Withering TV

When I was a kid, I watched a decent amount of network TV. Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Mork and Mindy, Mash, etc. Plus Saturday morning cartoons. The TV was generally always on in the evenings. Mom and Dad watched it quite a bit.

Today, the only show that I intend to watch on network TV this season is one that I haven't watched yet: House, on Fox. I'll try to catch the replay of the debut this Friday, and then maybe watch it every Tuesday, if it appeals to me.

In my family of 6, we just don't watch much TV. We don't even have cable. The older boys will catch a Will & Grace re-run now and then, and during the weekend, my youngest sons will watch a football game during the weekend. My daughter catches Everwood on Mondays, if she's home. If the game is interesting, we might catch Monday Night Football if Bari's not vying for the TV.

I got involved in the comments dust-up at Jeff Jarvis' site over the racy Monday Night Football intro.

Jeff's in a snit because Michael Powell says that he's disappointed in ABC's decision to air the intro (a different post, here). The FCC has no business butting into this, says he.

I say: who cares?

This is about marketing and branding. ABC chose to alter the Monday Night Football brand by running an intro that offended some of its viewers. If I watch Monday Night Football, it's with my 7-year-old who loves football, and racy content isn't something he's allowed to watch.

Tony Dungy, head coach for Indianapolis, said that he used the occasion to talk to his 12-year-old son about it, but we parents don't want those occasions foisted on us. It feels like an ambush. It's like having your kid receive soft-porn email in his inbox. It's unexpected and unwelcome.

As the Monday Night Football episode demonstrated, it's not the maturity content of the show, but of the advertising and of the bumper promos, when our children watch TV that parents find objectionable. Commercials and shows should be on the same maturity level. But advertising (with orgasmic shampoo, etc) is what's killing what I watch with my younger kids, not the shows. I choose the shows, but I can't choose the ads. I would prefer it if the content providers/networks would say that everything during a given hour will be a certain level of maturity. But I don't think that will happen.

The government's answer to this is the upcoming Broadcast Indencency Act, but it's wrong because the standards for indecency are way too subjective. Government is never an answer.

Jeff has spent a life in media and critiquing TV. He calls those of us in the cheap seats who object to titillating promos "prudes."

Me, I call us "gone." I have a remote and it has an "off" button. In a period of ample choice for media and entertainment, I want control. So I'll walk from TV even more than I do now if I find it objectionable. When the content providers start bleeding money (and maybe they are now), they might change. But it'll be too late. The alternatives are too numerous and much better. They just give us an opportunity to explore those alternatives with each of these dumb programming decisions.