End of days

Even as Barack Obama and his victory took over television last evening, I surfed for anything slightly different. And found the usual complement of soap operas, a couple of crime dramas and one very irritating society-party-report show with a very irritating anchor who puts on a strange and very irritating accent as she wanders from society party to society party wearing fashion just off the ramp and clutching a microphone that must smell from all that has been breathed into it.

That apart, I wandered into a show that I have watched maybe twice in my days as TV-watcher and avoided ever since because it not only made no sense, but was also a little to stodgy and sanctimonious for my taste. Which was obviously not everyone else's taste, since the soap has been going eight long years and the stodge and sanctimony garnering high viewership, too. Or so I believed. But apparently not. According to the host channel, it has lost its oomph and its get up and go has got up and gone, so it has been asked to stop. But the makers of the show are protesting and demanding - and hoping to get - a last minute reprieve. I am puzzled by this, since the show has to end today if it does, though the court hearing is tomorrow. So if the makers do not geta reprieve, they need to continue, and if they do not, they have to stop. So how do they manage to gear this episode? If it is ending, they need to come to some logical conclusion, so that all the 'I's are crossed and the 'T's are dotted, in a manner of speaking. If it is not ending, that process is not necessary. So what happens today? Except that whatever happens will make little sense to me, it would certainly be worth finding out how it all goes to bed tonight.

Soap operas defy all logic. In one that I watch occasionally, more to understand what a friend and long-time fan is talking about when she tells me excitedly about it, some lady is pretending to be someone else when she is actually the wife of the male lead and has had plastic surgery so that she looks like someone else. Somewhere along the way, life has got very confused and no one is quite sure who is doing what to whom and why. The how seems to be clear. In another, which I stopped at to see the truly strange fashions that the women wear, one lady's husband seems to be deathly ill and they are headed to an ashram to seek some sort of solution. Why not a new doctor for a second opinion, or even more experts, since there does not seem to be any shortage of money or will to live, I cannot help wondering. And in yet another, a badly dressed and worse bejewelled woman has just stuck a knife into her husband, while the villain looks on aghast, perhaps amazed at how his own villainy has been outdone.

But today's episode has me completely befogged. More since I cannot decide whether to watch it or not. But not knowing is worse than knowing too much or even too little, isn't it? Or is it?