Whither wholesome family entertainment?

Ok am sorry. I have been ignoring my first baby (aka thinking aloud blog) for the "glamour" and fun of my food blog. But that doesn't mean I have totally forsaken it. The fact that I am writing this with the mother-of-all-colds at 11.30 at night stands testimony to this fact.

I have this deal with Anoushka - its called the my TV time and your TV time. Early evenings is when she is allowed to watch cartoons and a little later - 8 pm onwards is when I watch my TV. I don't cut into her time and she knows not to cut into mine. I largely watch serials on Star World and AXN. Of this what I really enjoy are the family based serials on Star World - My Wife and Kids, Everybody loves Raymond, Two and Half Men, Hope and Faith, According to Jim and many more.

What I truly love about these serials is how in a span of half hour they present a situation that is so common in family life. There is always a solution shown to a everyday problem and all of this is done with a dash of humour. These are the same situations that people like me and you face - falling sick and having no one to look after the kids, in laws dropping unexpectedly, a clash of opinions on how to deal with kids, lying to the spouse to get out boring functions, the works.

All of us have encountered one or more this in our lives. Many a times the solution is almost the same we have seen on TV. Why then, we as a nation obsessed with reality TV don't have a single serial that revolves around true family values. All of our prime time soap operas are about evil stepmothers, even scarier mothers-in-law, sisters in law who traverse generations to kill your reincarnations and a whole other crock of excrement. Of course the defence has always been that "we have surveyed the audience and we know what they want." But tell me wouldn't you want to see how parents elsewhere deal with the issues of talking to their children of the bees and birds, how a dad has to cope with the mood swings of his PMS teenager, how you deal with kids experimenting with drugs or cigarettes or even the opposite sex, what to tell your spouse who has just been laid off.

These are questions that you can't always go running to the elders for. So if you have a counterpart on TV with a solution that forms part of your daily entertainment, why not? Yes! there are evil, conniving members in every family, but eventually in all families they are found out and they suffer the consequences and it generally happens in one lifetime itself.

What ever happened to the concept of wholesome family entertainment. Whatever hard hitting serials we do have deal with issues like child marriage and is meant to educate the masses that don't have access to cable TV, let alone the DTH luxury. Ironic, if you ask me.