The cast of Buckwild, and the only known image of a group of West Virginians in a pickup truck that doesn’t involve a noose and a minority. That’s progress, Mountain State!
I don’t have the slightest idea what Buckwild is, and if you happen to know where MTV is on your cable box it probably means your literacy level is hovering around sub-Beavis levels, so I really don’t need to impress you, or even be coherent. The rest of this post may as well be lorem ipsum for all the difference it’ll make. But I’ll do you one better and pretend to care about your interests. Your stupid, stupid interests.
Apparently Buckwild is a reality show set in West Virginia centering around let’s just say incest. Alright, that might not be strictly true, but supposedly it’s close enough in spirit that the state has denied the show tax credits due to the negative stereotypes it appeares to be enforcing. So when Shain Gandee, one of the show’s stars, was found dead on Monday the state collectively put down the pig they’d been relentlessly seducing and flew their most solemn “If You Hear the Shot, You Weren’t the Target” t-shirt at half-mast, as is their mourning tradition. It’s quite beautiful, in its way.
Gandee, 21, was found dead in a vehicle along with his uncle, David Dwight Gandee, 48, and Donald Robert Myers, 27, authorities said.
On Monday, the sheriff’s office said they had “received word of a disabled vehicle in a wooded area” near Sissonville, that deputies and Sissonville Volunteer Fire Department personnel used all-terrain vehicles to reach the 1984 Ford Bronco belonging to the Gandee family.
You know, everyone likes to bitch about how much MTV sucks now, but what everyone seems to be forgetting is that it was pretty much always totally unwatchable. The Real World and Road Rules were shamelessly scripting reality back when CBS was still beta testing the cyborg that would eventually become Jeff Probst, and whenever they *did* get around to playing music videos it was usually either Will Smith getting jiggy with a fisheye lens or some shitty Pearl Jam knockoff. Hell, pre-1991 the station’s programming consisted entirely of nothing but the Ghostbusters‘ theme on repeat. And I know we all liked Beavis & Butthead, but most of those episodes were just stitched together from looped bits of previous episodes, forming a sort of content ouroboros that they just hoped we were all too hopped up on Surge to notice (we were). Toss in a solid 25 minutes of commercials per hour and it’s amazing anyone ever thought there was the slightest bit of integrity to the whole scam. I don’t really begrudge MTV selling snake oil to the easily entertained for the last three decades, I just wish aging Gen Xers hadn’t let nostalgia convince them that Kennedy introducing a 7 Year Bitch video was their moon landing. Maybe it’s time to take some baby steps towards transparency. Can we at least admit that we’re all just watching the invasive surgery channel for masturbatory purposes? We all know it, let’s just be mature enough to get it all out in the open already.
Source: CNN.com
