I didn’t watch very much television last year; it’s not as though it plays a very important role in my life. I think our local news is insipid, i don’t pay for cable, and i don’t like to feel like my time is being wasting by a gaggle of fictional half-wits every week just so they can make People list of beautiful people.

Having established my general indifference towards the idiot box, i also have to admit that i love watching it in social settings. I love heckling it, and arguing over which character is cuter, and screaming in horror or delight at the newest contrivance of plot that leads two characters into one bed.

I think i could get by just on the WB, as long as i just pretend that Buffy isn’t actually a couple of channels away (though it’s still at the same time, on the same night). I’ve gotten used to despising Buffy, but lately she and the Scooby Gang have been delightfully on: on with their humor, on with their schlocky demons of the week, and on with a level of acting rarely exhibited on 20-Something dramas… namely my other two WB regulars, Dawson’s Creek and Felicity. Yes, i know they’re boring, insipid, insulting hours of teevee. Yes, i set aside Wednesday night just to see them.

This week i managed to catch all three of the aforementioned programs, and there is one theme that joined them all: sex. I know that it “sells,” but the current fixation with it is astounding. Buffy and Spike. Pacey and that waitress. Dawson and Jen. Noel and that floozy. Ben and Felicity. I’m sure even more whoopee was going on off camera. The thing that’s so unusual is the way the sex happens… on television, foreplay is equivalent to the kiss after the shirt comes off but before the groping starts. Buffy skipped it entirely, instead just unzipping Spike and climbing aboard. Pacey seemed like he might just fool around, but in the next scene it was obvious his clothes had been taken off and then put back on. Felicity and Ben shared a make-up kiss, laid down on the bed, and the next thing we knew they had been “in there for an hour.”

But, the most shocking of all of the intercourse i’ve witnessed in the past two days was Dawson’s. Dawson, one of the few remaining Virgins out of the long-running formerly-teeny-bopper shows. Dawson was my hero because, in the 90210 of my life, i am Dawson … i have plenty of potential romantic entanglements, but they’re all fizzle. Yet, in this inescapably well-scripted episode he goes from joking about dating Jen, to sortof dating Jen, to kissing Jen. And then… well, we know what comes then.

It’s the lack of foreplay that gets me, i suppose. Here’s Dawson, my V-club buddy of primetime, and he melts from one kiss down to a tangle of limbs and lust. This is not to say i would not be similarly tempted by Michelle Williams, but to have lost it in such a blasé fashion totally outside of any sort of relationship seems to defeat the entire Virgin thing to begin with. Of course, it’s not like Dawson and I were waiting for marriage, or even for the right time and place. We were just waiting.

Up until tonight, that is. And, despite the questionable circumstances of his tryst, i’m happy for Dawson … he slept with someone who he really loves as a friend, and immediately afterwards he felt right about it (which is less than we could say for poor Pacey earlier in the episode). It’s just the quantity of the sex, and the apparent quality of the sex, … and the way that five or six kisses immediately lead to sex that’s … starting to get to me.