In the dream, Ellen DeGeneres is explaining the fine points of building a monster small block for your street racer, noting especially the need for big stroker cranks. Then she does a little dance.
If you have no idea what Ellen’s up to, you have not been spending hours switching between the Oxygen and Spike TV channels trying to get a handle on how the tube channels gender images.
If these two networks are an accurate depiction of the state of the sexes in our society, we’re in real trouble. And guys, it’s looking especially bad for us.
Take “Train Wrecks” and “World’s Scariest Explosions” on Spike. These are real shows. As Dave Barry is fond of saying, I am not making this up.
“Explosions” was an entire hour devoted to stuff blowing up. There was no context, no veneer of documentary making, just rockets, propane tankers, oil refineries and airplanes exploding. Kind of cool, though laughably stupid.
At one point, someone in voice-over says it’s difficult to prevent unexpected explosions. Really. But the show’s stupidest line: “Even the suburbs aren’t free of the wrath of explosions.”
“Train Wrecks” tries to frame itself as a cautionary show about why you shouldn’t try, for example, to beat a train to a crossing, especially when you’re driving a gasoline truck. But we know what it’s really about – stuff blowing up, getting crushed, cars being flipped. At one point when a massive fire is shown, you can actually hear guys cheering in the background.
Women in the Oxygen/Spike world have a better sense of humor, though I’ll admit I have heard my son and his adolescent friends laughing until they cried at stuff blowing up.
“Campus Ladies,” for example, is a relatively new show on Oxygen. And gentlemen, before you think the women watching TV in the other room don’t like a little raunch with their comedy, check this show out.
Joan and Barri are two middle-aged women who go back to college. They don’t just go back, they decide to live in the dorm, have sex with strangers, stay up all night instead of going to class, and get roaring drunk. You know, the full academic experience.
“Suburban Shootout,” another show new to Oxygen, also shows the network is trying to get a little edgier with its fare.
This British import imagines the tidy English village of Little Stempington, where two heavily armed gangs of rival homemakers battle to run the protection rackets. The humor includes plenty of crude sexual innuendo and the sort of deadpan humor only the English can manage.
Both networks offer a steady stream of chick flicks and action movies. There is also “Oprah After the Show,” for those viewers for whom the regular Oprah show is not enough, and “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” which is also on KUSA-Channel 9.
DeGeneres seems to be having far more fun than anyone on Spike. She shows up for work in jeans, dances with the audience and does silly stunts like wrestling in sumo suits with Allison Janney from “The West Wing.”
One bright spot on Spike, which shows a similar capacity to have some fun, is the new “Pros vs. Joes.” The show pits young guys who want to match their mettle against retired professional athletes such as Jerry Rice, Bo Jackson, Clyde Drexler, Dennis Rodman, Jim McMahon, John Rocker, Bill Romanowski and others. It sure sounds silly, but that’s part of the charm.
Car shows are another Spike fixture. “Xtreme 4X4,” “Horsepower TV,” “MuscleCar” and the like all aim to show guys how to do complicated jobs on their rides. Since most people can barely check the oil in the complex, computerized cars of today, you have to suspect that some of these shows simply offer guys a little car lingo to throw around the poker table.
So how do the genders stack up?
Apparently women are getting most of the laughs, and the guys don’t even know it because they can’t hear them over all those explosions.
Spike has tapped deep into the wannabe pro athlete and master mechanic in all of us. Oxygen seems to know something about women, sex and guns that is one heck of a surprise.
All I know is that the next time I need the turbocharger swapped out in my Audi, I’m calling Ellen.
Staff writer Edward P. Smith can be reached at 303-820-1767 or esmith@denverpost.com.
