Buzzing earful for viewers’ itchy bugs

What’s bugging viewers about the TV biz and its products? At a recent media forum, we polled audience members for their own itchy “bugs”—and got a buzzing earful:

Reacting to the teleseryes currently on view, some viewers griped that they take too long to establish their “back stories,” sometimes starting three generations before present-day events.

Why do they do it? Some TV people feel that a series’ main conflict acquires greater heft and impact when it starts way back, with the featured families hating each other, and subsequent generations of their progeny intensifying the mutual aversion—until it explodes full-force today.

That makes sense, but viewers want  TV storytellers to know that they would prefer the action to start now, and to deal with the key conflict’s root mostly in flashbacks.

Another respondent’s beef is about  the predictability of the conflicts and interrelationships being dramatized. Can’t scriptwriters come up with fresher stories, he pleads?

Tall order

That’s a tall order, because some 20 or even 30 drama series are currently in the works, and teleseryes have been the dominant TV program staple for over a decade now—so, practically everything has already been done!

In addition, scriptwriters have been kept so busy supplying daily installments for different shows that they’re just plain written out!

Other rankling complaints: Some viewers suspect that some “reality TV” productions are actually not as spontaneous and real as advertised. They’ve come to this cynical conclusion after observing that each installment ends with a new, “unexpected” problem that makes viewers “need” to catch the following day’s telecast to see how it will be handled or solved.

“Life” doesn’t happen in such a reliably “eventful” way, so some shaping, planning and “complicating” is obviously involved.

Finally, some viewers react strongly to reports about senior actors falling ill and even dying in dire poverty, and criticize the entertainment industry for not taking better care of its old workers. Why isn’t there a union for show biz denizens, they want to know?