Interesting thread this Princess, well done.
to answer your questions from my perspective, yes my viewing as an adult was influenced by my tv viewing and book reading as a child, from Dungeons and Dragons, Battle of the Planets, Blakes7, Dr Who, Star Trek, The Water Margin to name a few and authors from CS Lewis, Bradbury, Tolkein and Feist..the list obviously goes on..
Others in this thread are correct that the majority of the tripe being pumped out recently by "hollywood" is generally neither original or interesting which in some ways is a real shame as they have given us some classics in the past (and still ocassionally do). Perhaps they have had it too good for too long and new another industry to kick them up the ass!
Even the shows that i do enjoy have story arcs based on previous shows, Heroes is described as the "new" LOST, the 4400 as the "new" x-files etc - rarely do we get something which is original and completely new, although the mini series called the Lost Room did in my opinion meet this criteria (apologies if this idea was stolen, it was new to me). If indeed it is different then we usually find it gets cancelled end or mid-season due to a lack of viewing figures, which generally means the Execs have figured they can spend less money making reality/celebrity tv and get double the viewing figures
No, i'm afraid i don't see us preparing the new generation as i can see the reality/celebrity tv continuing (certainly in the UK anyway) for some time to come. Unfortunatley, as long as it is watched by the mass of blinkered lemmings the execs will continue to make it at the cost of better more thought provoking and interesting tv. Our only saviour in all of this are the writers, who's books we can continue to buy/loan, and hope they will keep giving us the stories (fact or fiction) we crave
