True Blood

TV has gotten to be really weird.

Like really weird.

The evidence speaks for itself. Consider TLC. Called The Learning Channel, TLC used to show lots of educational shows about medical anomalies, strange cultures, and human oddities. It was, well, educational in some respect. Now? I recently spent a weekend binging on the horror that is My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. When asked about the show, the only comment I could muster was, “Oh my stars.” The show is ridiculous. It doesn’t count as “learning” – it counts as awkwardly gaping at a completely different culture that encourages girls to dress in bikinis at weddings and get married in two hundred pound gowns. (Morally I feel some sort of obligation to bash on Say Yes to the Dress as it also goes against everything TLC supposedly stands for, but that show is one of my guilty pleasures. They are pretty dresses. Don’t judge me.)

But I honestly thought I had seen the full gamut in terms of weird TV.

Then I watched half an episode of True Blood.

I got roped into watching the show with my mother after she wanted to turn it on and I was far too lazy to get off the couch. Five minutes in I had already identified one of the characters as an actress from the Harry Potter franchise (Aunt Petunia, if you were curious), made a half dozen comments comparing the relationships on the show to bestiality/furries, and called “glamouring” a really lame version of Jedi mind-tricks (“These are not the droids you are looking for…”)

Every twenty-two seconds, my mother felt the need to pause the show and explain the plot/character relationships to me so that I would have some semblance of understanding of what was going on. It went kind of like this:

Mom: Okay, that’s [random name of a character I didn’t bother to learn]. He’s a werewolf. And he’s hot. That guy is a changer, and she is the panther-chick. She wants to mate with [that other guy], but he doesn’t want to. Oh, look, there is a vampire there. She just got attacked by a witch, who is possessed by this other witch. OH MY GOODNESS SHE JUST MELTED HER FACE HAHAHAHAHAHA. And that’s Sookie.

Me: I know who Sookie is, Madre. I don’t live under a rock.

Mom: Oh, okay. Well she was dating Bill, but Eric always had the hots for her. Eric is the one that had that weird dominatrix-dungeon-thing in his basement.

Me: Got it.

Mom: Sookie and Bill broke up after Sookie spent 11 months with the fairies.

Me: I’m sorry, what now?

Mom: Well, she’s half fairy, so it made sense.

Me: [Face-palms]

I’m sorry, but in what world is the phrase “she’s a partial fairy” NORMAL?

What was worse was when I made a completely sane comment about the utterly ridiculous plot twists in this show and my mother said, “What? This isn’t nearly as bad as, like, Degrassi.”

I resent that remark.

UPDATE: As I’m writing this my mother decides to turn on the same episode we were watching last night. It makes even less sense tonight than it did then.

UPDATE #2: My mother decided to read this over my shoulder (our iPad wasn't to her liking, I take it) and as she was laughing (yeah, I'm giving my comedic ability a lot of undue credit here) she kept pointing out errors in the True Blood plotline as I had it typed. THAT is how convoluted the story is - my notes were even confused, and I actually put some mental effort into those. SOS.

UPDATE #3: My mother has taken to saying "Don't judge me" as an excuse. I think she intends that as a way to mock me, but isn't imitation the highest form of flattery? (at least, that's what she's told me for 13 years about my little sister....yes, Mother, you've dug yourself a hole with this one)