A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS

Ramblings about things done, seen, or remembered.

ADHD TV

The TV guide had Star Trek listed, and that’s what I had wanted to watch.  Our heroes (okay, my heroes) were facing the impending doom of humanity, the universe, and the franchise as we know it, when without warning or permission, a four-inch high man with crazy hair and wild eyes runs into view, slips and falls, pulls himself up on the “bottom” of my screen and looks at me for sympathy.  He only takes up the lower left hand corner of the TV but in case I want to see him perform such antics on all 27 inches of cathode ray, the date and time I can do so suddenly shoots across the screen (knocking him down again) and sits there for 20 seconds changing color. 

Overly large graphics during a program is one of TV’s answers to Tivo.  Because viewers can easily avoid promotions in the regular commercial breaks, stations play ads during the shows themselves.  And they are distracting enough that people have to take notice—by reflex if not by choice.  Then repeat and repeat and repeat so the message breaks through all other distractions. 

I’d missed a chunk of my show and even though I rewound and replayed I couldn’t stop myself from at least glancing again at the midget whose upcoming show was, if you believe the hype, “all new.” 

The Star Trek action had moved onto an alien world, though my attention had been hijacked by the spinning logo of a hit series returning next week, Mondays at nine, so I wasn’t certain why.

For those critics that harp on about all the aliens on Star Trek speaking English (or Spanish if you watch channel 9), this was a planet of giant insects that spoke in clicks.  To understand their dastardly plan subtitles were provided.

“Click, click”—The earthlings! We must destroy them.

“Click, click, click”—“No! We must stick to the plan.

“Click”—Don’t miss the TV mini-series event of the year!

The insects were clearly a serious threat to the human race, and more significantly to the impossibly cute girls of the future, but whatever they were actually saying was overwritten by massive words at the bottom of my picture telling me about an upcoming mini-series.

“Click, click”—Coming this June, a fading star is Yesterday’s News

This was just annoying.  The girls of Starfleet were facing imminent destruction (and by inference heroic escape), I didn’t know exactly what the threat was, and Tivo couldn’t help.

A streak of red filled the entire lower third of my screen with a promotion for a made-for-TV film the channel was heavily invested in and which it was determined everyone should have no choice but to be aware of, even though the film could clearly win a coveted cliché statuette at the annual Formulaic Arts Awards.

It was time for a commercial break—so as to give the channel an opportunity to advertise future programming.  Seeing as I already knew everything about the upcoming shows except what upcoming shows would be advertised during them, I decided to escape the distractions and turned to a news channel.

A reporter was covering a story about severe weather somewhere, dressed in yellow plastic and being pelted with rain, though strangely using an oversized and, I’m sure, highly absorbent foam covered microphone.  I concentrated on that for a full five seconds before being distracted.  The news about the arrest of a celebrity scrolled across the foot of the screen.  Both of those paled into insignificance as I noticed the stock market ticker was showing an increase for the day—good news for my pension.  The clock, displayed under the stations giant spinning 3-D logo (you just have to keep checking on it in case it does something different) indicated Trek might be back on.  So I turned back to continue watching more Scifi, enormous subtitles, and weird-hair comedy-midgets. 

What terrors were befalling the crew of Enterprise were anyone’s guess but it was time for the obligatory space battle, with:

Fighting words—“Aim for the warp coil injectors!”

Crisis dialogue—“We lost the warp coil injectors!”

And futuristic sounding techno-babble—“dilithium matrix tachyon warp coil injector things! that'll solve it.”

There was an explosion in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.  It wasn’t until it had changed from a ball of fire into letters of fire—spelling out the title of a film being shown later that night—that I realized it had nothing to do with the action on-screen.   Now, writing on screen just begs to be read.  Just try not reading subtitles, even when you know what’s going on.  Some people can tune this kind of thing out but others (me) have to look, every time.  Everyone however, consciously or subconsciously, gets the message.

It’s lucky I didn’t want to read the credits at the show’s end because they were run at three times normal speed to make time for ads of weekend movies, and squashed onto the left side of the screen to make room for a preview clip of tomorrow nights line-up.

“Tomorrow at seven on CTV, tune in for an all new hour of promotional graphics.”

The strategy has become self defeating.  Ads during the programs are run so frequently they become background noise.  I recently saw ads for a show I actually wanted to see (yes, it too had space ships and lasers) but I missed it entirely because I was so used to seeing the ad it just became white noise and I filtered out its message.

Plus when they put a lot of effort into having me watch something, only to prevent me from really enjoying it when it’s actually on, so why should I bother?

(…Scifi hotties, that’s why…)

Copyright © Lincoln Thomas  2008