It's just TV!

BETTING À DAY

Rule #1 – TV shows are not documentaries. 

Rule #2 – TV shows are not commercials. public interest.

Rule #3 – The role of TV shows is not to promote good behavior.

Rule No. 4 – The role of the authors of TV series is not to show the human being “as he should be” but “as he is”.

I think it is important to make this point, because regularly “interveners” from organization X or Regroupement Y complain in the media that such and such a series “is not realistic”, “doesn't sends the right message” or “offers the wrong role model”.

I add Rule #5: No one watches a TV show to get re-educated.

TV 101

In recent years, I have lost count of the number of complaints that have been made about Quebec series that have been accused of not sending a good message. Remember when Luc Dionne had to write a long Facebook status when he was accused of having shown in District 31 an honor killing perpetrated by members of the Muslim community? Series are regularly criticized for showing characters who smoke, who eat poorly, who do not recycle, who do not compost, who fuck without a condom, etc.

This week, in Le Journal , the representative of the “Grouping of houses for women victims of domestic violence” attacked the program À cœur beating on Radio-Canada.  

“The program broadcast on Tuesday evening ended with the suicide of a violent spouse on the grounds of a help and shelter for women victims of domestic violence. What message does this program send to the victims, to their loved ones? That taking refuge in a care and accommodation center will cause the suicide of one's spouse? That violent spouses can easily find the place where their spouse has taken refuge? That the security of the houses is fragile and therefore that of the women and children who are there? »

With all due respect to the exceptional work of the employees of these houses, I don't think the audience of a series draws so many conclusions from a single episode. We must not underestimate the intelligence of viewers who know very well that they are watching an invented story, played by actors, and taken from the fertile imagination of an author who INVENTS stories.

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The letter writer also claimed that only once in 50 years has a man committed suicide near a shelter for victims of violence.

So TV writers should write their script with a statistics book in hand?

IT'S JUST TV

In the first season of Le Bonheur , we saw Michel Charette playing an “over-the-top” professor freaking out and violently overturning his desk. 

Do the two authors of the series, François Avard and Daniel Gagnon, should have consulted the data from the Ministry of Education to know exactly and precisely what percentage of teachers “lifted furniture belonging to the State”?

This enjoyable scene may have sent a subversive message to the public, the delinquent teacher is surely a very bad role model for citizens, but damn it was good to watch!