24 is perhaps my favourite TV show of all time. For 6 years it has sustained its appeal to me, even with its formula being so simple. Sure, its simple – create a terrorist plot that can last 24 episodes. But its in the creating of this, producing it and finally making it, that makes this the greatest show on TV. Its main star is one Jack Bauer. He is an icon of what will become my TV watching life. He is in exalted company – Dexter Morgan, Dr Craigh Huffstodt, Earl Hickey and David Brent all share a role in the great TV in my head. So to hear that Jack’s real-life character, Kiefer Sutherland, was today sentenced to 48 days jail for a second drink-driving offence after one a few years previous. So with him gone, who is going to protect us now?

I feel so unsafe.

Always remember 07.12.07

We will never forget.

Those of you with Foxtel will have heard of a new channel called Showcase. It is aimed at being a, ready for it, brace yourself, a ’showcase’ of some of the finer shows on TV from around the world, a few artsy fartsy movies and a liberal dose of shows too risky to be picked up by domestic free-to-air channels. Series such as Dexter, perhaps the greatest thing to happen to TV since Jack Bauer first graced the screen, is one such show they are touting as theirs. Love My Way, that incredibly boring yet bizarrely popular Australian drama; yes its another ‘lets be all serious and shit because its cool to be serious here in Australia cause our new comedy shows are fucking terrible and we can only get grant money by being serious’.

Movies are on it too. Stuff like An Inconvenient Truth, Little Miss Sunshine and all the ones that Kino and Nova so desperately try to screen for our cultural enlightenment. I was keen to watch Rome but I am yet to see it air, nor can I find it on any of the TV Guides. Another show I was keen to ‘watch’ was Satisfaction. A brief bit of back-story here. A month or so ago I attended a Dexter Q&A at Kino (their large popcorn was pitiful) and it was an event partly sponsored by Foxtel due to its desire to promote its new channel. On each of the seats was a microwavable popcorn bag wrapped up with a Foxtel popcorn container and on that container were some scantily-clad women. Thats always enough to get my attention.

So over the next few weeks I would often zone out at home and leave Showcase on as it would often have some features on some of the items that were gonna be played once it began. The funniest, and by funniest I mean ‘completely and utterly disgraceful’, feature was that of Satisfaction. You see the creators of the show were trying to convince people that their show was a challenging, confronting and ground-breaking piece of television. All I heard was ‘brothel’ and ‘confronting’ and immediately thought that it was about time Australian TV resorted to some more ‘arty’ nudity. And this was what it was.

“the writing is really courageous”

“acting it was a liberating experience”

“its a show focussed on a cast of women, and thats a first in Australia”

This is some of the CRAP spouted by those involved…as if this was a show that warranted some sort of critical, academic and cultural recognition as the show at the forefront of Australian drama.

Watching the first episode tonight, it reminded me how poor Australian TV can get. This wasn’t a show of any quality, of any substance nor of any ground-breaking issues; it was purely a soft-core porno with even worse acting than Debbie Does Dallas 14. Now, I am all for gratuitous nudity with little to no plot, but to have been promised a show with some challenging writing, confronting issues and ground-breaking acting, and all I get is a Arts Council Funded skin-fest, I was again reminded of the hollowness of Australian TV. Seems we can only do game shows, reality shows and buy all the crap from overseas.

At least I know the boob-to-no boob ratio is now swinging back into the right zone.

// Australian TV welcome to a NEW low.