I’ve banished cable from my house and never did get the converter for over-the-air TV broadcasts, so the only thing coming into my living room is internet. Still, there’s a lot of movies and even TV shows you can watch via Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, etc.

While I usually avoid TV series like the plague, there’s one I began watching as part of bonding time with my young son.

Lincoln Heights is only a few years old, and is part cop show; part family drama. Some of the drama is really contrived, and the first two seasons had some typical TV stupidity (which originates at the writing stage, usually), but there were some positive aspects that made it worth the pain.

Eddy Sutton, the father/husband character, is the kind of cop I wish still existed. He doesn’t sit on his lard ass eating doughnuts at a speed trap, waiting to gouge taxpayers out of their hard-earned wages for not wearing seat belts or tinting their windows. He’s not on a power trip. He didn’t join the police so he could get stick time, taser people, have sex with prostitutes for free or get away with murder. Unlike real cops, he’d probably even give a damn when you’ve been robbed. He might even have fingerprints taken at the crime scene when the victim’s not a V.I.P.

Eddy Sutton wants to serve and protect the citizens who foot the bill for his paycheck. It might be a stretch, but you might even argue that he knows his job is to protect individual rights. In other words, a fictional cop. If not a fantasy cop. He’s a guy I would actually tell my son (or daughter, or wife) to run and find if I’m not around but some sort of threat is.

Jenny Sutton (his wife) is a nurse, a good woman and a good mother. The three children are written and acted realistically for their ages. Their screen time tends to be laden with melodramatic angst…which is a little too much reality for me but I think it’s what sucked my own child into the narrative.

Then we got to Season Three.

Episode One ramped up the stupidity, but everybody has bad days (especially writers and directors) so we hung in there.

Then in Episode Two or thereabouts, whoever calls the shots for Lincoln Heights jumped on the homosexual bandwagon. Somehow a TV show slipped through the cracks and for two whole seasons failed to display a sodomite character and ram a homophile message down our throats. In Homowood, Commiefornia that’s a reckless, inexcusable oversight.

And wouldn’t you know, the Sympathetic Gay Character is the child of the new preacher in town and his stereotypical phony hypocrite wife. Are TV writers still patting themselves on the back for stale bupkus like this or has it sunk in yet how hackneyed their plot devices are?

I don’t know why, but rather than just quit cold turkey, I skipped forward to get past the cut-and-paste sodomite soapbox. I noticed that, though they’re trying to be subtle about it, they’re also sneaking an anti-gun theme into the series. In Season Three the show goes downhill fast.

My best guess is, whoever wrote the first two seasons moved on to something else. A typical establishment hack took over and, as predictably as a bowel movement after prune juice, began tweaking every thread in the show to align it with every other show on the idiot box.

It’s surprising that it took two seasons before this happened.