Yesterday I attempted to keep a diary concerning everything I came across while watching television. It didn't quite work out, but what follows is everything I managed to write down:
4:00 PM: Good Eats. The best show about food ever? Certainly one of the only cooking shows concerned with how cooking does what it does. (I'm trying to avoid saying "the science of cooking," since that's what everyone says. It is, nevertheless, true.) The humor is sometimes...well...he means well. Today: the science of pies! Only I switched it over during the commercial break to...
4:06: Law & Order. Well, what can I say? Everyone knows how often Law & Order is on. Most of the audience has probably been on Law & Order, by this point. TNT is so eager to get in as much Law & Order as possible that, when the credits for one episode shrink down to a wafer-thin ribbon, they start the next episode instead of showing commercials. They also have these recaps about twenty minutes into some episodes, telling us what happened, who the suspect is, and also related an allegedly amusing witticism made during the course of the investigation. And it occurs to me that if they added Sam Waterson's histrionic outburst and the Attorney General saying "Just cut a deal before this gets into the papers" then they would essentially have the whole episode in a 45 second burst, and think of how much Law & Order they could show then.
4:08: Seinfeld. There are almost as many hours of Seinfeld on TBS as there are Law & Orders on TNT. Technically I should be as snarky about it, but the lack of four nights a week of Seinfeld-based programming on NBC dampens such snark. Inbetween the 4:00 and 5:00 episodes comes a single showing of Friends, and here I was about to make some disparaging comment about that show, its cast and its fans, when my pen ran out of ink, so I gave up on TV altogether. (But Friends is so bad.)
4:00 PM: Good Eats. The best show about food ever? Certainly one of the only cooking shows concerned with how cooking does what it does. (I'm trying to avoid saying "the science of cooking," since that's what everyone says. It is, nevertheless, true.) The humor is sometimes...well...he means well. Today: the science of pies! Only I switched it over during the commercial break to...
4:06: Law & Order. Well, what can I say? Everyone knows how often Law & Order is on. Most of the audience has probably been on Law & Order, by this point. TNT is so eager to get in as much Law & Order as possible that, when the credits for one episode shrink down to a wafer-thin ribbon, they start the next episode instead of showing commercials. They also have these recaps about twenty minutes into some episodes, telling us what happened, who the suspect is, and also related an allegedly amusing witticism made during the course of the investigation. And it occurs to me that if they added Sam Waterson's histrionic outburst and the Attorney General saying "Just cut a deal before this gets into the papers" then they would essentially have the whole episode in a 45 second burst, and think of how much Law & Order they could show then.
4:08: Seinfeld. There are almost as many hours of Seinfeld on TBS as there are Law & Orders on TNT. Technically I should be as snarky about it, but the lack of four nights a week of Seinfeld-based programming on NBC dampens such snark. Inbetween the 4:00 and 5:00 episodes comes a single showing of Friends, and here I was about to make some disparaging comment about that show, its cast and its fans, when my pen ran out of ink, so I gave up on TV altogether. (But Friends is so bad.)
