Monday, July 19, 2010

v38.2: What's wrong with TV?

Howdy folks,

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Things have been very busy for me lately.  Last week we had several clients visiting the office to put on some training for my team.  I spent quite a bit of time in meetings with them as well as a lunch meeting and an after work get together.  All-in-all, it was an OK week but I'm glad it is over.

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I remember watching Marry Poppins as a child; ok, you caught me, I watch it still.  I like having Children sometimes because I get to watch all the "kid" shows again that I used to enjoy as a child without the creepy single old guy feel.  I mean, how many men in their mid-30s do you know who sit there and watch Wizard of Oz by themselves?  See my point?

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I've tried to introduce my children to my childhood and the television memories I had but my kids just don't seem to be able to get into them.  There are these new shows which are basically carbon copies of the shows I used to watch as a child but with their own different twists.  Remember "Saved by the Bell"?  Today kids have various shows like that one but when I sat the kids down and showed them an episode of "Saved by the Bell", they didn't get it.  Surely it can't be because we were more mature as children and that kind of humor was funny, could it?  Have the show makers resorted to "dumbing down" their content to capture the audience's attention and keep viewers interested?  I know there is this rule of thumb that states you need to switch scenes within a certain time-frame or your audience gets bored.  Imagine watching a scene from CSI where you followed around a single CSI for 10 minutes as he went from lab to lab and gathered the evidence needed to solve the crime.  There would be no breaks, no fancy camera switching or flashing city fly-overs, just one cut, one scene, one boring show.  I'm sure the show wouldn't have nearly as many viewers and the content would be so boring nobody would want to sit through it.  It's bad enough sitting through commercials these days, please don't make my television show boring too.

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Did you know the average hour long show on Television only runs approximately 40 minutes?  That's right, download any hour long TV show off the Internet that has the commercials and credits cut out and the actual "show" time is only around 40 minutes.  What are you doing the other 20 minutes?  Sadly, it would seem commercials take up close to a third of our hour and that just makes me dislike television.  Now think back on all the hours of T.V. you've watched over the last year and start adding it up.  Since we were already talking about CSI, let's assume that you're a dedicated CSI fan and you've seen every single episode ever made.  There are currently 3 CSI shows on T.V. right now and each one of those has approximately 20 episodes per season.  Just to give more accuracy to my calculation, I'm going to head over to the CSI website and get an exact count of episodes from the last season for each:

CSI Original: 23 Episodes

CSI Miami: 22 Episodes

CSI New York: 23 Episodes

That means if you're a hardcore CSI fan, in the run of a single "season", you watched approximately 68 hours of television.  Now, if you do a little bit of research, you will see that each episode runs approximately 40-45 minutes without commercials.  Let's error on the high side of that average and say each episode runs 45 minutes which means we're watching 15 minutes of commercials per episode.

68 episodes X 15 minutes = 17 hours

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I'll give you a minute to digest that a little bit.

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What if you watch other shows in addition to these?  I mean there are 7 days in a week and a lot of people watch their "shows" every night of the week.  What would this number look like for someone who spent 2-3 hours of watching T.V. a night?  Over the course of a month you could be spending close to 100 hours a month just by simply watching T.V.  Keep in mind that for each hour of television you watch you're spending approximately 15 minutes watching commercials.

100 hours of T.V a month X 15 minutes = 25 hours

That's right folks, in the course of a month you have lost more than a full day to commercials.  Depressing isn't it?

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Of course my intent was not to depress anyone with this information but I did want to educate you on some of the issues with television today.  Typically I won't watch television live as I download episodes off the Internet and watch them at my own convienence.  That's another thing about Television I dislike, but that is a topic for another musing.

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Well folks, I think I've ranted enough about T.V. for now.  I've got a list of issues I have with T.V. but yet I'm a cable subscriber and I have several television sets in my home.  If you ask anyone who knows me, they'll tell you I'm a "flicker".  I hate commercials and when a show breaks for a commercial, the channel flicks to something else to watch.  In the run of an hour long show, I can watch at least two T.V. shows at a time.  Television is so predicable these days, I don't even need to watch every minute to get the story, and that's sad.  Anyway folks, have fun out there and enjoy the summer weather.

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Cheers,

Al

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