Thursday, October 16, 2008

Commercials just overwhelming TV

It seems like forever that "Saturday Night Live" has been on the air, and it has been at least 15 years since I watched it regularly.

These days, thanks to YouTube, I have been able to catch most of Tina Fey's hilarious portrayals of Sarah Palin. They make me laugh, but not enough that I want to stay up till 11:30 on a Saturday night and watch television.

The fact is, I hardly watch any scheduled TV shows at all anymore. It isn't that I'm some sort of snob; it's just that I really can't bear to watch all the commercials. Most of us from the Class of '67 probably remember the time when a half-hour show had one commercial in the middle and another one just before the end. These days if you watch late night TV, there seem to be a couple of minutes worth of commercials every seven or eight minutes.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, one Saturday night in Houston I saw the same Cal Worthington commercial 24 times in a three-hour period.



For those of you who never lived in the West, here's a sampler of the Worthington commercials, in which Cal and his "dog" Spot sold used cars. Sometimes the dog was a dolphin or an elephant, other times a tiger or a snake.

But at least his commercials were funny. Most of the ones we see these days are insulting.

So I'll watch shows on DVD, and I certainly love to watch movies, but I've pretty much banned regular shows from my entertainment package.

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