I Like to Watch

What should you be watching this fall? "Pushing Daisies" and "Gossip Girl" top the list.

By Heather Havrilesky

Read more: TV, Arts & Entertainment, Heather Havrilesky, I Like to Watch

Salon composite / Photo: ABC

Kristin Chenoweth in "Pushing Daisies".

Oct. 7, 2007 | OK, let's skip the dead kittens and get right to the point this week: television. Although it might seem difficult to imagine for even a second that I consider you, the common chicken, when I'm sitting down to write my column, I do. My aim is to make these words palatable for chickens who a) watch tons of television and want to discuss all of it, b) watch a few good shows and enjoy hearing about the really bad ones, c) don't watch TV at all but want to keep abreast of any and all small-screen insanity for water-cooler purposes, d) don't watch TV or care, but enjoy sad anecdotes about dead kittens and working at the Gap and hitting the wall in calculus, e) don't watch TV but read this column to comment on what a waste of time it is to watch TV and read this column.

Now that you understand my target poultry demographic, you have some inkling of the chaotic soup of conflicting impulses that swims through my big, empty head every time I sit down to write this column. Should I quickly review all of the best shows of the fall season in a concise but upbeat manner, or should I dedicate my entire column to the aging Derek Zoolander character on "Survivor: China," and how he represents the broad-scale collapse of the American personality over the past 20 years?

Wow! The answer is so obvious when I just lay it out simply like that.

Bull in a China swamp
In the old days, Americans were strong and silent. If you've been watching Ken Burns' World War II documentary series on PBS, "The War," you know what I'm talking about. Sure, we didn't say too much back then, and sometimes we got very drunk and fooled around with our secretaries. Other than that, though, Americans were pretty dependable: brusque, a little dogmatic, maybe, but reassuringly solid. When a problem presented itself, we rolled up our sleeves and solved it.

These days, Americans are more like Dave, aka Zoolander, former model and contestant on "Survivor: China" (8 p.m. Thursdays on CBS). Dave is the kind of guy who says "Calm down!" when he's losing his temper and "Don't be so sensitive!" when he's being overly sensitive. Dave is the guy who tells you to relax in a tone that makes your heart race faster. He's the control freak who accuses you of being controlling. He bullies you about what a bully you are, and stirs up trouble by calling you a troublemaker. Dave fancies himself a relaxed, happy, peace-loving guy who's both "a motivator" and a "good team player" (according to his bio on the CBS Web site), but he's actually wound-up and defensive and can't play nicely with others. The magic of Dave is that, when he gets in your face about something, he can almost convince you that you're the crazy one. And then he goes away, and you don't feel crazy anymore. You just want to kill him -- a completely rational urge, actually.

Or, as ousted Survivor Ashley puts it: "Dave, if I had one word to describe him? Tool. That is the perfect word for him. Tool."

See, in the old days, it was easy. If you met someone like Dave, you'd just avoid him. But these days, our workplaces and schools and even our homes are absolutely filthy with Daves. You can't order a sandwich at the corner deli or make a flight reservation or drop your kids off at school without some Dave slowing down the line or insulting someone or losing his temper over nothing. In the old days, a Dave would've kept quiet, drowning his inner demons in whiskey and loose women. These days, though, the Daves can't shut up. Whether they're collecting the trash or running Fortune 500 companies, Daves are a pox on the land. They represent the aggressive wimp, the wishy-washy zealot, the psychoanalyzing psycho, the nitpicky, fault-finding mess of flaws. If you wake up every day in a country you don't recognize anymore, that's because Daves across the nation are compromising our productivity and ripping apart our families and destroying our diplomatic relations worldwide, leaving a trail of paper jams and broken homes and chaos in their wake.

Next page: New twists on old formulas that work