When Fox bests PBS

I woke from an Alzheimer’s fighting nine hours of sleep this morning. Its about time. Four and five hours for a week straight doesn’t do it. Holed up upstairs away from the ongoing work in our kitchen Claudia and I had a long conversation about a couple television shows and a great summation about Harry Truman and the logs in some people’s eyes. This post will cover the unlikely butt whooping we saw in television programming last night.

On Sunday nights Claudia and I get together at our daughter’s house and watch TV. The nights usually begin with kid watching then moves on to Adult PBS watching. Kid watching has meant Stranger Things and the Tic in recent times followed by Masterpiece Theater. Last night it was reversed and we began watching Grantchester on PBS a series that has been OKish. I’ve been irritated by it because its flawed hero, an Anglican minister, is given a pass because of his experiences in World War I. His parish is Grantchester, hence the name, and like Agatha Chisties hamlet no end of murders take place there.

Last night we could not endure it when the 1960’s Grantchester was visited by a black minister and his family. I won’t bother explaining how daft the premise was but we drew the line and the latest sexual encounter this self righteous minister had, this time with the black daughter of the minister the night after her brother is murdered by some supposed English Racist. It crammed five decades and two continents of black/white relations into a sorry justification for an improbably unchristian act of sex……off screen but obvious enough when the minister’s friend the cop said with disgust “you screwed her.”

It was time for some kid watching to take our youngest grandson’s eyes off of awful. And I had a brainstorm. Malcolm in the Middle.

A quick check confirmed that it could be livestramed from Hulu for which my daughter and son[-in-law have a subscription. It came out the year after my daughter graduated from highschool but I recall watching it with our son a few years younger. It was one of the few things we did together. Malcolm is the fourth wall breaking middle child of a not quite dystopian wacked-out family. There was some off screen sex in this program too but it was more achingly ridiculous than Grantchester’s gratuitous steam.

As I said we had a long lively talk about this and enjoyed laughing through three episodes in a mini binge with our grandsons. They were the perfect age to watch four television brothers fight and scheme against the world and each other. As with the Simpsons, Fox provided a little anti-venom to its scurrilous political broadcasting designed for Alzheimish baby boomers.

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