The Point of Television, First Excursion into "The O.C."

Due to inclement weather and a roommate who buys TV shows on DVD, I knowingly threw myself into the pit of The O.C. First Buffy, then Angel, now The O.C. It’s a good thing he doesn’t own The Office or Lost. I’m only two episodes in, and already I am beginning to understand the draw. I have also come to an understanding about the state of modern TV, perhaps the whole history of TV. The point of TV is to sell products (I used to be less cynical about this thinking it was about entertainment and giving writers a creative outlet, but I am much too jaded to believe that anymore). The best way to sell products is to get the viewer hopelessly addicted to the show, like heroin, so that the viewer simply must come back week after week, thinking about the show in between times, waiting, anticipating when they can get their next fix, scheduling his or her life around their favorite shows.
How do these clever writers and marketers accomplish this? By convincing the viewing audience that they do not have a life. Whatever semblance of a life that the viewer does actually have pales in comparison to the flashy clothes, prefect hair, and witty banter of their TV friends. And that is what the characters become—friends. If the viewer misses an episode they feel as if they have missed out on a part of the life of people whom they know and love. When the show finally comes to an end, there is a sense of loss to the viewer, as if people they have a relationship with have died. So I, the viewer, must come back every week or day or whatever the interval, in order to enter this world that is bigger, brighter, and more glamorous than my own, which causes me to further be discontented with my own relationships/hair/lack of witty comebacks, creating a vicious cycle of needing the show and it’s characters, thereby exposing me, the viewer, to more ads.
It’s brilliant, really.
But I’m onto them. I don’t watch TV shows until they are several years (or a decade, you know) off of the air, thereby missing the ads. I am therefore subjecting myself to the same discontent with my own life (especially feeling that I wasted my teens and early twenties) and false relationships, all without the pressures of mass consumerism. God bless America.