So Much For My Daytime TV
scrappybadger June 6th, 2007
I’ve been busy teaching a couple of freshman comp. classes this summer, so I haven’t been able to watch The View in over a month. During the spring semester my schedule usually allowed me to catch it a couple of times a week. I’ve loved the show ever since Rosie was added to the cast. I’d been thinking for years that they needed a lesbian on the show, and I love that she is both a dyke and political. Frankly, I don’t get apolitical lesbians, and, what’s more, I don’t find them particularly interesting.
I don’t necessarily agree with everything Rosie says, and oftentimes my politics are much more radical than hers, but I love her and that wonderfully big mouth of hers nonetheless. I like seeing dykes on tv, real ones, not those pseudo-lesbians from The L Word or the occasional psycho gay woman on Law and Order. I like the actual lesbians, the ones that look like me, that sound like me, and whose lives might be at least a little like my own.
I’ve been happy watching her shock people and sometimes piss them off. I saw a Youtube clip of the very long (for tv at least) fight between Rosie and cohost Elisabeth, but I hadn’t heard much about it otherwise, so last night I went trolling through Youtube again only to find that she left The View early, earlier even than the few weeks she had left on the contract she wasn’t renewing. I guess I’ve been under a rock — or, more accurately, stacks of student essays. How can this be? How can she be leaving early?
I’m so bummed. I liked watching her. I like that she is fat. I like that she doesn’t hide the fact that she likes food and doesn’t incessantly apologize for liking it. I like that she is a lesbian. I like that she talks about issues the way regular people and that she does it in front of millions of people even though that isn’t an easy task. I just plain like her, and I hate to see her go.
I don’t think I’ll be watching The View anymore. I didn’t watch it much before, and I can’t stand the constant promotion of dieting and body hatred that has come to define the show. The hot topics were what I tuned in for and to hear what Rosie would say each day. It just sucks that we’re back to Our Regularly Scheduled Heterosexual Programming. It’s tiresome.
