Must Me TV

My life has been abducted by television network executives. Not the good ones who work hard all year, but the guys who crawl out of the woodwork during sweeps week and decide that every show on the network is going to be tied together with a common theme. Like, oh I don't know... dead phones, let's say.

For example:

First, the highly successful series Friends-ish will feature that kooky girl Rach-kel debating whether to use money she found under the sofa to replace her dead cell phone battery, even though she knows the money is Mom-ica's....

Then, on Sein-keld, our vacationing heroine Kel-aine will lose days of mobile phone usage to a dead battery while fighting the foreign Cell Nazi for a replacement. When she finally wins, she'll discover she missed an important call from her landlord back home... and another fight is looming.

Finally, on ER-ER-O, after allowing a controversial procedure at County General Hospital Days of Our Lives, Dr. Kel-izabeth Corday will distractedly scour her kitchen. She'll unplug and move the portable phone to clean under it, but when she puts it back, she'll plug into the wrong phone jack and possibly miss an important call from her own doctor with test results....

Jeez... not only am I stuck in a bad Sweeps Week marketing ploy, it seems I'm also stuck in 1999 -- none of the shows I spoofed are still in first-run. (Whattaya mean ER hasn't been cancelled yet? Why not?) But you get my point. On TV, I'd never have bought the dead phone theme. I'd have been rolling my eyes in disgust. "Weak! Weak!" I'd have cried.

But at least on TV it would have happened to three different people.