Back in the day, when you curled up on the couch to watch TV, it was generally a pleasurable, albeit mind-numbing experience, just as the networks intended it to be. Sure, commercials were annoying but they were about Maytag washing machines or dishwashing liquid or some other non-threatening product. You could eat a bowl of ice cream or some popcorn without suddenly being frightened out of your wits that you would get diabetes from the ice cream and high blood pressure from the salt on the popcorn. Or cancer. Or heart disease. Or uncontrollable bowel movements. Or, God help you, all three.
Curling up on the couch to watch TV used to be a way to achieve comfort; now it's a place where you curl up into a fetal position and achieve terror.
I'm sick and tired (no pun intended) of having to listen to some announcer with the hurried voice of a cattle auctioneer rushing through a list of thoroughly disgusting side effects. Here I am, happily watching a ball game or a sitcom and when the commercial break comes on I have to hear about how taking Zimethetonacxionzataphin (why do they always have a Z or an X in their names?) can cause diarrhea, unbearable headaches, projectile vomiting, anal bleeding, heart failure, total loss of muscle control, pus-filled growths, penile discharge, cancer of everything and a whole gruesome array of other revolting symptoms, all of which I am certain I will probably get because I'm a certified hypochondriac. Who needs it? Guys, I DO NOT want to have to listen to that shit, loose, watery or otherwise abnormal.
If you're not already a hypochondriac, Big Pharma will make you one. Maybe that's their goal. Stress them out enough with the commercials and hopefully they'll get sick.
If that's not bad enough, there's the lingerie-clad woman with the singsong English accent talking about erectile dysfunction which, via the power of suggestion, you will soon develop because the next time you have sex you will be reminded of the erectile dysfunction ad you just saw.
Following the Viagra commercial, a Cancer Centers of America ad pops on featuring bald people with twenty tubes up their noses. For some reason, they're all smiling as if to say, "Keep watching---this will soon be you."
And what's with the two outdoor bathtubs? If you lug two three hundred pound bathtubs outdoors, you will definitely experience ED, not to mention permanent back problems, from which you will get temporary relief from the product in the next commercial, although you might also get lymphoma and die if you take it.
Do me a favor, Big Pharma: Enough with the pharmaceutical ads. I just want to sit back on my Barcalounger and watch actors lying on blood-soaked operating tables getting their small intestines pulled out on my favorite hospital show.