Thursday, November 26, 2009

Thanksgiving curmudgeonry....bah humbug

I guess I've given up watching Thanksgiving parades. If I wanted to watch celebrity interviews I'm pretty sure there're other better places to do that. If I wanted to watch infomercials for Pillsbury or Disney....well I don't. And it seems particularly egregious to follow up the Pillsbury infomercial with a two minute commercial break. Since the floats and balloons themselves are subtle advertisements, if we overlay them with infomercials, and follow with actual commercial breaks we have three layers of advertisement.  Ours is a capitalist economy and I'm not a hater. I don't resent the rich. I don't hate business, but, regarding these parades, the pendulum has swung a bit too far towards commercialism for me and I guess I'll take a few years off.

I do remember when the coverage consisted of nothing but long range views of the parades from stationary cameras sited some distance off the parade routes. That wasn't ideal, but now I feel like I'm watching a talk show that occasionally shows a view of a parade. I imagine television executives with their cohorts and advisors decided that just looking at a parade for 3? hours is boring. Maybe that's why there aren't any televised parades between New Year's Day and Thanksgiving, ~330 days!. And some interviews are fine, but if we have to hear 3 minutes of speculation about where the plot line of All My Children will be going for the next few months, why couldn't we be viewing the Parade at the same time? Maybe I'm just in a mood.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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