I’m running a contest within this update. The first person to e-mail me with the correct episodes from which the Spock quotes originated will get mentioned in my next article. I’ll most likely insult your masculinity and make insinuations about your vast Star Trek knowledge possibly stemming from your participation in one of America’s many “alternative” lifestyles. I’ll also make it a point to transcribe in explicit detail, the various sexual misadventures your mother has made it her business to partake in.
Television is an invention which has helped shape many of America’s youngest and brightest future thinkers into the mindless lumps of self-indulgence and lethargy you’ll commonly find trying to frighten the elderly with their “outrageous” hair styles and “provocative” choices in apparel. Sadly, the irony in spending three hours dying their hair blue and sewing on that radical new Anti-Flag back patch they ordered off of interpunk.com with their mother’s credit card in an attempt to look like the crazy old lady who lives at the dump and throws cats at children is lost on these people.
Sometimes when people find themselves locked in gripping conversation concerning which television family better represents their own “dysfunctional” home life I like to forcibly interject myself into the discussion to casually suggest that my family is more like the family on that one TV show in which the father gets fired from his job working graveyard security down at the laundromat for coming in drunk and pissing all over the inventory only to stagger home and drag his kid out of bed at three-thirty in the morning to berate him for being the result of a cheap bottle of bourbon and a broken prophylactic.
Of course most of my cynicism can be traced back to my childhood where my mother would set me in front of the television for hours on end in lieu of doing any hands on parenting and letting it placate my juvenile need for superfluous emotional indulgences such as “being told that I’m loved”. I can’t really hold anything against her though, as I’m sure it must’ve sucked raising me. I mean, in between soiling myself upwards of two to three times daily and requiring food every six to eight hours I’m surprised she didn’t throw up her arms and donate me to the carnival. By the time my siblings were born, making sure they didn’t mature into the same sort of socially maligned shell of a human being I’ve become ended up being a job in itself.
I’m not bitter though. Far from it, actually. Television did a fine job of filling the void in my life. Whenever I had a question concerning a pressing issue relevant to real life situations I’d find myself facing every day, I knew I could always count on a formulaic sitcom to dispense the answers. Whether I needed advice on repairing the kitchen wall after driving my father’s new car through it, desired instructions detailing the construction of a genetically altering transformer so that I could infuse Bruce Li’s blood with my own in order to save my girlfriend from a gang of local ruffians, or sought a means of keeping the jive talking alien who lived with us from eating my cat, there was a set of cookie-cutter parental units, devoid of any dimension almost to the point of transparency to whom I could turn.
However, not all of them were typecast servings of Americana. Underneath the distracting layer of designer sweater-vests and floral print sun dresses lay a group of TV authority figures whose sole justification of existence came from molding an impressionable generation into depraved immoral misfits.
Knowing I couldn’t go it alone, I tried recruiting the world’s #1 expert in child psychology, Dr. Spock, to take up arms and fight the good fight. Unfortunately I had no means of contacting him so I just randomly mashed the keys on the face of the phone until the woman who picked up informed me that he died in like, 1998 and if I called again she’d involve the law. I next made an attempt to get in touch with TV’s Mr. Spock, Leonard Nimoy because one would assume that having done narrative work on Seaman he wouldn’t be too discriminating as it pertains to picking work. Apparently the allure of writing a guest spot in an article on the internet for both myself and my mom to see wasn’t enough for Mr. Spock and my only available alternative is to copy and paste quotes from a Mr. Spock fan site next to amusing pictures and caricatures I found by entering “mr spock is gay asshole sex with men kate winslett morgan webb nude riding the orgain trail” into Google’s image search.
Heathcliff and Claire Huxtable
Show: The Cosby Show (NBC 1984-1992)
Synopsis:Old senile sociopath and his overtly smug wife slowly chip away at the mental stability of anyone under the age of thirty through means of completely inane rambling and a self-affirming smirk.
Whereas most old-fashioned parents find themselves content with physically abusing their kids right into the loving arms of America’s special education system, Heathcliff and Claire always sought out more contemporary means of disciplinary action. Cliff would routinely launch into a series of indecipherable tongues and ritualistic spasmodic dances until the child he was trying to subdue would glow with a red aura and start attacking the other members of their party and themselves at x2 ATK power, having fallen victim to the deadly berserker status ailment.
Lisa Bonet, circa third season The Cosby Show
Claire on the other hand, would seemingly derive some form of perverse sexual gratification from her children’s many mistakes. Never one to dispense advice prior to the incident, Claire wasn’t content to let the crippling emotional damage concurrent to staggering failure set in and slowly erode her children’s already warped self-image. She would always be sitting in that fucking armchair with the floral print, armed with her shit-eating know-it-all grin, ready to harp on the kids for the plethora of mistakes they no doubt made that day the second they walked through the door. She reminds me of this one gym teacher I had throughout highschool who couldn’t cut it as a college athlete and would routinely make it a point to establish his physical dominance over some of the less athletically inclined students by breaking land-speed records while rocketing red dodge balls at their heads.
Applicable level of expected counter-disciplinary youth rebellion:
Turning queer just for the reaction.
Mr. Spock on Heathclff Huxtable
A curious creature. Its trilling seems to have a tranquilizing effect on the human nervous system. Fortunately, of course, I am ... immune ... to ... its ... effect...
Aunt Becky
Show: Full House (ABC 1987-1995)
Synopsis: Closet homosexual juggles the burden of holding down a full-time job while acting as the patriarch to a household with a populous large enough to maintain its own internal economy.
Aunt Becky’s primary role on the show was to serve as the “You’re Not My Mother” motherly figure to the three girls whenever they went through one of those awkward phases girls go through in between being too young to cook me my fucking dinner and just old enough to cook me my fucking dinner. Whenever she’d attempt to dispense some critical girl-to-girl advice on say, putting on make-up or something, the recipient would punch her in the ovaries and scream about how she wasn’t their mother, and how she shouldn’t try to act as if she were their mother, and that their mother is dead.. Somewhere deep down you’ve got to think part of Becky was grateful for not having to exist in a universe in which problems like heavy menstrual flow were a common occurrence.
I once tried the “my mother is dead” approach with my own mom after coming home from school with a bad report card. After spending several minutes unsuccessfully convincing her that she died shortly after giving birth to my younger twin sisters who oddly enough were never seen in the same place or at the same time until one of them fell off of a horse and contracted a bout of amnesia in the most anti-climactic series finale ever, she chipped her diamond ring on my front teeth and put her cigarette out on my forehead.
Applicable level of expected counter-disciplinary youth rebellion:
Going back in time to buy one of those “I “heart” N.Y.” shirts with an airplane in place of the heart, on 9/12/2025 because you’re such a misunderstood loner who laughs in the wake of tragedy.
Mr Spock on Aunt Becky’s lackadaisical attitude towards administering advice:
If I were human, I believe my response would be: 'go to hell'. If I were human
Phillip Banks
Show: The Fresh Prince of Bel Air (NBC 1990-1996)
Synopsis: Crotchety fat man sinks deeper into depression and a bucket of the Colonel’s 20 piece Mega Meal as his culturally mismatched nephew corrupts his blue blood offspring through mad-cap antics and depreciating one-liners.
Phillip Banks is an anomaly amongst television fathers. It seems completely illogical for a man of his monetary stature to not just give in and get the fucking surgery done. I mean, if the man can cough up the money to have his wife murdered, the body disposed of, and a robotic look-a-like brought on in her absence, I’m sure he could dig enough cash out of his vast rolls of greasy lard to pay for some liposuction. You could just see it in his eyes with each agonizing step from the kitchen to the couch. He prayed for death’s clammy grip to claim him and end the suffering.
He also ended up batting .000 in the parenting department, having gone 0-3. His daughter Hillary turned out to be nothing more than a vapid sack of collagen, Carlton ended up being a limp wristed nancy boy, and Ashley was the rebel of the lot - always ready to launch some hair brained scheme to become the next En Vogue, or God forbid enroll in a public school.
Applicable level of expected counter-disciplinary youth rebellion:
Dropping out of high school to pursue a full-time musical career because some guy at a gas station heard your band’s demo tape and said you’ve got a sound that could make it big one day, dude, and then asked if you had a few extra bucks to spare so he could buy a six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
Mr. Spock on Phillip Banks’ insatiable desire to end it all by way of a slow and steady gorging process:
After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.
Eric Camden
Show:7th Heaven (WB 1996-Present)
Synopsis:Minister with an awkward balding pattern shelters his children from the harsh reality of life whilst harboring every known form of degenerate known to man under his roof.
Oh shit, where to begin with this one? Aside from the fact that he raised that one kid in the 10th gym locker room who remained completely oblivious to the meaning of any form of sexually ringed colloquialism yet would laugh anyway as to avoid having the football team violently violate him with a bar of soap for being such a “fucking queer” seven fucking times, Eric would regularly compromise their well being at home by marching an endless parade of society’s bottom rung through his house as he helped them find God through advice seminars preachy enough to make both Mary Worth and the mother from “Cathy” blush. I’ve taken the liberty of providing an abridged list of some of the more notable miscreants and deviants to set foot in the Camden residence.
- Emotionally imbalanced pregnant teenagers
- Abusive husbands
- Alcoholics
- Convicted child pornographers
- Iranian terrorists
- David Koresh (this was a special two-part episode)
- Michael Eisner
- The entire 2003 Yankee organization
Applicable level of expected counter-disciplinary youth rebellion:
Making a point to keep secret the habit of cutting yourself only to conspicuously leave the bloody knife in laughably obvious locations.
Mr. Spock on Eric Camden:
The creature within me is gone. I am free of it, and the pain. I am also quite blind.
I hope I’ve helped nip this problem in the bud before it corrupts another young mind. I’d try and come up with a comical way to wrap this post up, but years spent doing nothing but watching television have reduced me to a state in which I can only recite memorable quips from my favorite programs.
No, really. It’s a serious problem.
Wait, what are we laughing about again?
