy Congress"
Move over Nancy Pelosi, there's a new Congress in town. Every six years, Harpo Studios will scour these 50 great states for 535 of the brightest, most photogenic Americans age zero to 13 to form a legislative body for America's most underrepresented electoral demographic. Can boys and girls overcome partisan differences in order to pass much-needed cootie reform legislation? Can the senior senator from Delaware pass a constitutional amendment banning multiplication tables, or are the lobbyists for Big Homework just too powerful? And what happens when the head of the Senate Bedtime Committee is caught watching cartoons way past 9 p.m.? Get ready for America's funniest filibusters, craziest quorums and most adorable attempts to circumvent the Geneva Convention.
"Postmodern Family"
Meet the 21st century's wackiest, edgiest family this side of Jean Baudrillard. Can a gay couple raise a healthy child in a society shackled by the ever-present controlling gaze of Foucault's Panopticon? Can Dad drum up the will to make himself a sandwich, while grappling with the awareness that Jean-Francois Lyotard's death of the meta-narratives means the energy he would gain from his sandwich consumption would not help him and his society along a linear progression towards the apex of human civilization, but instead he is lost in a world of uncertainties, floating signifiers and relative ethics, a world without an ideal path for humanity and with a cold indifference to the travails of any individual? Can he muster up the strength to squeeze that mustard and add a leaf of lettuce to that sandwich?
Each episode is randomly sequenced so the viewer can never understand what's going on, to simulate the pervasive sense of uncertainty and helplessness that is a fundamental symptom of postmodern life. Eddie Murphy guest stars.
"Steam from a Seamy Kettle: The Teapot Dome Story"
This 76-part historical drama documents one of the most chilling, explosive controversies in American history: the Teapot Dome Scandal. All the sex, drugs and violence of the 1922-1923 Senate investigation into bribery for the sale of a government-owned oil field are faithfully recreated exactly the way today's top HBO writers imagine it happened.
President Warren G. Harding is boozing hard again, and his penchant for Brazilian prostitutes and Colombian cocaine is more vicious than ever. As usual, everything the president is putting up his nose causes him to miss what's right beneath it: the political scandal of the century.
When Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall sells America's touted Teapot Dome oil field to oil magnate Harry F. Sinclair, Sen. Thomas J. Walsh hires an elite team of nymphomaniacal female ninjas to investigate. Can the ninjas seduce the culprits and still have enough airtime remaining to progress the plot? When a four-armed alien sniper from the planet Xenoklorr Seven starts picking off Senate Republicans one-by-one, can the president lay off the nose candy in time to save his ailing country? Before Watergate, before Lewinski, before the choking-hazard pretzel — there was Teapot Dome.