Power tubing

Cynicism? Hell no! I just love salt and grease -- especially after a hard day of eating baked tofu. Sure, I'd be lying if I said I'm a regular Baywatch viewer, but I'm damn glad it's there. Whenever I've run across this atrocity packaged by Speedo, it's an endless yuk fest of mindless plot populated by empty-headed heroes and heroines, with lots of hot bods. And sometimes that's enough. Much as weekends were once made for Michelob, weeknights -- those things that string our workdays together -- are made for snacking on bad TV. Couch-potato chips, that is: junk food for the tired brain.

I'm not putting it down. The media violence-watch people might be right in asserting that TV makes us a more pernicious culture, but it is also the great electronic Prozac. Sometimes, when you need to let the detritus of a hard day float downstream, that's just what it takes to unwind -- Harlan Ellison be damned.

Today, the 57-channeled cable-fed monster we've come to know as television offers us so many options for morale boosting and escape. Nickelodeon and its TV Land spinoff mini-network, for example, offer The Munsters, Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, even Rhoda at night. Entertainment, yes, but more; it's the hairtrigger of the memories of the warm fuzzy years of my generation -- the comfort of childhood, rekindled and recalled, at the push of a button.

And that's just the nostalgia trip. Contemporary shows like Baywatch let us click off our minds just as easily while letting our human impulse to pant at other members of our own species click on; Freud might call it getting in touch with our animal nature. And if we do care to keep our wits about us while watching 'Watch or its spinoff, we can play cultural elitist and turn the show into a weekly version of our own MST3Bay. Any excuse to show off our wit, even while lying on the couch in our underwear eating Smartfood and suckin' a beah, is a good one.

Xena -- hey, the show's like every Mighty Thor comic book I read when I was a kid. Only better; it's Edgar Rice Burroughs and Marvel Comics rolled into one. Better yet, Xena's a big, strong, beautiful woman who kicks butt. Damned if women don't deserve to kick butt for a change. And guy heroes are so damned predictable. For one thing, they always get the girl. Most of the time, Xena doesn't even care about the guy. She's got demons to conquer and evil warlords to off. (Sounds like my office. What about yours?)

Then, what's a better great escape than space? You know, the final frontier? (And I thought that was where I live, near the airport in Eastie.) Right now there are so many Star Treks going that even the supremely logical Spock (he should talk to Pamela Lee's surgeons about those ears) couldn't keep them all straight. Yet hardcore Trekkies have no problem remembering Who's Who on Deep Space Nine, or which episode of the original series Robert Bloch wrote.

Star Trek is the center of one of the firestorms of the bad-TV controversy. It's an issue not so much of quality as of defining that point where longevity, quality, and franchise spinoffs converge -- and bad TV crosses the line to become intolerable TV. For some, this show hit that nadir of taste and judgment when Kirk, Spock, and the rest of the original crew were plopped down into the middle of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral. For others, it will never reach that point of no return.

The shows we're writing about here aren't necessarily the best of the baddest. Who's really fit to judge such a sublimely personal thing? But we do think they're among the cream. Not to slight fans of Highlander, the suburban-terror-inducing COPS, Bewitched, Mad About You, I Dream of Jeannie, and other embraceable atrocities. We agree those shows are awful too, of course. We also say: so sugar rots your teeth, step on into the candy store.

Now, repeat after me: there is nothing wrong with loving bad TV, there is nothing wrong with loving old TV, there is nothing wrong with never turning on an episode of Upstairs Downstairs in your life, even though you know the name of the suburb that Cliffy from Cheers hails from. Got that? Good. A guilty pleasure? Hey, who's got time for guilt in this life? (Okay, I know we all do, but it's never constructive.) Sure, you could be roller-blading or studying the stock market, but diff'rnt strokes for different folks. There are times when it's okay to relax, when it's okay to do nuthin'. And it's for those times that bad TV was made. So enjoy, and pick up another pint of fat-free Ben & Jerry's for me.