the gadfly

After-hours guilt

Having browsed the tube channels and come across a healthy dose of trash TV à la Mancow and Jerry Springer one Saturday night, I got the very lucid feeling that all was lost with my acceptance of such forms of entertainment. Of course, from the get-go I didn't have high hopes for it either. Three lesbians and Mancow himself jumping around naked in their studio, Jerry following on another channel with the usual enraged love train of sex-crazed fools following their misguided loins into several relationships at the same time, consequently perfecting how to be unfaithful and maximize one's sense of perverted satisfaction … you get the idea. It can whack you off the bed, stunned, yet at the same time desensitize, leaving you laughing at their frailty, pitying what looks to be the downfall of civilization.

But we all need our outlets I suppose, and Saturday night programming seems to fulfill that role to some extent for the leering masses. Personally, I don't identify with such content and the people that bring the trash to life. Conversely, I don't think it should be censored by the more conservative folks who I could imagine wouldn't like this seamy stuff. Then again, they might be just curious onlookers, critiquing what they see in order to justify why in fact they're watching the crap. Either way, there is indeed a tele-something for everyone to consume, but Lo, how it is targeted, and how it flows.

Amidst the ludicrousness, we sooner or later come to a reprieve, the commercial break, the eye in the storm of shock-factor programming. Commercial breaks really know how to make or break the transition in programming themes. And this was a night for off-key transitions. The superbly odd counterpoint of the evening to all the previously ludicrous programming was a commercial advertising a Sunday morning religious program approximately eight hours later … the name escapes me, something about daily salvation, a few shots of on-stage preachers in deep presentation of their godly beliefs, and so on. Coinciding with Mancow and Jerry Springer, the contrast in themes almost seemed to underscore the purpose of Sunday morning, as if the day, the Sabbath, was created to wipe clean the sleaze of the previous evening. It's just what the opportunistic guilt-flyer has in mind in order to rationalize the occasional loosened departure from everyday, good behavior.

It's probably not what the religious communities of the various denominations intended, but it's interesting that salvation follows sin in neat packets of consecutive programming order. This duality was cleverly, though unintentionally, underscored by the TV station's advertisement flow between programs. Or was it? Could they (the Big TV They) be subtly enforcing the Sabbath, while at the same time allowing the transmission of trash TV the evening before? "Paranoid", you'd say, "How could the TV networks be moralizing while at the same time demoralizing?" Great American contradictions—packaged together, such dualities make for programming that reaches the widest possible audience, no matter how broad and tasteless, ready for consumption.

Hmm, advertising doesn't cross party lines, or does it?

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