Rob and I take television very seriously but we almost never watch it live to air. There are several reasons for this but last night reaffirmed them all with concrete gusto. We attempted to watch an hour of the new Simpsons episodes on a commercial television channel. Every five minutes or so a bunch of shitty dancing graphics exploded in our faces, yelling crap and treating us like stupid children. Advertisements! Horrid little critters, lethal, loud and totally in our fucking faces. The same ones repeated over and over and over until I could feel the bilge valve of my IQ giving way and the dregs of my intelligence sluicing down the back of my neck. How do people stand this kind of violent assault on a regular basis? How does it not make you stupid and sap your will to live?
We then switched to SBS to attempt some supernatural documentary thing featuring Tony Robinson, but even that was choked with adds so we gave up the ghost and slammed a True Blood season 2 deev into the machine just so we could clear our heads.
Live television anywhere but on the ABC sucks. Not going back there again.
6 Comments
The Mute button is our friend.
not good enough. I want to mainline my television program, not be interrupted every 5 minutes
I do occasionally watch live-to-air shows on commercial stations, but am phasing them out – now that Underbelly has finished, I’m down to non-repeat eps of Mythbusters and Top Gear, and not even obsessive about those. All other shows, I watch streamed or on DVD – and I’m getting sufficiently tired of the anti-piracy warnings on DVDs that pirated copies are starting to look much more appealing…
Heh
I used to be able to live with ads because the shows on commercial television were structured around them.
But now they can’t even wait till the obvious commercial break – you get little overlays and supers blocking the bottom third of the screen because apparently you need to know that the second season of Merlin has started on Sunday because you can’t be trusted to read a tv guide anymore, or indeed read at all because you have the attention span of a gnat because all continuous narrative nowadays has to be interrupted every five seconds with IMPORTANT COMMERCIAL ANNOUNCEMENTS just in case you’re making the mistake of trying to follow the story-
GAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Shorter version – I agree.
it’s like the whole world got stupider while I wasn’t looking