My disappointment ...

We have recently acquired a real TV and DVD player from friends who are heading back to their own country for a few months.  We have not owned or even possessed a television for almost four years, so you can imagine the novelty of actually having a screen (slightly) bigger than the computer, which we can borrow for a few months.  

Our new piece of technology also means that we can be using the computer and watching telllie at the same time.  Wow!  So a few nights ago, armed with the latest season of ER (a series I really enjoyed when I was living back in Australia) I settled down to enjoy a night of TV.  

And I can't tell you how disappointed I was!  The pirated copy of ER worked  without a hitch.  The television was perfect.  Even the remote was fairly good.  It was the content of the show that completely shocked me.

In the first episode, a man kidnapped his son and estranged wife, after a rampaging shootout in the emergency room of the hospital.  During the hour that followed, he murdered a policeman, then his two accomplices and raped his wife while his teenage son apparently lay sleeping in the open doored van.  Once he fell asleep, his wife  shot him in the head, and fled.  In the next scene you see her desperately calling a lawyer friend whose good advice is to lie about the murder and claim it was self defence, which she does, and by the end of the episode, through bribes and helpful friendships her lawyer has successfully hidden her guilt and guarded her freedom.

In the next episode, among other things is a doctor who is accused of child molesting a young boy.  The charge is brought against the doctor by the child's lesbian " mothers" and forces the doctor to admit that the child is actually his secret love child.  In another scene, an aging white drag queen fights with the black conservative family of his lover in a dispute about whether or not to allow the ill man to live or die.  And finally, a new mother sits with a group of nannies in a park and hears them talking together about their sexual relationships with their employers which includes stealing, lieing and abusing trust as well as routinely sleeping with the fathers of the children they are caring for, and then aborting the resulting pregnancies.

Really - is it just me or is most of this content totally sick and perverted?  I know that I live in the jungle and have the title of "missionary" in the occupation field of my medicare form, but seriously ... isn't there something wrong with a society that watches this kind of exceptionally gross content as a form of entertainment? 

If you do, I hope you become offended enough by this post to reconsider what you are really allowing to enter your hearts and minds.  

As for me, I'm chucking the ER Series and searching through my kid's Disney Collection.