Poll Results - What Show Rated Badly By The PTC Do You Watch Most?

And the results are in. There are a couple of minor surprises but on the whole the results were exactly what I was expecting. There were 13 votes cast this time around. The War At Home and The O.C. each tied for fifth place with no votes. In fourth place with one vote - 7% of the total - was American Dad. In third place with two votes (15%) was None of them. You may recall that in the poll about shows recommended by the PTC, None of them was the highest rated category. In second place with three votes or 23% was the original C.S.I. but on top with a majority of the votes - seven out of thirteen - was Family Guy. If this poll and the previous one show nothing else it is just how irrelevant the views of the PTC are to people, or at least to the people who read this I Am A Child Of Television and responded to the poll.

I have to confess that if I had voted, the only one I could have voted for was C.S.I. because except for the episode of The War At Home which I reviewed I haven't watched any of them. That The War At Home was so poorly regarded by readers of this blog is unsurprising. It is one of the worst excuses for a TV show that it has ever been my misfortune to view. The fact that The O.C. was as poorly regarded is a much bigger surprise for me. Either my blog's demographics skew older than the audience for the show or it really isn't as well regarded as the people at Fox think it is (or a combination of the two). Of course this argument about demogrphics becomes a bit moot when C.S.I. is considered. That show is after all one of if not the highest rated series on TV and the other two series in the franchise are also well regarded in terms of viewer numbers. So it's not surprising that it placed in the top two, but a little surprising that it wasn't the top show.

I've left the two animated offerings on this list for last for a specific reason. While the poll found that American Dad was one of the less well liked show of the five surveyed, and indeed fell behind None of them, it and Family Guy which is the most highly watched of the five by my readers share one thing in common - they're animated and the PTC has a particular hatred for them because of this. Apparently the Council buys into the old myth that cartoons are for kids and kids alone. Certainly none of the people who made them - going back at least to Friz Freleng at Warner Brothers in the 1930s thought that way. However the PTC sees Family Guy and American Dad as being particularly harmful to children because they're "cartoons" but contain adult themes. That's one of the reasons why the matricidal Stewie and his clan are regarded as the second worst TV show by the PTC. The fact that enough people realise that these shows aren't for kids but are enjoyable nonetheless - so much so that fan support was able to bring it back after it was cancelled in 2002 - shows that in this case as in many others the PTC and its views are irrelevant.

I think I'll try something a little more fun for the next poll.