1/28/13
I watch a lot of TV shows. There are many shows I’m not proud to have watched, but life is peppered with guilty pleasures. Downton Abbey is one such indulgence. To summarize it bluntly, this show is an expensive take on British soap opera. Viewers get front row seats to the minutia of a highly privileged English family and their waiting staff. Plot devices include missing cufflinks, new frocks, and who will win this year’s flower show.
Although the Downton I’ve seen so far has been reduced to two sentences, soap operas are more than quizzical if you actually sit down and think on it. People know how low the quality of the script, characters, lighting, or even acting for that matter, yet they still continue to glue their gossip-hungry eyes to the screen on a weekly basis.
I had an insight towards this phenomenon deep in the western mountains of Honduras. It was the summer of ’06 and volunteering was all the rage, high school students were always finding more expensive ways to polish their college applications so I found myself stationed in Los Surcos (pop. 300) to build a schoolhouse.
My Spanish thrived and work ethic was born when Joe, my project partner, and I helped the locals. However stimulating it was to live in a foreign village in the tropical mountains of Choluteca, after several weeks it turned monotonous. That’s when Pasiones Prohibidas seduced my addled cabeza.
Every wealthy family in Los Surcos had a small TV hooked to a car battery topped with rabbit ears. This enabled the women to get their soaps. I knew it was a fool’s obsession the moment I heard the names: La Madrastra (The Stepmother), Valle de Pasiones (Passion Valley), Pasiones Prohibidas, and what is now Ugly Betty, La Fea Mas Bella (direct translation: The Ugly More Pretty).
After a long day of mixing cement and getting your gringo ass handed to you by the hombres at futbol, nothing sounds better than lying in the hammock with your host mother and escaping to a rich family under a haze of powdery makeup with lots to fuss about.
Whether it’s a long day of errands topped by a mountain of dishes, a gaggle of screaming kids who demand every waking second of your attention, or just a stressful day at the office, soap operas help people distract themselves. If not on a regular basis then perhaps every once in a while, I propose we all be distracted by some fancifully fictional drama.
I must reinforce the word fiction because reality TV has the fatal flaw of social implications. It’s hard to walk away from a show like Jersey Shore and not be seriously disturbed that people like that do exist. I prefer to keep Television in a vacuum definitively separate from reality.
Me in the coveted hammock and my beautiful host grandmother in the corner. TV was just to the right.