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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

USA: How low can you go?

I hope that the Screen Actors Guild goes on strike. Then we'd be spared crap like USA's new original series "The War Next Door" (9 p.m. Sunday), representing the latest offensive in the network's war on good taste.\nYes, I'd be out of work if America's celebrities walked off the job, but after watching the aforementioned program, I don't care: I'd rather set my nuts on fire and put them out with a ballpeen hammer than sit through that P.O.S. again.\nHow bad could it be? I would have enjoyed taking hits from an exhaust pipe while reading MAD Magazine's "Spy vs. Spy" comic strip more than watching "The War Next Door."\nThis is the premise: Retired CIA agent Kennedy Smith (Linden Ashby), named after the target of the CIA's most successful operation, moves to suburbia. His arch-nemesis Alan Kriegman (Damian Young) -- German for "War Man" -- and super-seductress Barbara Bush (Tara Rosling), who is not related to the former first lady, move next door. Hilarity then ensues.\nNo, seriously.\nI can only assume that either the producers of this show think we're all morons, or this show's writers accidentally lobotomized themselves by picking their noses with coat hangers.\nIn the episode entitled "Blood is Thicker Than Death," Kennedy is frustrated that he can't tell his son Lucas that he killed people for the CIA. Meanwhile, Kriegman conspires to seduce Lucas by hiring mercenary Ninja midgets to ambush Lucas, then showing up in the nick of time to save him.\nI swear to God and sunny Jesus I'm not making this up.\nGetting back to the plot ... ah, to hell with it. I won't enrich your lives by telling you how this story turns out.\nIs this what television has come to? Do the people in the entertainment industry think that viewers are nothing more than Pavlov's dog, ready to salivate for cruel jokes like "The War Next Door," which pretends to be a comedy when it's really just an insult to fans of campy, low-brow humor everywhere?\nThat's why I hope the SAG goes on strike. Sure, I'd miss the two outstanding shows on television, but a SAG strike would at least mean a temporary reprieve from the hundreds, nay, thousands of inane and downright irritating series like this one that do nothing but pollute the electromagnetic spectrum.\nA SAG strike would also expose how insane celebrities are. They make more money than several European countries and yet they are the only ones who go on strike nowadays. This is ego gone out of control.\nIt really puts my panties in a bunch when financially secure actors like David Duchovny bitch about how hard they work and how they deserve millions and how the ungrateful public doesn't appreciate the tremendous sacrifices they make.\n(Editor's note: IDS Weekend deleted three paragraphs from this article because they were laced with obscenities, calls for physical violence and phone numbers of celebrities that Schogol asked readers to harass. We are printing a slightly modified version of the rest of this review.) \nThat (rooster)-sucking (donkey)hole can suck his own (Richard)! And when I call him a son of a (female dog), I mean that literally.\nThe successful members of SAG are part of the same entertainment industry gone amuck that produces "The War Next Door." They would perform a public service by throwing a monkey wrench into the Hollywood machinery.\nHell, if it means no more USA original series, I'll go out and picket with them!

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