The television season is coming to an end, and shows are pulling out all the stops to keep viewers excited for next season. Ninety-five percent of season finales will end with someone getting married, someone dying, or someone contracting polio, and these are the only episodes I truly look forward to each year.
I'm not a big fan of TV. Over the years, commercials have become longer while shows have gotten dumber. Almost every drama I see is filled entirely with characters I want to punch in the face. Almost every comedy I see is so unintelligent that it makes the Naked Gun movies look like Ken Burns documentaries. This is why I love the tragedies of season finales. I watch every finale I can, even of shows I despise and normally refuse to watch, just so I can see all their horrible characters die. I just wish more characters would die, and in more entertaining ways.
Marissa from "The OC" died in a car crash last night, but it wasn't as satisfying as I had hoped. I wanted to see her dropped out of a plane, with the camera actually showing her head splitting against the sidewalk. No, wait! I changed my mind! I wanted to see her contract HIV, sob like a coward, and then shoot herself in the face.
I didn't like her character very much, in case you didn't notice. It's not her fault. It's the writer's fault. Mischa Barton seems nice and all. I just want her character to get AIDS and herpes and then die from suffocation when her mom sits on her face and farts for, like, twelve minutes straight.
It's ideas like these that probably keep studio executives from hiring me as a writer. Here's another idea that'll keep me from getting hired:
I wish game shows and reality shows would kill off characters as well. Deal or No Deal? Howie Mandel gets beaten to death by a contestant. American Idol? The last two singers are required to sing their way out of a wet paper bag, are unable to do it, and therefore die of pneumonia. David Blaine? He again attempts to break the record for holding his breath underwater, but this time he drowns and nobody bothers to pull his body out of the water, so over time his corpse just gets soggier and soggier until it disintegrates.
So which finale was the best this year? I'd have to go with "Frank Wiggins, MD". That's one of my favorite shows, and this year's finale had Porgy proposing to Dr. Egadnads, and then screwing up the marriage by becoming romantically involved with Mr. Peepers during the wedding rehearsal. Mr. Peepers, of course, is Porgy's pet castoroides.
My second favorite finale was Desperate Housewives, where Gabrielle Solis gets kicked in the face by a mule and is no longer pretty enough to live on Wisteria Lane, so she's forced to move to the Minneapolis suburb of Richfield, where she takes a job as a cashier at Petsmart. It's a nice Petsmart, but she's ultimately unhappy with the job because her bosses keep riding her to push the Natural Choice Large Breed Weight Management line of dog food, when she prefers the Nature's Recipe Vegetarian Canine Formula. They won't fire her, though, because they've mistaken her for a mentally handicapped person, and Lord knows you can't fire retarded people.
How many words is that? 600 words in this column? Hell yeah, sucker. This column's done.
