By emily

Grade: C

Let’s face it: there is absolutely no reason to have Cable anymore. Every single good show on it has jumped, Evel Knievel-style, over a pool of a thousand sharks. Dave Chapelle and Sascha Baron Cohen and Jon Stewart are still funny, but not $100/month worth of funny. Adriana is dead. And I don’t even want to talk about Six Feet Under. Besides, as the number of people who have TiVo increases, we Cable subscribers are quickly starting to feel like the one person on the subway car who has a discman instead of an iPod. (What is up with the rAndOm capitalization in these technical innovations, anyway? Are they trying to be like a DuMb abbreviation for an NYC neighborhood?) Anyway, I am going to start weaning myself off of the dark box asap. I realized this last night while watching Duplex, which is a wacky caper film in which Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore try to kill an old lady.

There is no excuse for this sort of behavior (watching Duplex, not killing an old lady, although of course that is also bad). Except I guess being on an airplane. Duplex, though it sometimes seems like it’s going to, does not quite go so far past bad that it completes the 360 back to good. It’s just really, really bad and kind of fascinatingly ill-conceived: can you imagine people sitting in a boardroom somewhere saying: let’s make a fun comedy in which Drew Barrymore and Ben Stiller keep trying to kill an old lady but their efforts are always thwarted by a sinister black cop? Henry really enjoyed it, but that’s just because he likes watching people push old ladies down stairs. I felt dirty afterwards. Damn your molesting ways, Cable!

There are plenty of other good reasons not to have Cable, besides its way of being expensive and forcing you to watch bad movies:

the number one reason is: if you live in New York, you have to have Time Warner Cable, and though I enjoy their Columbus Center Mall (in spite of its being cursed), I really hate Time Warner. They use their cable monopoly to get away with ridiculously shitty service, chronic service outages, unreliable installers and repairmen, and general weirdnesses. For example, we used to have Showtime and then one day, it wasn’t there! Maybe they somehow found out how much we were making fun of the L word. I know that the normal thing to do in this circumstance is call and complain, but of course that will get you nowhere with these people. We are talking about the same people who make you haul your cable boxes into Manhattan, haul them back to Brooklyn because their office is closed on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, haul them back into Manahttan the next day and wait on line for an hour and a half JUST TO CHANGE THE NAME ON THE ACCOUNT.

I am starting to think that it isn’t enough just to give up Cable, because that might mean that I would just end up watching all the things I used to watch before I had Cable, such as Elimidate. I might have to give up TV entirely. Maybe this will usher in a new period of asceticism in my life. I have already given up coffee and being a huge bitch for no reason. I think I’m on my way to becoming some sort of holy person.