The Great 24-Hour Television Experiment Pt.2

(A note about “to be continued...'s: I always hated it when shows did that, I'm not talking about like dramas that having running plot lines, but sitcoms and the like that had “to be continued” episodes really bugged me because I never remembered to follow up and watch the next one. It especially sucks for re-run syndication). So anyway, picking up where we left off...

The Face of Unamusement

10:30 p.m.
Jackass is jackass, you know it. It's stupid, but funny at times. By now the shock value has worn off, but I still remember about 10 years ago when the show first came out and parents were flipping out and I thought it was the best thing ever. I wonder how far our moral standards will digress and what we will start seeing on cable TV in the next 10 years. I can hardly wait

Country Fried Home Videos is CMT's version of America's Funniest Home Videos. There is your usual cornucopia of people getting hit in the crotch, falling down, crazy pets and bad facial hair “this is absolutely horrible,” claimed The Friend after seeing a few too many tractor-riding-gone-wrong clips..git 'er done.

Conan O'Brien is the only late night show worth watching these days. Letterman is getting too old and seems uninspired, Jay Leno is awful as always, and the rest are irrelevant. Especially irrelevant is Carson Daily, who looks like a Cheeto, by the way. But Conan is consistently creative, funny and has great guests. I can't wait until he takes over for Leno in two years.

I plan to do a comprehensive blog about public access programming sometime in the near future, but if you have never tuned in to your loal public access channel, do it, and preferably very late at night. You will see things on public access that very few will ever have the opportunity to witness (E.G. Very very VERY low budget sci-fi movies filmed in Tucson in the 1980's about traveling through holes in the fabric of time through stereo speakers.)

Lifetime's Gay, Straight, Or Taken was a great interactive show that did a lot more to fend off the weariness than jumping jacks have been doing. In the show, a girl goes on a four-way date with, as the name implies, a gay guy, a straight guy, and a guy in a relationship. She has to try to figure out who among them is the straight guy to win a date. “I don't think he's gay, I think he's just foreign” commented The Girlfriend. The Friend ended up being correct on her original gay, straight, and taken predictions.

1a.m.
First on the schedule for day 2 was E!'s “the soup” which is basically a clip show, highlighting humorous bits from the past weeks television programming. I think this was a poor choice on my part, because all those clips almost made it feel like I had just watched about 20 hours of TV instead of 10.

MXC is actually a dubbed over version of a crazy Japanese game show from the late 80's. It has somewhat of a cult following, much like Iron Chef. I can't really do this show any justice with words, just try to catch it sometime if you are flipping around at 1 or 2 in the morning, preferably drunk.

Full house at two in the morning is a lot better than I had even hoped. This is the second show of the day to feature Bob Saget, and I can't say that makes me happy..but the awesome music at the end of the show can brighten any situation..even a very poorly thought out blog experiment.

It was after full house that everyone who had joined me decided that could not stomach anymore and left me alone to make it through the night. I am about to enter the death valley of TV programming. What comes on between the hours of 2 and 5 in the morning is designed to either help insomniacs get to sleep, or take advantage of their fragile mental state and drunk poor judgement.


For one whole hour I watched nothing but QVC and infomercials. I had to restrain myself from buying a Boss stereo, a set of 80 pocket knives and a 2007P Jamestown Proof Commemorative Silver Dollar, NGC certified PF70 Ultra Cameo...only $149.97.

Focus

Commercial count update:
Car commercials:7
vs.
Erectile Dysfunction treatment: 4

Maybe it's just the sleep deprivation, but much of the humor on the Naked Trucker & T-Bone show was lost on me. It seems like the show is a potentially very funny 10 minute skit dragged out into a 10 episode series.

I don't know what kind of people CNN is trying to appeal to at 4 in the morning with the special investigation report “How To Rob A Bank,” that literally describes the techniques used by criminals to steal identities and rob banks. I learned that banks in the U.S. send out over 5 billion credit card offers every year, and it is ridiculously easy for someone to take one of those offers you casually toss out, purchase your identity information on line for 50 bucks and run up thousands of dollars of credit in your name.

It would appear that the only time you can find music videos being shown on MTV or VH1 is at 5 in the morning, and even then it's the shittiest of the shitty music videos. VH1's top 10 video countdown made me want to give up on this gig, go put on some Neil Young and sleep for 12 hours straight. Every minute I am becoming more bitter and more hungry.

Hope

Around 6am the sun began to come up and I knew the hardest part was over, I still had 8 hours of TV left to watch, but I was confident I could make it through. After an hour of cable news on MSNBC (O'reilly's least favorite network), I felt sufficiently informed and turned to TBS for an episode of the classic series “Dawson's Creek”. You know you have watched this show at some point, so don't try to hide it. This episode featured Joey's dad being released from prison, only to fall back into his drug-dealing ways. It is refreshing to see Katie Holmes before she became crazy and married the King of Crazy aka Tom Cruise.

Perhaps the least exciting program of this entire thing was the E! True Hollywood Story of Rosie O' Donnell. Somehow, this was the the best thing on at 8a.m. Come on, TV, you gotta get some better stuff up on Saturday mornings. I am pretty neutral about Rosie O' Donnell, it just doesn't seem like she her life has been exciting or controversial enough to earn a True Hollywood Story.

A portion of this that I was really looking forward to was Saturday morning cartoons, like all 20 somethings, I often reminisce about that awesomeness that was Saturday morning cartoons that were on when I was little. I wanted to see what was out there for the youth of today. I was sorely disappointed. I watched the Bratz cartoon, which featured a villain turning innocent Bratz into “pink zombies” with what looked like pink spray paint. I then watched a bad Scooby Doo adaptation which just had Scooby and Shaggy trying to save a bunch of pygmy marmosets (not kidding.) And Finally, Viva Pinata, a cartoon about...talking pinatas. Oh youth of this generation, how I pity you.

I happened upon some show on the travel channel about haunted buildings. Again this is one of many shows that doesn't seem to fit with its allocated cable channel, but somebody made the damn show and they have to put it somewhere.

After watching 20 hours of TV, I wasn't in the mood to have a really intense guy with crazy hair yell at me about being fat, but that's what I got when I tuned into PBS. “Kiss Your Fat Goodbye” is a show that tries to analyze why we are all overweight, and claims that we can be living to be 140 years old if we make the effort. I think if I wasn't so exhausted I would laugh at this show, but in my current state, it just made me a little bit angry. “You tip into distress and then full blown disease,” claimed crazy hair guy about weight gain.

A couple steps up from Tucson Public Access is channel 12, a local channel that usually programs really boring things like county legislative meetings and such. There are a few programs on it worth viewing though. Sam The Cooking guy is one of them. It is enjoyable local programming.

11:30 a.m.
TV land had a special showing the 100 greatest TV catchphrases of all times. Among the top 20 was this gem:


I'll just come out and say it; I love the history channel (aka The Hitler Channel). Modern marvels, True Crime, How William Shatner Changed The World, whatever it is, I will watch it and re-watch it every time they replay it for a month. It was a pleasant surprise to see that a special about cannibalism was being shown this afternoon, as I'm approaching the final stretch, some good history channel is exactly what I needed.

I felt it was cheating somewhat to watch the UA vs. Washington basketball game, as it was something that I would have been doing anyway at this time. Nonetheless, I was grateful that the game was on, and that UA got the much-needed victory. I was so elated, I barely noticed that as the game ended, I was entering my final hour of TVing.

I spent the final hour channel surfing, because I didn't feel it would be complete without some mindless clicking (and after 23 hours of nothing but a screen in front of you, believe me I was mindless). And before I knew it, it was over. I felt empowered as I turned off the TV. I also felt exhausted, ashamed, dirty, and irritable, but empowered nonetheless.

Commercial count:
Valentine's Day jewelry commercials: 9
Insurance commercials:9

So what did I learn you might ask? I wish at the end of this I that I had come to some vast spiritual awareness or new sociological perspective, instead I just really got sick of TV and don't think I will be able to watch much for the next few weeks. Some say there is too much on TV now, but I think choice is a good thing. There is something out there for everyone. If you want nothing but racing and car programming at all times, you have the SPEED network. If seeing uncensored open-heart surgery is your think, there's Discovery Health. And if you have a longing for Bob Saget, he can be found somewhere out there at pretty much any hour of the day.

The End.