Tuesday, December 09, 2003

Those goofy networks....

This is something I noticed last week when we watched A Charlie Brown Christmas here at The Household: commercial breaks were just shoehorned into the show, regardless of flow or whether or not it made any sense to have a commercial at that point. And even stranger, the show's original commercial break-points were ignored -- the standard "fade out" happened, right where the commercial was supposed to have gone, but then the show came right back on. So the show was broken up for commercial breaks in bad places, when the show was originally produced to accomodate commercial breaks at logical points in the action. Is there some network requirement for a certain number of minutes of advertising per half hour, and by God, they're going to make it? And is there some new network requirement that commercial breaks must occur at a certain time, thus forcing such goofy editing of shows originally produced for television, but for a different time? What gives?

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