The idiot box

I was exposed to a lot of network and cable television while I was at my sister's in San Antonio. A reminder that in my own home I have access to only the local area PBS station, since that is all my rabbit ears will pick up (actually, I did just recently discover that I could also pick up the Fox station out of Portland, so whenever I feel like seeing the forensic show "Bones," or old episodes of "Two and a Half Men," I can flip over there). I can only say that being limited to public tele-vision, for all my annoyance at the frequent periods of "begging," would seem to be a blessing.

It isn't that the programming on network and cable T.V. is so relent-lessly bad -- I know from having seen the occasional episode of this show or that that there are some well-written, intelligent shows to be seen, along with, of course, all the garbage for the lowest common denominator out there. No, the big problem is the commercials. The constant, constant barrage of commercials. For every three or four minutes of a program you seem to get five minutes of commercials. I know there were not so many commercials during a show -- or for that matter between shows -- in the "good old days" as there are now. Indeed, I can remember when there would be one product advertised per commercial break.

What I don't understand is how the people who watch a lot of tele-vision can stand it. Sitting with my mother and watching to keep her company I would sometimes feel my soul fluttering up out of my body. You can't even flip to another channel, because they all seem to run their commercials at the same time. To be constantly hawked at about this product, then that product, then that product, all too often in a very frenetic, if not downright screaming, way: it's got to be mind-numbing. Especially as they'll sometimes play a commercial that you just saw one or two commercials ago, over again. "Yes," I would say aloud to the offending television, "you just showed us that."

Not only do I wonder how people stand this endless advertising, I wonder why they stand for it. My mother, in her drastically weakened little voice, stated the obvious, "Well, they have to pay for the shows some way." Yes, but. Does it really take that many commercials to pay for a show? Or has that ol' bugaboo, Greed, gotten its tentacles in here, as well as in Wall Street and the real estate market. 'Hey, how about squeezing in four commercials, rather than just three? Or say, why not five?'

Maybe it would be a little better if all the commercials came between shows; then at least you could watch the actual programming without having the story line or your concentration/enjoyment broken by all this stuff you're not likely to pay much attention to anyway. Of course the advertisers would say no, people would just get up and go out to the kitchen for a snack between shows; but to judge by my siblings, they already do that, during the course of the show. And I'm sure there are other folks like me, who just hit the mute button. Those advertisers are already not reaching a whole bunch of us out here. They're just adversely affecting our viewing pleasure.

So maybe we should tell them that. Start a campaign: Reduce the Number of Commercials (RNC). Maybe write our congressional representatives urging them to introduce laws limiting the number of commercials that can be run during a show.

Or maybe just switch to the public broadcasting station, and give money like crazy during the pledge drives.