I’m sitting at Capitol City Ford while my Explorer gets its 12,000 oil change and general ‘turn your head and cough’ checkup, trying to get some work done for my meeting in Sacramento next week, and I’ve made the mistake taking my headphones off. Over the course of the last 25 minutes or so, I’ve been subjected to the inane ranting of Regis and Kelly, and the soul-devouring vapidity of Rachael Ray. (Oh boy! The ‘snack of the day is Asiago Cheese Straws! KILL ME NOW.) I know that I’m not in the target demographic for these shows, but I don’t understand how these shows are fit for any kind of human consumption. Seriously, I can feel my brain cells committing ritual suicide as I type this.
I miss daytime game shows. OK, maybe Match Game wasn’t exactly the Algonquin Round Table, but it was at least good for a laugh. And, hell, I probably learned more about math from The Price is Right than I learned in my first two years of elementary school. (At the very least, I was playing pricing games at a 5th grade level.)
I reckon that, at some point, a network executive decided that it was more economical to produce 1 hour of Rosie, BabaWawa, et al droning on and on about absolutely nothing for an hour each day than to produce 30 minutes of actual entertainment. I could never subject viewers like me to that kind of torture – so I guess I’d make a lousy network executive.
The other issue is that people supposedly “relate” to these women. They feel like the women are their friends, and like they’re spending an hour each day talking to them and finding out what’s going on with them.
Two things. Match Game was probably the funniest, if not best, game show ever. If you ever get a chance to catch the classic ones (Richard Dawson, Charles Nelson O’Reilly, Brett Summers, etc.) on the Game Show channel, by all means do so.
Second, the best insulting commentary on daytime news shows wasn’t even techincally a commentary. It was the scenes at the beginning of Fargo where we see that apparently there *are* people out there who actually find the banter funny…and they aren’t that bright.