Voice-Over(whelmed)

My Boys:
Yesterday afternoon I found myself watching some of TBS's My Boys marathon (and, heaven help me, 1.5 Lifetime movies, but that's another story). The second season of My Boys begins tonight at 10 p.m. and all the Season 1 episodes are online, which is pretty cool.

At first, I was impressed with My Boys yesterday. The cast is funny and the writing isn't bad at all. It's not the edgiest or most revolutionary comedy ever, but it's fun. But then I remembered why I'd given up on this show last year: the voice-over.

The events of each episode of My Boys is put into the context of a baseball analogy via P.J.'s voice-over. Ok, we get it: she's a tom-boy. That's already obvious--you don't need to constantly remind us! And we especially don't need to hear the same freakin baseball analogy episode after episode.

I'm sick of the V.O. in general. Admittedly, some shows use voice-overs very well: Arrested Development, Sex and the City, Veronica Mars, The Wonder Years, early Desperate Housewives, etc. But now it seems like every show on T.V. is trying to use one, and that, my friends, is just really lazy storytelling. If the action and dialogue of a show are so confusing that a disembodied voice has to explain it to viewers, then the writers just aren't doing a very good job. And if, as in the case of My Boys, the action and dialogue of the show are rather self-evident and the writers add a V.O. anyway, then they're just hitting the audience over the head. Viewers are not that stupid. We watch Lost for crying out loud and that doesn't have a voice-over.