This week, we have reached an important moment in human history. No, it isn’t the fact America landed an SUV on Mars, or that scientists and their enormous atom smasher have discovered the illusive Higgs-Boson particle. It isn’t even the fact Jennifer Aniston has used her dark magic to lock a mortal into a binding marriage contract.
No, friends, our historic moment is that with the debut of the CW’s Oh Sit, we have finally found ourselves with our heads submerged under the Judge Line.
What is the Judge Line you ask? Well, for those of you familiar with the sport of baseball, you may have heard some stat junkie use the term ?Mendoza Line.? This hypothetical cut off point, named after defense specialist Mario Mendoza, is used to signify the moment a batter has become completely incompetent. Anybody who falls below the Mendoza Line is universally accepted to be terrible. The Judge Line is very much like that, except instead of measuring someone’s batting average, it measures the point where real life becomes more ridiculous than Mike Judge’s 2006 movie?Idiocracy.?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBvIweCIgwk
The other difference is that nobody actually uses the term because I just made it up for this post. Just go with it.
Idiocracy was the creator of Beavis and Butthead’s satirical take on the gradual dumbing down of modern society. The president is a monster truck driving professional wrestler, crops are watered by a loudly marketed energy drink despite that not being a very good idea, and Costco has become America’s most revered holy ground. With the current state of electoral politics, the over-saturation of genetically modified foods, and Walmart taking up more square miles than Manhattan, you can make an argument that we probably passed the Judge Line in the 80s. Not everyone would agree though.
See, with most of the things Idiocracy parodied, there are a lot of people that would look at them and argue we haven’t quite gotten below that mythical Judge Line based on them alone. The idiocy is just subjective, if you will. Some would say politics around the world are broken because it is easier for a rich guy to buy a politician than it is for a poor kid to get an education, but others would point out we haven’t quite gotten to the stage where we are electing President The Warlord and Prime Minister Kendo Nagasaki. GMO’s are incredibly creepy, but hey that’s just science right? You can’t get to sexy space robots without making some mutant man eating corn along the way. And Walmart… well, where else are you going to be able to get censored DVDs, bath tubs full of cheese balls, and store brand pregnancy tests in one shopping trip? Only a godless commie would want to get all those things at different stores comrade.
The new found consensus that real life is now more of a parody of itself than Idiocracy is a parody of real life comes from the movie’s take on television. In Idiocracy’s future, television has been reduced to the most base and easily digestible concepts. The most popular network is nothing but ?bating? and the highest rated show is called ?Ow! My Balls!??Thanks to Oh Sit, the game show that makes musical chairs EXTREEEEEME, sociologists can finally agree that humanity is no longer worth saving. Cancel the asteroid deflection programs, burn all the coal at once, nuke the whales, chairs up on the table, last one out shut off the lights ? people are watching musical chairs on television.
Seriously, compare this;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiSgFgns1R8
To this;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAg1r6zw7Bg
Which is the parody? Is it the show about outlandish testicular trauma? Or the show that goes so far out of its way to make as many, literally, shit puns as it can? Which one would you expect to be hosted by Jamie Kennedy? Considering he was in “Malibu’s Most Wanted” neither of these shows are exactly outside of his particular expertise. It is genuinely impossible to figure out, which is all the proof you need that we’ve passed the Judge Line.
Of course, it is all a possibility that I and the other pretentious pseudo-intellectual fatalists like me are jumping the gun on our condemnation of civilization due to televised musical chairs. Oh Sit could be some brilliantly subversive Dadaesque ?commentary on the type of programming we are willing to digest. The guy who created the show doesn’t seem to be taking it very seriously, and you have to think anybody that would hire the aforementioned Jamie Kennedy and the borderline insufferable Jessi Cruickshank to be the faces of your program is either making a bold statement or so allergic to comedy that he doesn’t want anything funny within two and a half miles of him. I very much want to believe this is its own social commentary, and not an actual attempt at being engaging or entertaining in anyway.
The problem is that it would be easier to believe that – or at the very least take Oh Sit’s own advice to not judge it very seriously – if we weren’t constantly told that very same thing as an excuse for other Judge Line candidates. In the past five years alone, we’ve been given a show where people try to fit through holes carved out of?Styrofoam, a show where two people go on a date in a pitch black room, a show where people eat as much food as they can until everyone vomits but the winner, and the upcoming Stars Earn Stripes which forgot to cast any actual stars but remembered to piss off veterans of actual wars. The only conclusion we can come to is that “high octane musical chairs” might not be the sole culprit, but it is certainly the tipping point that has sent us rolling down the hill towards the inevitability of watering our plants with Brawndo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbxq0IDqD04
Later, modern civilization.
It’s honestly been really sitty.