It isn’t only NFL football watchers who suffer from the commercial interruptions. TV is overflowing with advertising garbage, and the virtual smell is getting stinkier every day. When TV first started to come into the home in the late 40s, commercials, which were mostly live at the time, took up no more than a minute or two of each hour’s broadcast.
Today, commercials are not only undercutting the dormant pleasures of couch potatoes who watch NFL games, but also are gradually strangling all of TV. Not even considering the glut of late-night ads and infomercials that hog 100% of every hour with the smirking faces of crooked pitchmen/women, the average prime time network TV hour is stuffed with at least 20 minutes of commercials.
The worst, which defy any sense of logic, are the ones that are repeated every day for weeks and months, often two or three times within the same one-hour program. Somewhere in the bowels of a TV studio or ad agency, the commercials are filmed and the exact same annoying one- or two-minute pitch is aired hundreds of times, in football as well as other sports and prime-time programs.
Some of the worst are the new car ads, with their gruesomely loud MTV-aped audio and video productions. They’re supposed to make us run right out to our crooked neighborhood auto dealer and buy a new gas hog for $30,000, with a $5,000 cash-back offer they’ll never get. I’ve never bought a car because of seeing a TV ad, even if has been pounded into my face a thousand times, and I doubt if anyone else has. As far as I’m concerned, millions of ad bucks are totally wasted on me.
However, just maybe those grossly overpaid NFL players see the ads, and the next day run out and buy another SUV or two to go with their Mercedes and Audis that decorate their Malibu estates.
