Thursday, February 01, 2007

Define "average-looking"

There's been a movement in recent years to make TV more average-looking. Instead of having only beautiful, impossibly thin and attractive people on TV, networks have been urged to have more "average-looking" people on their shows. Instead of giving all of us normal Americans an inferiority complex, networks should show the regular folk that we can readily identify with.

In theory, I agree with this. And yet ... in the past few days, I've noticed several instances of not-beautiful people on TV, and they frightened me.

I won't call them average because, well, they seemed downright ugly. There! I said it. I'm all for having cute women, slightly pudgy men, maybe people with some crooked teeth .... but these actors were alarming. Their features were just wrong.

Is this what TVland thinks the average American looks like? Maybe when you're constantly surrounded by beautiful people, you become somewhat visually impaired, unable to distinguish between "reasonably attractive" and "feral gnome." That would be a strange, strange world.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

TV brought the alarming several years ago: Tori Spelling.

She looks like her dad in a wig. Bug eyes, weird canyon thing going on between her boobs ... seriously ugly.

I like my TV shallow and pretty. See One Tree Hill, for example. One of the mothers, Deb, is played by a former Playboy video star. Her (ex)husband? Played by the guy who played KEG brother John Sears on 90210. All very hot people.

Then I flip past Wife Swap or something and wonder why the TV isn't breaking from the inside out.