Television

I’ve been thinking about television a great deal lately because now with our recently installed cable in our Wellington flat we have been watching a great deal of it. Sometimes it seems we came all the way across the Pacific so that we could watch the last episodes of “The Sopranos”. I have taken great pains in explaining to people here that that particular program captures some but not quite all of the essence of people in the great state of New Jersey. There is a lot of U.S. programming from premium channels like Showtime and HBO that is broadcast here uncensored on the regular broadcast stations but with commercial interruptions. Kiwis are much less uptight about the content of late night programs then many Americans. I can’t picture that they would have made quite the fuss over Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction a few years back during Super Bowl halftime. I like that but sadly television advertising is now pretty much the same through out the Western world. When I was a child I remember my father complaining about how television was geared to the lowest common denominator (his phrase). I was becoming an avid reader then but I dearly loved my “Twilight Zone” and “Rocky and Bullwinkle” and didn’t understand his complaint. Some four decades later I truly understand his thought. But it’s not just having an older persons perspective, television truly has changed for the worse in one important aspect. The elimination of U.S. government control on the amount of television advertising has made the medium almost unwatchable. And oh how that advertising has changed. Back then it was easier to ignore and tune out the ridiculous hard sell for “fast, fast relief” or the new and improved whatever. Now commercials have vastly improved production values and sophistication. They’ve benefited (for the advertisers) from all that psychological and focus group research in trying to make us buy. They’re hipper, smarter, louder, more visually spectacular and relentless in trying to get under the skin. Now in the interest of achieving “market efficiency” medical providers back in the U.S. have started running commercials to attract clients (no longer called patients as I’ve recently learned from my wife’s nursing text books) and these ads I find particularly wretched. They attempt to reach some warm spot in my heart with a first person narrative, usually telling me about some loved one with terminal cancer and how they are getting such wonderful end of life care from the hospital or hospice that’s being pitched. As Dorothy Parker once wrote in her review of “Winnie the Pooh”, “it makes me want to fwow up”. In New Zealand, with its national health service, I am mercilessly spared those ads. Unfortunately most of the television commercials here are distinguishable from the American kind only by the Kiwi accents of the actors and announcers. They are just as annoying and irritating.

Television programming for some time has been crafted to attract what is euphemistically called “young demographics”. But I question the usual explanation for the obsession that advertisers have for seeking the eyes and ears of younger viewers. The reason that advertisers are less interested in attracting aging baby boomer viewers is not so much because they are less open to changing brands or for trying new products. It is probably more to do with their learned cynicism in believing in the mantra that buying more stuff is fun and will help make you happy.

With the obvious exception of public broadcasting the main content of television is the advertising and the programming is really just filler. It’s ultimately a passive medium and we needn’t surrender so much of our waking hours to it. But first I must catch the finale to “Nip and Tuck”.