Hey, What's On TV?

I must admit that I am a lifelong TV addict. Oh there was a time when I was young and convinced of my intellectual superiority that I eschewed TV. Then I realized that there is only so much staying at home and reading a person can really stand, and only so much going out with friends and drinking heavily that a person's body can really stand. I re-developed a TV habit at that point. I returned to the ways of my childhood when I could watch a lot of hours of TV non-stop.

I remember the summer that my father's step-mother, "Granny Ray," came to visit and I was watching endless B movies (The Mummy and other Boris Karloff greats) on TV on a Saturday afternoon. Now Granny Ray insisted that a young man of age 9 really needed to be outside playing and being active. Turns out she wanted to watch the Chicago White Sox on another channel, and couldn't have cared less if this 9 year old was being active in the Great Outdoors.

When I was a kid there were 3 channels on TV, NBC, ABC, and CBS. A little later on, somewhere during my college years PBS became a fixture. Then somewhere in the late 1970's and early 1980's HBO, Showtime, and MTV became fixtures. Over the next 20 years the number of channels and niche markets exploded. I'm honestly not sure how many channels I have, but it numbers in the hundreds. Trouble is on any given day when it's a distinct possibility that an American citizen can, in all honesty, say 500 channels and there's nothing on worth watching. How did that happen?

At this advanced date, and with all of those channels competing for viewers, it has seriously cut into the viewership of the original 3 NBC, ABC, and CBS. Ergo, the ad revenues have also been divided by a great many more channels. A great many of the cable channels survive by playing endless reruns of programs gone to syndication. News channels make their money off of whatever goes on in the world and making it sound catastrophic or sensational. Movie channels play the same movies over and over again until people get sick of them and they have to get a new batch.

NBC, ABC, and CBS, and OK add Fox at this point, well they continually try to find ways to cut costs. Turns out actors, writers, and directors are expensive so they have resorted to endless "Reality Shows" and a lot of sports extravaganzas that are hyped to the Nth degree. Today is March 1 and there has been some highly hyped sports extravaganza since sometime back in December.

First there were the NCAA football "Bowl Games." How many bowl games are there these days for goodness sakes? Then there were NFL playoff games and, subsequently the Super Bowl. There may have been a week or two lull, but then came the Winter Olympics. I'm still trying to figure out how the USA can produce the best hockey players, skiers, figure skaters, etc., etc., etc., but cannot put together a curling team. Don't we have enough heavy drinkers in the Northern States to compete with the beer drinking Canadians? Or is Molsen Golden more conducive to curling than say Miller Lite? One of life's little mysteries.

Anyway, after college football, pro football, and what seemed like months of Winter Olympics, we are now moving into the sports extravaganza part of the year known as "March Madness." Conference playoffs will decide who gets to go to the Big Show, and then, with 64 teams, a tourney that lasts a couple of weeks will dominate the TV. By the time that's over it will be nearly April.

So what next? Well people, you'll simply have to watch some actual TV shows for a while, albeit a short while, because the NBA playoffs will occupy the center place on the TV for a good month. (Unless of course you're a hockey fan, and then the Stanley Cup Playoffs will take center stage for an equally long time.) By the time the NBA and NHL playoffs are done and over, baseball season will be in full-swing. It will be summer and a million distractions, not involving TV will beg for our attentions.

Next thing you know it will be the end of summer and college football will be starting up again, the baseball playoffs will become the centerpiece of in October, and pretty soon it will be time for the college football bowl games again. Does anyone write regular TV shows anymore? Is there a place in our world for comedies and dramas? Is there a place for professional musicians to entertain us en masse, and not a bunch of amateur wannabes on "American Idol"?

Turns out that there are comedies and dramas out there, but some of them are on cable and none of them go by the seasonal schedules they used to. Once upon a time the new TV season started in the fall about the time school started, after Labor Day. You got new shows until about the time school was out, at the end of May. Then there were re-runs all summer and then the cycle started all over again. Now shows seem to run for a couple of months and then disappear for several months and then re-appear for a couple of months again. The old rules and seasonal time-frames do not apply. Got a favorite show? Got used to seeing it week after week? Well don't get too used to it. It won't be there after a couple of months. It may come back after an absence of 6 months, but it won't be there for the 8-9 months that we once were accustomed to. Sigh.

Now if you'll excuse me, the Winter Olympics have ended and the NCAA playoffs haven't started yet, so I have to search for a reasonable sitcom or cop show. Failing that, I do have Netflix and a backlog of movies I haven't watched. Then again maybe I could do something constructive with my time. Hmmm. Nahh! TV it is.