I'm glad you asked, my little darlings, now take out those earphones, and I'll tell you. TV shows begin in far away places where they don't even have shows let alone TV shows - places like Zoomba Land and Miskatonica and Minnesota. There, the little children rush off to the hillsides every morning with their brightly colored baskets to the giant rubber trees to gather the rubber fruit and the majestic cork trees where they gather the cork branches and the dainty little plastic bushes where they pick plastic berries and the thorny little styrofoam vines to pick freshly ripened curlicues of excelsior.
But all of this still doesn't make a TV show, it's entertaining yes, but it's not TV. So all of this produce is tied up in big bundles and taken to the shipping docks where mighty stevedores load and unload it, singing "Day-O" and warning each other to watch for the deadly black tarantulas. "Watch out for that deadly black tarantula, Joe," one of them will say, and the other will respond, "Thanks, Bob, I hadn't noticed."
When it gets to America, it's rolled out into big sheets by a large noisy machine, and then taken to the stamping room. There, ladies inspect each bundle sorting them by size and then sending them off lickety-split to the TV studios out in Hollywood. These bundles are called "scripts." Some bundles become dramas, some are comedies, and some are documentaries about killer sharks, but they're all made from the same raw material, isn't that amazing?
"But aren't there also people on TV? Can I grow up to be a TV person, too?"
The answer is no, and stop asking so many questions. Anybody in this country can grow up to be president or pope, but to be on TV, you have to be chosen from birth. TV people are raised in special rooms where they are kept from interacting with any live actual human being. Sometimes they're allowed out of their rooms early if a TV show needs someone to play the part of a child, but then they're rushed back into the room as soon as possible. Special scientists visit every day in Haz-Mat suits to train them to make expressions - smug for if they've just made a joke, and sort of a crinkle-faced look if they're being serious. If it's a "reality" show, sometimes they put the women in a room together and get them to fight, which they do by smearing peanut butter on their noses.
As you can see, a lot of effort goes into a TV show, and it's nothing for TV people to be at work with bags of ice on the forehead and cups of black coffee until one or two in the afternoon. That's because they believe nothing's is too good for the American public, and that's just what they deliver.
