"All Fresh Prince, All the Time". The Viacom cable service Nick at Nite has gone out of its mind. Completely. It has given over a full week for a marathon of one of the very worst television programs ever made, Will Smith's execrable piece of sh*t The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. I cannot express in print how much I hate that show. Yet it appears all over the dial at least 5,000 times a year. At the best of times, it appears four or five times a nite on Nick@Nite. At the worst, dozens of episodes appear nite after nite without letup. Nickelodeon has given over a full week to nothing but Fresh Prince! Why?!?
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For many of us, television is the only relaxation we get at the end of a stressed-out day, but our comfort zone is endlessly violated by programmers who think it would be a great idea to pre-empt all regular programming and attack the audience with unasked-for, unwanted marathons of show after show after show after show after show — you get the picture, but programmers don't — of exactly the same type, for hours on end, whether the audience loves that particular show or hates it.
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The people in charge of programming today have no idea why people watch TV. They don't understand how television became an entrenched habit in popular culture. They just don't "get it". You'd think they'd know, because it is their job to know. But they don't.
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TV is not supposed to be a constant surprise, a gamble. It is supposed to comprise a foreseeable and predictable routine that we can rely upon. That's how TV became a habit with the public.
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Habits are customary behaviors. By their nature, they don't bounce around. Most people need familiar routines. For every day and nite of life to be different from every other would be intolerably chaotic. What if the sun came up at 6:00 a.m. one day, but 4:30 p.m. the next, and 10:13 a.m. the next, and 12:00 midnite the next after that? What if it stayed up constantly for a week, then went away for three days, came up for one day, went away for seven, came up every day but at times an hour or two different each day, sometimes later, sometimes earlier? Would we like that? Or would we all be stark raving mad within a month, biorhythms in a tangle, our bodies scarcely able to function?
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For the bulk of the general population, television plays a major role in their sense of time. To say that it is our sun might overstate the case, but not by much. It is at least, to us today, what the North Star was to navigators of old.
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"If it's Tuesday, then x must be on at 9:30", or "It's 3 o'clock, time for Dr. Phil" or "4 o'clock, time for Oprah."
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Television programmers sometimes forget that we like to know when we can see the shows we like. Would Regis Philbin be hugely popular if his show bounced all over the schedule? Or would the audience weary of hunting for his show and find something else to watch, or just turn the damned thing off in frustration?
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All network programming is experiencing a serious decline in viewership, not so much because people don't like what they find, but because they can't find what they like. Programmers have taken to changing schedules peremptorily to boost one show's ratings by giving it a different lead-in, at the cost of confusing viewers as to what happened to the show that used to be there. Was it canceled? If not, where did it go? Why? Is it on hiatus but coming back? Or is it (quote) "on hiatus", meaning canceled?
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TV needs to clean house of the crazy children, with the attention span and intelligence of a gnat, who now control programming, and give us people who understand that normal people like variety but predictability, not either without the other. We don't want 63 hours of nothing but Fresh Prince, and we don't want entirely different programs every half hour for the rest of the world. We want to know that if it's 10 p.m. and this is Nick@Nite, Roseanne is on. And if we turn to Nickelodeon and find Roseanne is not on, but that Fresh Prince, which we HATE, has pre-empted it for a whole f**kin' week, we are angry.
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I guess viewer anger doesn't matter to the executives of Viacom. They don't need an audience. Or do they?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,463.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:31 AM