Charity begins ... on TV.

I'm feeling overly cynical today. Go figure. It's a short trip from my general cynical mode to the "overly" mode, so you'll forgive me if I seem a bit put off. First, it was Major League baseball and their unusual rules, combined with the magic of cable TV to start me off for the night.

I returned at 7:15 from a pleasurable bike ride to flip on the start of the Phillies-Mets game that I was told was on ESPN2 - in Hi-Definition - for which I pay a premium. But the game wasn't on ESPN2. Instead, it was on Regular-Def Comcast channel 8 in a fuzzy square screen that, if I wanted, I would have kept my old TV. I'm guessing that Major League Baseball or Comcast (equally spawns of Satan) have some rule involving the broadcast of a game in a local city, which means we here in the greater Philadelphia area have to slum-it with the fuzzy TV picture while the rest of the country gets the Hi-Def. That makes good nonsense.

Meanwhile, I'm paying for the Hi-Definition programming and a channel is blacked-out. Will I get a pro-rated refund? I'm holding my breath.

Part of my discontent resulted from the late delivery of my pre-ordered 2-disc DVD of "There Will Be Blood" which is languishing somewhere between Amazon's warehouse and my house. Wherefore art thou, DVD? It's Thursday soon and you said you sent it on Monday.

Disinterested in the pending fuzzy baseball game, I began pushing the channel buttons. Still, even though the writers' strike is long over, we are infested with these so-called "reality" shows. Tonight was Wife Swap and Supernanny sandwiched between a multi-hour special called Idol Gives Back, which I thought was going to involve the hours of people's lives that have been lost viewing the show, but instead involved something about a charity.

I wondered what the charity was, so I watched long enough to find out it was poverty. Really. The show was full of celebrities touring run-down areas of the country (seemingly in awe that people actually live like that) and we're supposed to believe that the show is doing something about it. Forgive me, but I didn't stay tuned long enough to find out how American Idol is going to solve the poverty problem in America. Call me cynical, but I'm thinking it's a big stage show with celebrities (including presidential candidates) parading on prime-time TV to show us that they're concerned.

Over the past few weeks, when I (in a weak moment) tune into Action News on our local ABC affiliate, I find my TV infested with a promo (disguised as news) for something called Oprah's Big Give, which is supposed to involve "regular people" doing random acts of kindness in the name of the Holy Oprah.

I'm guessing that people would murder small animals or have sex with a chicken if Oprah said they should do it. We've already seen how influential her Book Club is, and sometimes the books she recommends aren't all that accurate, but I'll skip that. Oprah's Big Give looks to me like another way for Oprah to manipulate her audience and show us all how much of a Svengali she is when it comes to her sheep-like TV audience. Could we call it Oprah's Big Take? Oprah is worth a thousand billion dollars. She could wander the Earth doing random acts of kindness herself for the rest of her life and still have hundreds of billions of dollars left. That she asks her witless audience to do her work for her is both manipulative and lazy. There, I said it.

Here it is, April 9. The TV writers have been back to work for over for a month. Still, I have no new Heroes shows and I'm stuck wandering the TV looking for programs that don't have "contestants" or celebrities pretending to care about us and our problems.

Tomorrow, The Office finally returns, following another new My Name is Earl episode. "There Will Be Blood" will undoubtedly arrive on Thursday, but it will sit because two great programs featuring actors and a script will be airing. If they're up to form, I'll laugh a lot.

Finally, TV will give something back that means something to people.