My Head's Gonna Explode!

I won't play games with you and make you guess my age, as it may be self-evident with my lunatic ravings. If you must know, I just turned fifty-nine last month. You say, "so what?" I say, listen up and I'll give you a peek into my keen insight of modern day television production practices.

In the days of black and white broadcasting, there was a sense of professionalism, decorum and civility. It also predated the technology that we all love and enjoy today. Well, some of us do...

My first rant is with so-called "journalists". I don't have a degree in that field, and I suspect that many of our esteemed newsreaders are posing as unqualified journalists.

I have always heard that to properly convey a story to someone, you need to cover the "who, what, where, when and how". It seems simple enough and covers a lot of ground. But it appears to be a foreign concept for producers and newsreaders on everything from local news outlets to cable news stations.

For instance, there will be coverage of a raging fire that is consuming the state of Texas. They show us dramatic footage of flames and trees turning into naked, charred sticks. Wow! I've never seen that before! As a matter of fact, they look like trees that could be found almost anywhere, on fire. What the so-called journalist neglected to tell me and the other twelve million viewers is WHERE in Texas is this conflagration occurring? Location? Is that too much to ask for? I have friends that live in that hellish oven and am concerned that the raging inferno might be destroying their homes. Geez....

The other thing that infuriates me and gives my already high blood pressure an unwanted boost, is the interaction between the cable news station host and the interviewee. It's pathetic and deplorable. It seems as if there is an inverse relationship present: the more important the guest is, the less time and more interruptions he/she will receive. It happens time and again. I was watching a guest being interviewed that had some very important things to say about terrorism, due to his close contacts and connections in the Middle East. I swear to God that they devoted less time to him than a story about a mutant rabbit, or something like that.

The news host wouldn't allow this gentleman to finish a sentence without showing us how smart he/she was on the topic. Well, if you are that damn informed about the topic, why bring a guest expert on your show? I cringe for the guest when this happens. I firmly believe you must be a masochist in order to suffer this kind of abuse.

Another insidious form of abuse towards the guest are the under-the-breath, but nevertheless very audible, "okays", "rights", etc., that the host mutters in the middle of a guest response. That's the secret signal to the guest that he/she is out of time and to wrap it up now! This is usually done at a very critical juncture when the guest will tell us something very interesting or useful.

This never happened during the B/W days of broadcasting! Can you feel my rage??!! Do you share it? Possibly, if you're in dire need of therapy like me.

On a more local note, how many more cat stories can I possibly absorb? It seems that lonely, elderly women who harbor two hundred felines or more in their homes, are increasing at an alarmingly exponential rate. Thanks to my local network, this superb example of hard-hitting journalism offers me two benefits: I will never relocate to a residence next to an elderly female neighbor and I should buy a lot of stock in Kitty Litter. No kidding.

Enough about the cable news. How about the new technology now? It's bad enough that the cable station ID takes up space in the lower left corner of your screen, but now we have interruptions with idiotic actors doing some weird gyrations to hype their show that's on next Tuesday. It annoys the hell out of me as it distracts me from finding out who the real suspect is that Bobby Goren is pursuing. You see, as he's doing one of his patented psyche moves on a suspect, the knuckleheads from the "other" show are in a St. Vitus' dance at the same time. Arrrgghhhh!

What about the background music volume, you ask? Well, let me tell you - it is worse than distracting. I'm watching Law and Order: Criminal Intent as usual, and as we get to a critical scene, the entire symphony orchestra keeps dramatically rising in volume until I can't hear a freaking thing that Bobby or my love, Eames, is saying. What? What did he just say? Damn it!

That brings up another related issue: musical background. The vast wasteland of television is turning into reality shows. In my reality and most likely, yours, there's no music playing while we wash dishes or get hit by cars. A car hit me last year while crossing a street. As I was airborne, I heard NO heavenly music. Not even a drum roll as the adolescent driver locked all four wheels. I never heard music when I was in Vietnam. So why the hell do these crack-crazed producers insist on music in the first place? Is their material not dramatic enough without having to add an artificial prop?

I could go on and on, but don't get me started! I do have to ask myself, though: is it just me? Is it a generational issue, whereby I have a basis of comparison (old B/W broadcasting vs. new age) and younger viewers don't? Am I completely wrong about this? I do welcome your comments, and will post my email address when I find out the particular institution my wife has picked out for me.

Happy viewing!