Television Lied

As my friends and family are well aware of, I love television. As a pre-teen I would disobey my parent's rules about no tv after dinner and sneak away to watch Dark Angel, Dawson's Creek, and any other prime time show I could manage watching without getting caught. When I got into high school, my parents let me do homework and watch tv at the same time. I was in advanced classes and in the top quarter of my class, so as long as I got the work done it didn't matter whether I did it in front of the tv. In those formidable years, I soaked up images and ideas about what adulthood would be like. Ten years ago, adults had all the answers. They had great apartments, great jobs, and glamorous social lives. And as naive as it sounds, when I was a teenager, I thought that by the time I hit 25 I'd be living in a downtown apartment, with a fancy job, and have a certain piece of jewelry on my left ring finger. Why would I have such high expectations? Because that's what tv showed me. The characters on Friends lived across the street from Central Park in big apartments. The young doctors of ER had amazing jobs. And everyone on tv had a local bar/club/coffee shop where they would hang out for hours on end to flirt and talk. Adult life seemed so glamorous and carefree. Now that I've reached adulthood, all I can say is that those shows lied. Adulthood is not glamorous or carefree. It's filled with job searches, uncertainty, and lots of bills. I wish that characters like Liz Lemon from 30 Rock, were around when I was growing up. Liz Lemon is a mess. Her life is not glamorous or carefree. And if not Liz Lemon, where was Jim Halpert, Pam Beasley, Michael Scott, and Dwight Schrute ten years ago? The average, sometimes disgruntled, characters from The Office who work in an unglamorous job, so that they can live in the unglamorous Scranton (no offense to Scranton, PA but it's no NYC). Hell, where was Meredith Grey who's weekly voice overs remind us that just because you're a surgeon and dating McDreamy you can't still be seriously flawed? I wish that these average, flawed, unglamorous characters had been around ten years ago. If I would have grown up with these characters I might not have had such unrealistic notions of adulthood.