I want to be a! An uptight look at American TV shows and their effect

Have you ever seen or followed a television drama series that airs predominantly on American television channels? Have you ever been blown over by the characters? Do you feel that their badassery keeps you hooked and gets you to binge watch episode after episode, season after season?

The bold, dominating, devious, uncompromising alpha characters make you want to go ahead,quit your job and apply their exact same principles in their exact same fields. Harvey Specter (Suits) makes you think that you can ‘close’ in the world of corporate law, Frank Underwood (House of Cards) makes you think that maybe,just maybe,you can *snigger* make President of USA someday, Walter White (Breaking Bad) tempts you to try your hand at cooking crystal meth, Don Draper (Mad Men) gets you all fired up about advertising (and of course, the proximity to Christina Hendricks).

Nearly everyone from your social circle is in the loop with one such show. The characters are infectious and the writing is crisp and entertaining enough at the same time to keep you glued. Such a craze is fairly recent in our country. But amidst all this,notice how such Indian shows are few and far in between.

For an audience that is saturated with soaps on tussles between the bride and the mother-in-law,the best sort of TV shows that came along were the likes of well…. MTV Roadies and Koffee With Karan. Yes,one of them is a talk show and the other is supposedly a reality show. There is not so much a problem with audiences turning to American shows as the effect that they leave on viewers.

People force themselves to identify with these far-fetched, borderline unrealistic and heavily indulging shows and their characters that there is a lot of wannabeism that they generate along with the heaps of interest.

Folks make Sheldonian jokes, profess that they prefer to ‘play the man and never the odds’ and keep going to the point of losing some grip on reality. At the risk of sounding preachy, maybe time can be spent doing better things than binge watching TV shows from another country and then losing all meaning and purpose in life when we finally ‘finish a series’.

P.S: With all that said, I’m on the first season of House of Cards and absolutely love Kevin Spacey.