Invisible Nosedive

^ NOT to be Idolized.

Sigh.

Two more months to go until Game of Thrones returns. The Dead Files is on hiatus. I already blew through all of the new episodes of MST3k: The Return. I'm BOOORED. I need a new show to become obsessed with. NOW. A task made especially difficult because I am ridiculously picky. I hate most TV shows with their infantile humor, sugar-coated realities, or worse...reality TV shows that worship ignorance, arrogance and glamorize stupidity. I had no idea what "Cash me ousside, how bow dah?" even meant until I googled it. I wish I hadn't. I didn't need to know that, and I feel dumber for having looked it up. I could have spent that wasted five minutes listening to Kanye West talk about how wonderful he seems to believe he is and felt more entertained.

After eavesdropping on my coworkers conversations, I decided to give Black Mirror a shot. I'd heard them talking about Westworld and wasn't interested because #1 - Westerns, yuck and #2 - Uh, Yul Brynner, hello? I'd listened to them squeal over Orphan Black, Orange is the New Black (what is with the color black lately?) and some other shit that didn't interest me in the least. But Black Mirror sounded try-worthy, reeking of The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. And hey, it was streaming on Netflix so fuck it.

There was only one season available, so I clicked on episode numero uno and waited to be impressed.

Ugh, god. Why don't I like Bryce Dallas Howard? I really don't know. Maybe because Jurassic World made me want to scour out my vagina with Borax and a steel brush and then lobotomize myself? Perhaps because Lady in the Water was about as thrilling as watching grandma fold socks for an hour and a half? I mean, she may be a very nice person in real life, I don't know. But the sight of her perky, eternally beaming face makes me want to squirt her with a bottle of weed killer until she goes away.

Oh well, at least her merciless cuteitude is put to good use here. Brycie is Lacie, a vacuous, terribly insecure and phonyass get-along girl, thrust into a not too distant future where Facebook and Instagram have merged into one universal website where you can rate your friends, your family, strangers on the street, etc. instantly and with disastrous results. Most people cruise along with 3.5 averages, living amiably and quietly, satisfied with their mediocrity. But then there's people like Lacie, who currently enjoys a 4.2 and has gotten a taste of the power it can bring and the doors it can open.

Lacie's world is a pastel perfect dessert shop window, everyone dressed in soft focus spring colors, floating through their Stepford Lives in pleasant, superficial stupors. Everyone seems happy and well-adjusted. Lacie, desperate to rent an apartment in an exclusive housing community where a rating of 4.5 or higher will get you a significant break on your rent, is trying too hard. She shoves her niceness down people's throats, forces her generosity onto anyone unlucky enough to step inside her pink plastic bubble, trying so hard to be perfect that she makes people choke on her artificial sweetness. She's cloying, to say the least.

For some reason, her uploaded photograph of a disfigured doll makes her rating shoot higher and wins her the friendship of some blonde bitch with fake tits who rests on her lofty 4.9 laurels and flashes a diamond engagement ring the size of Andre the Giant's worst hemorrhoid. And oh goody and Lordy Lou, she wants Lacie to be her MAID OF HONOR!!!

Ugh. In the never-to-be-forgotten words of the porn shop clerk in the 1991 British sitcom Bottom - "No thank you sir, I'd rather have a pineapple inserted violently into my rectum." If I never attend another bridal shower/baby shower/bachelorette party in my life, I will shed this mortal coil happier than the most obnoxiously happy asshole ever to be slapped with the happy stick in Happydale.

But anyway, it was about this time I completely lost interest and turned the show off. I knew where it was headed: Lacie will fuck up somehow and lose all her points and learn a lesson about the true meaning of life and blah blah blahdee blah, I don't give a twopenny fuck what happens to any of these meat mannequins. Wait, no, that's a lie - I hope they all die horribly and spend an eternity in a Hell without Wifi, Starbucks or pom key charms.

Back in Ye Olden Days of 1986, the then revamped version of The Twilight Zone aired an episode called "Too See the Invisible Man." It starred a guy who, for some reason, my memory insists was Steve Gutenberg, but wasn't. Not Steve Gutenberg played the part of a typical corporate douchebag tool. The year is 2104 or something, and all human activity is surveilled by drones. Thanks, Obama. Anyway, he gets caught being a giant douche to everyone and is sentenced to a year of invisibility. He has a nickel sized implant inserted in his forehead for all to see, and it's no good trying to disguise that shit with a jaunty cap good chap, because it's got a laser that burns through anything that tries to conceal it, so haha all over THAT smartass fucker. Although I do have to feel sorry for anyone in this futuristic metropolis who has really bad acne and constantly gets shunned by accident until the Oxy can do its job.

At first, Not Steve Gutenberg is pumped. He can walk into a bank and help himself to big handfuls of cash. He can elbow his way to the front of the line at the all you can eat buffet. He can walk down the street, calling everyone an asshole without fear of retaliation. But he also can't call for assistance when he's deliberately hit by a car. No one is allowed to talk to him, or acknowledge his existence in any way, not even other Invisibles. Punishment for acknowledging an Invisible is a year of Invisibility. But by the end of the year, NSG has learned his lesson and becomes so ridiculously compassionate that he gets sentenced to another year of Invisibility for acknowledging a sobbing Invisible woman.

Please eat his face off, please.

Okay yeah, they're far from identical, but close enough for Black Mirror to feel like recycling. I tried the next episode - something about a slovenly, neckbeardy loser who needs money quick and ends up screaming for 40 long, irritating minutes as he imagines giant spiders in a VR haunted house. I got so tired of listening to him scream that I turned that one off too. Friends told me to try the Christmas episode, which I did, and shut off 20 minutes in. Because I just didn't give a shit about any of these people, or the selfish plights that landed them in their current kerfuffle, or their stubborn refusal to accept responsibility for all of the shit things they've done and are still doing. I can see that shit on Jerry Springer. I want a fucking escape, where sociopathic actions have severe consequences.

So far, all of these new shows have lacked one critical element: a conscience. Can we please stop glamorizing sociopaths?