Observations on Television

I did not spend a whole lot of time watching TV in Cancun. Saw a little bit of the Giants game on Sunday Night and then watched a bit of World News on Tuesday Night, but on the way there and back I had Direct TV for about 3 hours and managed to find something to watch. Here are some observations from someone whose not watched TV in some time:

-I have to wonder is CNN International less biased than the US CNN. I tuned in to watch CNN and caught the end of “The Situation Room” where they were talking about the letter from the President of Iran to President Bush and how some in the Iranian community saw it as an opportunity for dialogue. The host lamented at the end that the Bush White House was ignorning the letter.

Then CNN International’s World News Tonight came on from Hong Kong and the segment mentioned that the letter was seen as the Iranian President preaching at Bush and not an attempt to open dialogue, which put an entirely different slant on the story. CNN International looked like a serious news organization, US CNN not so much. For anyone to purport or sympathize with the idea that letter was an invitation to dialogue is the height of bias.

-CNN Headline News and ESPN News have reinvented themselves. It used to be, particlarly with Headline News, these networks followed a very simple format. Anytime you wanted to, be it 4:00 PM in the afternoon or 4:00 AM in the Morning, you could spend half an hour and find out everything that was going on the World. With Headline News, it really worked like clockwork. From the top of the hour to fifteen minutes after you got just “news” and then from Fifteen to Twenty minutes, you got business news. Twenty to Twenty five minutes you got sports and then Twenty-five minutes to the bottom of the hour you got some Lifestyle puff piece. Then, it started all over again.

Apparently, the Internet’s made a lot of that obselete, so now they’re offering some talk on these stations. I saw ESPN news with a couple sports guys doing rapid debates jumping from sport to sport.

Then I caught the new Glenn Beck TV show on Headline News. I like Glenn on the radio. I just don’t have as much opportunity to listen as I’d like. I have this thing called work that gets in the way.

Glenn’s TV show basically does what most radio hosts do when they go to television-bring the radio show to television. Glenn’s fairly humorous and has some good guests. The TV show is not even close in terms of humor, because Glenn does all of these fantastic parodies and it doesn’t translate as well.

Still, the guy’s funny, he’s got good guests, it’s different than anything else on Cable Television, which is to say, it will probably get cancelled in 6 months because shows that are different like this tend not to last.

What happens with Cable TV is so many people like Dennis Miller, Alan Keyes, or Glenn Beck come at it and say, “By Gosh, we’re going to be different.” The thing is that people don’t want different. That what the same old format delivered with the host’s personality and wit. So, Glenn Beck’s TV Show will either change or die.

-Finally, I was watching Boomerang, a part of the Cartoon Network for the last hour of the trip back and I realized something. Tom and Jerry is a really sick cartoon. I never thought about it growing up, because it was just this little mouse running from a cat, but it was sick, sadistic, and really twisted.

Bugs Bunny could do some awful things, but nothing compared to what Jerry did to Tom. Things like making Tom believe he was going out of his mind and trying to kill himself. I was watching it and said, “Whoa, this is sick!” I mean, it was violence really that was out of proportion to the need for defense.

In one way, the show is almost post-modern in its outlook on life. In Bugs Bunny, he always had at least a claim to moral rightness in his attacks, he’s provoked. In Tom and Jerry, whose right or wrong doesn’t really matter. Jerry wants to steal some cheese, sneaks on board a ship. Tom ends up flying way up in the sky and Jerry throws a life preserver in the water and Tom steers towards it. I said at that point, “You know, the mouse has got some decency.”

Then, he whistles and this shark sticks his nose up under the life preserver. No, Jerry has no decency. I’m not saying there’s not a certain genius behind these. Its just a sick, twisted genius.

Anyway, TV rots the brain, so enough with that for now.