Television Documentation of Real-Life Decline of Boston

An impending "escape" from the Boston area provides the impetus for this detour into "blogland" regarding how current television shows properly portray the decline of this once great city.

One spoiler is that thoughts to purchase the vanity plate "FU MA" are not entirely joking. Another spoiler is that Boston still is an overall pretty city with nice attractions. It simply is as if a mad scientist has polluted the water supply with a chemical that has made the population incredibly aggressive and unable to not relentlessly dig in their heels when hearing "no" as a response to anything that affects them.

Future entries will expand on the above theme.

A "Family Guy" cutaway from a recent season is the initial source of inspiration for these musings. Hub-area native Seth MacFarlane has "Guy" character Peter Griffin ponder how Boston could both be home to many of the best universities in the county and be entirely populated by dirt bags.

This joke is consistent with other recent televised portrayals of the capital of The Peoples' Republic of Taxachusetts. The hilarious web series, a YouTube clip of which is provided below, "The Real Housewives of South Boston" is one of the best (and most spot-on) examples of this development.

"Guy" and "Housewives" are on top of the unwatchable reality show "Wahlburgers"about the hamburger restaurant chain of the siblings of Dorchester, MA native Mark Wahlberg. (Watching the mother of the boys whine about her options for traveling several hundred miles to a family event fatally exhausted the patience of your "unreal" reviewer during an attempt to check out the program.)

Televised depictions of real-life Boston-area events received even greater notice when national news stories noted that three Lifetime movies in a row focused on lurid incidents from that region a few years ago. That trifecta consists of the Craigslist Killer, the pregnancy pact of the female students at the high school in Gloucester, MA, and a third one that presently cannot be recalled.

As illustrated above, for whatever reason, the "slobs' have defeated the "snobs" in this city. One need look no further than the constantly humid and always reeking of urine subway stations, the plethora of very assertive panhandlers who accost you at every convenience store and Dunkin Donuts entry, and the increasingly Port Authority Bus Terminal like North Station to see this.

Speaking of the transportation system in Boston, the commuter rail system being known as the TSR (for Trans-Siberian Railroad) in my household long pre-dates the ongoing epic (and inexcusable) failures of that system and the general MBTA of this past winter.

The commuter trains have been filthy, crowded, smelly, and unreliable for years. A recent trip in which the floor was pig sty level muddy at the first stop on the first trip of the day (which was late despite the train having been at the station since the previous day) is one of many examples of this.

The sad fact regarding all this is that life is imitating art in an era in which the congenial blue and gray collar barflies of "Cheers" have become the thugs of current Beantown-based televised fare.

Anyone with CIVILIZED questions or comments regarding the above topic is welcome to either email me or to connect on Twitter via @tvdvdguy,