Item 1: Marathon Madness. Television is suffering from monomania. Channel after channel nowadays is inflicting marathons upon viewers. TV Land, almost all of whose programming consists of "classic" series that have been in syndication for decades, is a particularly egregious offender, pre-empting regularly scheduled programs for entire weekends, even weekdays, unpredictably, for 24-hour or 48-hour marathons of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (a dreadful show), Baywatch (never watched it, never will), Three's Company, Bonanza, and other ancient series. Its related service, Nick at Nite, similarly disrupts regular programming for marathons of The Cosby Show, Roseanne, and other programs that have been shown on that service for years. Why?
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Programming monomania is not restricted to cable stations, alas. Our local Newark/New York City PBS station WNET (the Nation's first "educational" broadcaster) is notorious for showing, for instance, the entire multi-hour Ken Burns series New York, Baseball, or Jazz (all 18 1/2 hours of it!) during pledge breaks (what I call "begathons" — which should be forbidden by law).
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What is wrong with the programmers who schedule such nerve-deadening repetition? Few of us — the normal people out there, the audience — want to see hour after hour of the same thing, even if it's good stuff — which not all marathons broadcast. "Variety is the spice of life" should be on the wall of every programmer's office. Instead, they seem to subscribe to the notion that "Too much is not enuf". They have already planned the next imposition upon the audience before the current festival of monomania has ended. It's got to stop.
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Item 2: Brokaw Leaves, Williams Arrives. Permit me brief comment on the departure a couple of weeks ago of longtime NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw. I never particularly cared for him. He was at best OK, but for some reason he was permitted, year after year, to inflict a speech defect upon millions of listeners. Again and again he employed the "dark-L" where the "lite-L" belongs.
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Lite-L is the usual sound of L in initial and final position (line, ill, lull). It is pronounced with the tongue near the front of the mouth (thus closer to the lite). Dark-L is a special sound usually employed only before a consonant but occasionally at the end of a word, as everyone says cold and some people say full. It is pronounced with the tongue farther back (and thus in the dark). It is NEVER to be said in initial position nor between two vowels, but Tom Brokaw says it everywhere, which makes him sound like he's gargling whenever he says an L.
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NBC should long ago have insisted he stop that and speak correctly: 'You're a speech exemplar, for Chrissake.' The only other person I have heard in national news who is permitted to use that defect on air is Robert Bazell, a health/science reporter also employed by NBC. It would seem that NBC doesn't take seriously the responsibility of broadcasters to provide good guidance as to speech so that people who model their pronunciations on the speech of newscasters speak well.
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Tom Brokaw also put the crazy and offensive term "The Greatest Generation" into the language, referring not to the Founding Fathers of the United States, the true greatest generation of all (if any is to be said greater than the present generation, ever), but to the generation that suffered and struggled thru the Great Depression and World War II. (See this blog's entry of June 1, 2004.)
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On the other hand, I was delited to hear Brokaw's voice narrating the film that plays in the visitor center at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota. (That national memorial — giant sculpted heads of four presidents blasted into the rock of a mountain in the Badlands — is a truly wonderful sight everyone should see at least once, like Niagara Falls. Yes, I know it's in the middle of noplace. Go anyway.)
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Brokaw is from South Dakota, and even tho he has lived in New York for decades, he never lost sight of his roots, and never disowned his origins. So he's not a bad guy. He just speaks badly.
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Brian Williams, his replacement, is from New Jersey. More specifically, he is from the town(ship) I grew up in, Middletown, in Monmouth County, in a section from which, on a clear day, you can see Manhattan's towers across the interconnecting waters of Sandy Hook Bay, Lower New York Bay, and Upper New York Bay. It can be a spectacular view.
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One evening, as I was walking thru Times Square on my way to work (I lived for 35 years in Manhattan, the last 25 in Hell's Kitchen, and walked to work for seven years thru Times Square to East 42nd Street), I saw him standing on a sturdy plastic box/milk crate, microphone in hand, with a camera pointed up to show him in front of the giant TV screen at One Times Square, which was showing NBC programming at the time. I thought to myself how silly he looked: 'What some people will do for money and fame!'
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Now he's top dog at NBC News. Being willing to look silly by standing on a box in Times Square sure paid off.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:09 PM