I am watching Breaking Bad this evening and a show like this stands in stark contrast to the current furore over a girl barely out of her teens stripping down to her underwear (like an endless line of girls barely out of their teens before her) and singing a shitty, shitty song (like an endless line of shitty, shitty songs before it) on stage at an event that purports to celebrate music videos but has instead been at the mercy of corporate bullshit for at least a decade.

Breaking Bad is a ridiculous show. New Mexico is the perfect setting for the heightened reality within which it operates, and it adds this sheen of weirdness that makes the narrative neatness plausible. But it’s valuable watching this sort of thing because the things that are front and centre are motives, aspirations, the quirks of each individual character. Something insane like this show makes me think about my own thoughts, how I view the world, that sort of thing. It’s fiction doing its job.

You don’t get this sense with things like the VMAs. I was going to put “media portrayals of real people”, but that’s far too wide - there are plenty of documentary filmmakers, and podcast hosts, and so on that do a pretty good job of representing real people. But there again is the fact that a single stupid act by a stupid 20-year-old girl, backed up by dozens of people older than her, sparks a frenzy of blog posts and news articles and GIFs (oh, the fucking GIFs. Seriously. I have seen so many, and I do not follow the sort of people who would usually post this) that burns quickly but also absurdly brightly.

On the news this morning, there was all but concrete confirmation that chemical weapons have been used in Syria, and that nearly 3,500 people are currently being treated for related injuries. If confirmed, the use of those chemical weapons would violate the so-called “red line” President Obama mentioned when he first started responding to calls for involvement in the conflict. Which isn’t to say that the US will step into yet another warzone - just that they might, and that if they do it should be cause for concern.

And okay, this is heavy stuff, and an equation of this with a story about how you can probably see Miley Cyrus’s anus if you look close enough is disingenuous at best. And I’m not even making a point about “high” and “low” culture - because mindless lightness is something I need from time to time. I know as much as anyone else that constant immersion in heady, intellectual, pretentious stuff doesn’t make for a balanced outlook.

But stories like that don’t feel light to me. They feel hollow and cynical. I don’t come out of this feeling uplifted - the best I get is a smug sense of satisfaction that by 20, I had a better grip on my life than she did. Honestly, the strongest thing I feel is pity and loathing - pity for a girl who has never had to hear “no” during some crucial years of development, and loathing for the people who never said it.

There’s this image of Will Smith and his kids gawping at Cyrus’s performance in horror, because it’s a glib way to characterise that shitshow. A sort of “what am I watching” moment for everyone to connect with. Never why. That question’s far too scary.