criticizing Japanese TV

Most of the following criticisms apply to Korean TV as well, probably because, for as much as Korea claims to hate Japan, much of Korean pop culture is modeled on Japanese pop culture, especially when it comes to TV shows. So watch the following video and mentally swap out "Japanese" with "Korean," and you'll understand why I never watch Korean TV:

To be clear, I generally avoid American TV, too. It's all trash, as far as I'm concerned. Well, almost all. If there's a rare American TV series worth bingeing, I'll buy it on Amazon or iTunes and watch that, but otherwise, I have no use for talk shows (unless we're talking Craig Ferguson back in the day, and he's a Scot who's only belatedly American), reality TV (with "Fear Factor" as a notable exception), soap operas (a pile of trite refuse), US news (lies and more lies), and most dramas and comedies (same genres, over and over). It helps that the TV I own isn't actually hooked up to allow me to watch TV; I use my TV, on very rare occasions, to watch DVDs and Blu-rays I own (and I don't have many of those). Aside from all that, I confine myself primarily to movies, online articles, dead-tree books, and ebooks. 

TV everywhere is 99% garbage, but Japanese and Korean TV are especially cringe-inducing. A series like "Squid Game" has gained global popularity as a drama because it doesn't fit the usual pattern of Korean dramas, which, even today, tend to have a cheap, videotaped look about them, and they all follow the same tired peninsular formula of lots of screaming, lots of crying, occasional memory loss, serious accidents, and terminal illness. "Squid Game" borrows liberally from the Tarantino playbook to ratchet up tension ("Who's gonna die next?"); it's a reliable formula, and while some people are heedlessly praising "Squid Game" for offering a supposedly fresh alternative to the usual Hollywood tripe, I see the show as very much benefitting from tropes, scenarios, and storylines that sprang up in Hollywood, which itself routinely borrows from other cultures in a neverending cycle of cross-pollination or cannibalization. In a sense, all TV is derivative, so maybe accusing "Squid Game" of having Hollywoodish elements is unfair or even trivial. But my essential point is that, these days, it takes a lot for a TV show to rise above the sludge. I'm not calling myself any kind of TV maven with perfect taste when it comes to the shows I watch, but I think my conviction that TV is mostly worthless has merit. And these days, with the entertainment industry as "woke" as it is, I wonder if the time hasn't come to just unplug and stick to user-created content. And books.