Friday, May 6, 2016

TV Critic Tells All!




Meanderings and mutterings from the messy desk of your friendly, neighborhood TV critic:
ROTTEN TV: People are always asking me about the rotten state of TV these days.
I used to blame imbecilic programmers but now I know the real reason.
It's the TV clicker, that's what.
You see I remember the Fifties when my family had one of the first TV sets on the street and we had exactly four stations to chose from: WBEN-TV and WGR-TV in Buffalo and CBLT in Toronto (then Channel 9) and Hamilton's feisty independent CHCH-TV.
Now let me digress for a moment and say the other day I had to look after a slew of neighborhood kidlets while the harassed mom ran off to hospital emergency department.
The kids were very rambunctious and when they finally left I'd lost my clicker (it turned up days later under the couch).
For days I was transported back to the Fifties when clickers did not exist.
That was a time when I'd watch an entire program because to change channels meant walking over to the TV set and manually clicking away.
Our whole family would watch Ed Sullivan together, Playhouse 90, Dinah Shore --there was no idea of getting up and manually switching to a different channel every five minutes.
Which is what kids do today. They'd never watch a complete program.
So everything on TV has been reduced to lowest common denominator with dozens of false climaxes to keep us watching.
Shows as horrible as reality TV would never have lasted in the pas because they are so repetitive..
But today I must admit I click away every few minutes, fine turning TV into a sort of never ending sequence of garbage shows.
***********
BEST TV: The best TV as far as I'm concerned are the commercials.
I watch the Blue Jays and I'm seeing an inventive sequence of Hyundai commercials in which foreign infiltrators try to slip into the plant and find out how Hyundai does it.
Very funny and very inventive.
I also like those Snickers parodies --in one old sequences from the Brady Bunch are manipulated so Marsha turns from a howling fury and into the Marsha we all love after snacking on a Snickers.
In another there's an inventive parody of The Seven Year Itch with Willem Dafoe in a Marilyn Monroe dress standing over an air vent and then feasting on a Snickers and magically turning into the delectable MM.
TRUMP TV: The inevitable progression of Donald Trump to become official candidate of the Republican party is, well, inevitable.
Remember this is the GOP of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.
And now it's the turn of reality TV star Donald Trump.
No wonder Kanye West of Keeping Up With The Khardashians is threatening to run next time.
Trump makes his points by referring to the latest issue of National Enquirer.
The news networks give him a free rein because he's responsible for their ggiantic ratings spike.
Most of what he says is twaddle but nobody calls him on any of it.
And on Election niight will Anderson Cooper finally tell TRump? "You're fired?"
Stay tuned.
-30-


No comments: