When is it enough?

I’m old enough to remember when our TV had 5 channels that we could crank the old knob around to find: 3 major networks, an independent station, and PBS. I knew them well as the first 7 or 8 years of my life, I was actually the remote control. I remember the landmark day that the Ireland household got cable. We were that one family who always got everything after everyone else had it for years. Our line-up increased to an unimaginable 20+ channels. Even at that age, there was just too much television to watch, and yet nothing was on. Flash forward 30 years and I have something in the neighborhood of 500+ channels. Yeah, you know where I’m going – all this TV and yet nothing is on. Let me arrive at my point.

I’m happy to say that we don’t watch a lot of TV in the Ireland household. We have a few programs we watch, and there are only a handful of channels we frequent. Fact is, we DVR most of the television we watch. Yet with this somewhat limited exposure, we are somehow bombarded over and over with the same garbage messaging.

Commercials have always been the zits of television. They pop up at all the wrong times, they are annoying, and all we can do is ignore them until they go away. That fact has never changed. The problem I have now is that there seem to be only 10 commercials playing at every break on all 500 channels and 7 of them are for Geico. My beef is how can any company afford that much commercial time in this bad economy? I do not have Geico, and I’m proud to say I never will. If I did, I would only wonder how much of my insurance premiums were going into the latest wacky adventure of the computer animated lizard and his doofus boss. Is there such a thing as reverse messaging? Can too much exposure begin to be a bad thing? In this case I’m going to say yes.

The other issue is up to the minute news crawls and updates. This just happened with the Tiger Woods scandal and now over the weekend with the Mike Leach/Texas Tech debacle. BREAKING NEWS…! The news media has been overdoing it for years, so that is nothing new. The big problem now is the little black news crawl across the bottom of some channels. In the span of one football game we were reminded of the Mike Leach situation once every couple of seconds, despite the fact it happened 3 days ago, and that they had nothing new to report. After the crawl ticked by 20 times, they would break in with a live studio update of the situation, which was just reading the same text crawl, and showing the same piece of stock Mike Leach footage… again. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

We get it. I promise you we get it. Those that don’t have had their brains turned to mush from overexposure and are too far-gone to get it. Enough!