Returning Favorites?

I don’t really want to watch House anymore.  Or South Park for that matter.  Really, they’re just shells of their former selves.

But yet, new seasons for each have started, and I watch them.  Why, why, why am I watching them?  Why do I still take time out of my week to see what’s going on?  Sure, I’ve invested years into the characters, but the shows are just not that good anymore.

House came off its worst season, one in which Cuddy comes out of nowhere to profess her love to House.  The season finale was actually one of the better ones in the series, where our favorite self-loathing doctor somehow became attached to a woman whose leg was pinned down in a collapsed building.  It was actually pretty riveting, enthralling, and everything worked until that last scene where Cuddy came in.  Maybe this would’ve made sense a few years ago, but now all of a sudden, after adopting a child and getting engaged with another guy, she realized how much she loved House.

And that doesn’t even get into the general awfulness of that season and the general decline of the series the past few years.  Seasons two and three were probably the best House we’ll ever see.  The team was set, House was a complete ass, Cuddy and Wilson played the adults, and we had reliably good patients-of-the-week.  There was a system to each episode.  Enter the patient, House finds something interesting and goes for the most common solution, a series of negative tests and false diagnoses follow, someone tells House he’s crazy, House does it anyway, and finally, someone says some non-sequitur that sparks a revelation in House that explains everything.  Maybe a little formulaic, but it worked, damn it.

Then the patients became an afterthought, like “Oh yeah, our characters are doctors, so they need to have patients.”  Rarely did they have families to check up on them, often did they suddenly know that House was an ass because of his leg pain (somehow), always did they’re situation reflect exactly what was going on with the characters.  Patients now can’t just have an illness because they have an illness.  That would be silly.  The main plots became House and his team, and while this was entertaining at times, it took us out of the formula.  And when they kept switching up the team, there was no cohesion, and things got messy.

South Park has been about the same.  There used to be a time when South Park was one of the best commentaries on television, even with all the crude jokes and wild situations.  It was at its best when they were saying something about what was going on in the world.  Unlike most animated shows, it was made with computers, and an episode could be made in a week instead of months.  South Park could be topical.

Episodes on Mel Gibson, gays, Scientology, immigration, and Paris Hilton were brilliant, weird, and hilarious.  Even when it wasn’t commenting on something, it was the funniest show around.  One of its best moments was the first episode a month after 9/11.  South Park made it okay to laugh again, and they were brilliant.  Whatever they wanted to do, they did it.

But now, it seems they don’t want to do topical humor anymore.  Sure, there’s been the occasional Glenn Beck and Tiger Woods episode, but they’ve been hit or miss.  This week’s season opener was about Cartman believing all NASCAR fans are poor and stupid, so he tries to be poor and stupid to drive NASCAR.  Kenny objected, and that was about it.  Meh.

Essentially, South Park and House have turned into The Simpsons, though somehow House got there a lot faster.  They’ve all been around so long that they’ve run out of ideas.  Now, they’re just relying on hey-have-we-done-this-yet stories.  They’re watered down, so then why am I still watching?  Do I really care about these characters that much to keep watching, even if I kinda dread it?  Am I holding onto hope that they’ll somehow right the ship and become great again?  I don’t know.

And damn it, I still watch The Simpsons, too.