The idiot box lives up to its name

What is it with all the soaps on television? Ihad thought(hoped) that the craze would end with Chitti. While Chitti was airing you could walk out on the street and not an ee-kaakaa would be there,and out of evvery house on the street Chittiii would be eerily heard.
But Chitti is done and over with and has been replaced by a slew of new ones,Annamalai,Metti Oli and others...They all follow a fairly similar plot...and you get the feeling that if the characters were interchanged, it wouldn't make a lot of difference.
The generic plot goes thus: There is a "strong" female lead character-a journalist or a social worker or a girl working to support 4 younger siblings and a sick mother.There is a good-for nothing father, a scheming boyfriend,a best friend(male) who is in love with her,another best friend(female) in love with the male friend. Then there is the family fued because of which another clan is trying to break up this girl's sister's marraige by foul means,the sister has fallen for a Malaysian millionaire,but the enemies of the heroine blackmail him into marrrying their daughter,the sister inevitably goes into a decline and loses her mind or dies or gets amnesia,and the brother vows revenge ...see plot all done!
By the time the story is into its hundredth episode you can't remember what the plot was and and how its started,and have even less of an idea of what the plot of the story was supposed to be.But let me not limit myself to Tamil soaps...Hindi ones are even more fun to make fun of.There you have thepoor set upon heroine,who is married to some chap who is oblivious to the fact that his sisters and mother hate her and are doing their best to get rid of her.There is the heroine's best friend(guy) who is secretly in love with her, but the husband doesn't approve and she (weeping) tells him that they cannot see each other again.Then there is an accident in which she ends up with amnesia...her memory returns just as her husband is getting mqarried again....btw in case you have any trouble telling the heroines from the vamps,the vamps are the ones with the gobs of lipstick and mascara and the heavy silk sarees...it looks like a half-hour ad for Nalli!
Not that English channels are much better either, I mean Reality TV ...uggghhhh.Who care what hapens to blonde bimbos who have to muck it put on a farm?
Serious lack of stuff to watch....only NGC and Discand History channel left. Not even news channel unless you want to watch politicians spewing rhetoric...isn't there any good news any more?