National Review reviews a new reality show that’s something like Dog the Bounty Hunter meets, well, meets deadbeat dads.  The show is called Bad Dads, where a bounty hunter finds deadbeats behind on their child support and busts some heads, metaphorically speaking. 

Bad Dads is just the latest insult to men and especially fathers who feel, appropriately, that they’ve been maligned and minimized through television programming and advertising. In sitcoms, men are typically buffoons. And fathers, if they exist, are inept and unreliable, while Mom is a paragon of virtue and competence. Television executives and advertisers may profit from such “entertainment,” but who’s having fun? Apparently, women are. Four out of five network sitcom viewers are female.

It might be justice for the families who need that money, but it’s just more injustice to the institution of fatherhood.  But fathers have no one to blame but themselves.  Be a good dad.  It’s hard to do, and not very good television.

Yesterday marked the start of the countdown to Feb. 17, 2009, which is the day that U.S. television stations will stop broadcasting in analog and switch to digital. TV viewers who receive free broadcasts via an antennae will have to purchase a converter box–or else get a new digital TV or start paying for cable or satellite. Coupon vouchers are available to help defer the cost of the converter box.

At my house, we still use rabbit ears to receive all of three stations–ABC, CBS, and NBC. (Sadly, we can’t even get PBS.) So we are now weighing our options. Do we request two vouchers and fork over the rest to buy two converter boxes? Or, since both of our TVs are older, should we consider making the investment now to buy at least one new digital version? Or do we just bite the bullet and sign up for cable or satellite?

If you, too, are facing the same predicament, what will you be doing in your household?

…you ain’t see nothing yet. Check out this Culture and Media Institute review of the CBS program Cold Case:

When’s the last time your local Christian youth group stoned somebody to death?…In the September 30 episode of the CBS forensics show, the devoutly religious teens in an abstinence club turn out to be sexually active hypocrites who murder one of their own members - by stoning her, as the Bible teaches - to keep their sins secret.  Their youth pastor encourages one girl to describe her impure dreams to him, and masturbates while listening.

In a ham-handed attempt to influence this fall’s Congressional debate on abstinence education programs, the show also depicts abstinence-only education as useless, if not actively harmful.   

The episode centers on the unsolved 1998 murder of Carrie Swett, a promiscuous 15-year-old girl.   New clues lead the detectives in the Philadelphia homicide unit to reopen the case. Shortly before her death Carrie joins Hearts Wait, an abstinence club…

Cue fearmongering and hysteria.

It gets worse. Seriously. Check out the rest of the review here. I have known of youth pastors tossed for having sex with their charges. But Cold Case suggests that the very idea of abstinence before marriage — a worthy, healthy ideal – is not only Ungood, but so Ungood as to spawn a murderous coven. Now: as a community, WMB may have the Internet’s highest concentration of youth-group/abstinence program experience and expertise. How far beyond reality does this Cold Case episode go to demonize Christians and their values?

Tonight, the CW network premiered the new sitcom “Aliens in America,” which follows the exploits of a Muslim Pakistani foreign exchange student living in small-town middle America. Everyone from those at the Brookings Institution to the Islamic Center of Southern California have praised the show for its “more diverse” representation of Muslims - in other words, depicting them as something other than terrorists. “This will be the first and maybe even primary source for most Americans in understanding anything positive or accurate about Islam,” said Jihad Turk, the center’s religious director. We’ll see how they feel about it after next week’s episode, in which the Muslim teen and his host are thought to be gay, a plot turn that even USA Today reviewer Robert Bianco found “atrocious.”