No one MAKES you watch bad TV

Relatedly, no one makes anyone read TwoP either.

This is true.

And, I almost don't want to post this, but I might as well...

"The Inside" (households: 2.6/4, #13; adults 18-49: 1.6, #13). The new summer drama was off 19% in households and 20% in adults 18-49 from its debut numbers last week (households: 3.2/5; adults 18-49: 2.0 on 6/8/05).

Yeah, kinda the raison d'etre of the site is to bust on guilty pleasure shows. Though I am slightly mystified by the people who loathe something passionately right out of the gate and continue posting to that effect for months on end.

Relatedly, no one makes anyone read TwoP either.

A true, true thing. But it seems to me that most of the people here seem to be reading it with fun in mind, or, in Tim's case perhaps, to gauge a general reaction to the show. I myself, for example, am not reading anything over there right now.

I do enjoy the Veronica Mars recaps.

I understand that people have problems with gore on tv shows and that context does play a lot into it.

But, honestly, I don't think that anything on prime time is as gorey as what Discovery Health channel shows during the day.

A couple months ago I was flipping through the channels and lighted on Discovery Health. It looked interesting, trauma in the ER. There's this guy on the exam table, obviously in pain and shock, he's moaning, there's blood and medical professionals all around. They say something about an accident, and the doctors are talking. And then one hands the other the guy's severed foot.

I almost threw up on the cat.

They were probably going to try and re attach it or something, I don't know, I couldn't watch anymore.

That's my bench mark for gross now. So far The Inside has not topped the severed foot and I don't think it will.

Gore doesn't bother me. I might turn away (never seen a surgery on Nip/Tuck and never will), but I'm not upset or offended that it's there.

That being said, I haven't had to hide my eyes yet.

Personally, gore doesn't remotely bother me, at all. I'm not sure why.

But, honestly, I don't think that anything on prime time is as gorey as what Discovery Health channel shows during the day.

I can't watch any of that stuff. I get completely squicked. I think it might a switch in my brain that knows: This gore is real vs. This gore is fake.

I saw one of those Discovery Channel ER shows recently, in which a college kid had burned himself severely (no idea how). So there were closeups of his burns and all, but what struck me was the person behind the diagnosis -- when they brought him in, he was trembling uncontrollably, talking and trying to get a handle on what had happened to him and trying to be responsive to all these hospital people, volunteering information. He didn't shut up till they put him on supplementary oxygen.

Later, they showed his new skin grafts on his thighs being washed and bandaged, as they are every day at first, and it's terribly painful. He would lie there, tears streaming down his face, apologizing for crying and trying to make lighthearted conversation with the nurses.

Closeups of 3rd degree burns? Whatever. I've grilled meat before. Those burns were meaningless to me. That the burns happened to a person, a real person, a person I got to know, a person I ended up liking a whole lot, that's what makes the burns matter.

The weird thing about severe burns is that it kills all the nerve cells, so the victims often feel no pain (after the initial burning). I read a book about the crash of a commuter plane - some of the survivors were all rational and pain-free, yet they knew that they were going to die as a result of their burns because their burns were too severe.