TV. or not TV?

Charlie Brooker is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore. And, like Peter Finch, whose character in the 1976 TV satire Network roamed around in the rain, heard voices in his head and shared his crazed insights with millions of viewers, Brooker allows himself to go all ranty for a good portion of each episode of the BBC show How TV Ruined Your Life.

Brooker somewhat resembles a seedier, angrier Kenneth Branaugh, and he’s the writer and creator of this six-part vent-a-thon that tackles ways in which TV, well, fraks up modern life. Conveniently broken into half-hour chunks, it can be viewed, yes, on BBC television (or checked out on YouTube, for you anti-TV purists).

Brooker is an intensely cynical man. Which doesn’t mean he’s not right most of the time. Each episode of How TV Ruined Your Life explores how a different aspect of our daily lives has been manipulated, polluted, altered and distorted by the TV tube. Brooker is ticked off by the way advertisers and media use fear to get us to stay indoors and… watch more television. He’s seething at the way TV programs trick us into seeking love and companionship — not because these are intrinsically good things, but because it will motivate us to buy more toothpaste and a sexier car. And he’s really pissed off at no-name rap and rock stars who flaunt their conspicuous consumption of large mansions on shows like MTV’s Cribs. In short, he’s like many a college roommate or housemate you might have had who spent, literally, hours on end sitting in front of a television set, just so he could hurl insults at it. If you posed the obvious question to said roommate (“Well, why are you still watching it?”), this only led to hour-long digressive rants about the media-saturated society and the lack of legitimate sounding boards in such a mediocracy. You’d just never win.

The prom-ise: Check out Debenham’s carpet-worthy fashions for prom nights and grad balls.

Brooker is more entertaining than a college roommate, his jabs are wittier, but he does sound like a fairly difficult person to enjoy having a beer with. Here’s his take on the cynical use of babies to sell everything from jewelry to cars in TV ads: “Childbirth is a miracle, albeit perhaps the most visually repugnant miracle it’s possible to imagine, short of watching a horse shitting a wheelbarrow… Yet people seem fond of these gurgling, semi-humanoid Gumps.”

Adults fare little better, especially dads in TV shows, who are usually depicted as “tragic, shuffling, pitiful individuals who should be lined up in a ditch and coldly shot in the head to put them out of their misery.”

In the episode called “The Lifecycle,” Brooker looks at the way TV increasingly panders to young people on TV and shoves old people into the storage shed — while, ironically, it’s senior citizens who watch the most television, being less likely to attend raves or go wakeboarding on a regular basis. Youth, meantime, is adored, glorified, pitched to on a nonstop, 24-frames-per-second basis. Because these are the people who will most likely blow their (or their parents’) hard-earned money on Frappuccinos and distressed jeans.

No, this is not exactly news. When “teenagers” were first discovered to be a huge, desirable marketing target in the 1950s (around the time they cured polio), it led to a constant race to pander to their tastes on television. The trend is accelerated today, Brooker points out, with youth being worshipped on shows like Hannah Montana and My Sweet 16, while older characters are left making pathetic attempts to seem “hip” or “cool” (see: the Phil Dunphy character on Modern Family or those old guys on Top Gear).

Give ’em the boot: Siriano created six powerful styles to accompany his RTW apparel at New York Fashion Week

Brooker’s even more scathing about love, and how almost every second of TV viewing since childhood has conditioned everyone, both male and female, to believe there’s a single “soulmate” out there waiting for them (“Out of billions and billions of people, you’re only allowed one person to love? One person? That’s your serving?”) and to desire a type of idealized love connection that’s largely built on illusion. Or, as he charmingly puts it: “Television: the machine that wiped its ass on your Valentines.”

Yes, a deeply cynical man.

But what lifts How TV Ruined Your Life above mere frothing at the mouth is the basic soundness of Brooker’s analysis. True, he doesn’t offer much as a substitute to getting our daily lifestyle cues from the box; but he shows just how much TV’s grip has escalated over the last half century.

Though, arguably, the grip of the old boob tube is now largely weakened by other available media out there (or, as one YouTube viewer commented: “Do people still watch television?”). Television, in its own way, has always targeted and lashed out at such competition. First, there were hard-sell TV news exposés about the “dangers” of video games and constant computer use; then the fear-based hype surrounding the Y2K Bug and its imagined catastrophic after-effects (“No one knew precisely what would happen, but they knew it would suck.”). Brooker argues that TV, like a paranoid HAL 9000, seeks to destroy and eliminate anything that shifts human focus away from… itself.

Actresses Mena Suvari and Gabrielle Union sit front-row at the Christian Siriano fall ’11 runway show during New York Fashion Week. Dressed head-to-toe in Christian Siriano, the starlets also rock the Orchid Pump and Harness Bootie from the Christian Siriano for Payless Fall ’11 Gold collection.

In the show titled “Progress,” he argues that TV once promised a future where we’d all have personal jetpacks and control our lives through TV screens while robots did all the household work. Instead, we’ve become slaves to gadgets and TV screens (“Pop a TV screen in our line of vision, and we’re hopelessly drawn to the light. Never mind apes; we must be descended from moths”). Reality TV, meanwhile, has led to a generation of “hive-minded jury monsters” who feel a “vague sense of permanent outrage when they can’t automatically control world events by texting in” like on Big Brother or American Idol. And increasingly, we’re “marooned here in the future with our devices, unable to focus on anything that doesn’t light up and go ‘beep,’” meanwhile “jigging about like desperate jesters for their computerized approval.”

Of course, you could just shut the damn things off.

Nah, that’ll never work.

Yup. Hating television has never been so entertaining.