Let me make something very clear to you: I love watching TV. I love it. I love the shows, I love the movie marathons, I love the fact that everything from cooking to treehouses deserves not only its own show, but entire channels. I grew up sitting down after school every day to watch "The Andy Griffith Show" and "The Simpsons" back to back. The only reason I would ever own an alarm clock when I was eight was to wake me up in time for cartoons on Saturday mornings. Throughout my life, TV has acted as a parent, a teacher and a friend.
I no longer watch TV. You know why? Because I hate it. I hate it with a burning, fiery passion.
OK, let me just back up for a moment and say that I don’t hate TV shows (although "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" really pushes the limit). I don’t even hate the TV in of itself, despite our many differences in the past. I hate watching network television.
Commercials have ruined network TV for me.
I know what you’re thinking: “Wow, Eli, we love reading your articles several times in a row, and we know we’ll never be as handsome or cool as you and you are a rebel who does and says whatever he wants, but this is pretty extreme! TV has always had commercials! Are you really trying to change that?”
Yes, dear readers, that’s exactly what I’m doing. Because goddammit, this needs changing.
The other night, my roommates and I were gathered around the TV to do one of my favorite things: watch televised sports. It was a basketball game, I think between the Golden Crate Warrior’s and…the…Quakers? Maybe? Yeah, it was something like that. Anyways, we were just broin’ out and watching some good ol’ b-ball, and it was such a close game, even I was getting into it, and then they called their time out or foul or congress or whatever for the third time in as many minutes. And the commercials invaded, the same ones we’d been watching just two minutes ago, playing for a full five minutes. Facial creams, Doritos, Disneyland and Doritos again followed by two Progressive commercials in a row with Flo, the initially entertaining spokeswoman who now haunts my nightmares, offering affordable damnation. Then, back to basketball, and the Golden Gate Warriors shoot and miss and get fouled and literally three seconds later, commercials for another five minutes. Flo, goddammit, will you ever release me from your torment?
Sitting there, overwhelmed by the flashing lights and pulsing noise that’s even louder than the freaking basketball game, I looked around at my housemates, most of whom were ignoring the commercials on TV and scrolling through Facebook or Twitter, where they are faced with even more ads.
Why do we allow this? I honestly just don’t get it! Commercials are funded brainwashing, used to convince us to buy products through subtle tricks and themes that not only spur us onward through this consumer culture, but help shape the culture itself. No matter how innocuous they may seem, the social roles and values portrayed in advertisements are hammered into our heads through repetition and pure inescapable mass, molding how we perceive and value the items and people around us. I feel like a crazy conspiracy nut raving about the people in secret buildings trying to mind control us, but the real crazy thing is that is exactly what is happening. People know about it, they do studies on it, they even study how to do it! "Mad Men" (excellent show, by the way) was all about the depravity and coerciveness of the advertisement industry (now I have a real conspiracy theory about why they gave such a horrible business such a beautiful face!
Online streaming changed everything. With only a few exceptions I know about, such as Hulu, we can now watch TV and movies the way they were meant to be watched: uninterrupted. No more fart-themed gum commercials. No more jingles and slogans meant to capitalize on our tiny attention spans, ever-dwindling in response to the patronizing television industry. No more Flo. Just pure, untainted TV. I can watch every episode of "30 Rock" back to back twice, and you can enjoy the "Kardashians," blissfully uninterrupted.
When I was young, I was able to deal with commercials creatively. It was my small window of time to go pee really quick, or to read a few pages of the book I had on hand for just that reason. But now, most people’s go-to time killer is their phone, where more ads are waiting on the edges of every app. I considered buying a new Amazon Kindle for the luxury of taking countless books with me to the bathroom rather than my standard three, until I learned there is literally no way to stop it from constantly displaying advertisements on the home screen.
At this point, commercials are just another accepted part of life. We grew up with them; to us, they’re just another part of TV. But as screens slowly dominate more and more of what we see every day, we need to be careful about what we let them show us. We need to be wary about how much power we give them over TV and our own brains.
I used to love TV. I used to love flipping channels and vegetating on the couch and letting NBC churn out every episode of "Scrubs" they had. But now, I can’t turn on the TV without my emotions being manipulated and my attention span shrinking and my IQ faltering in the light of flashing red letters and deep male voice’s promises of low, low prices.
Commercials have ruined TV; please, don’t let it ruin anything else.
