Faces of America

I watched the first two programs (55 minutes each) of the PBS series Faces of America this evening. I found the shows to be interesting, informative, moving and enjoyable. I encourage you to find time to view the series; all four episodes are currently online.

What made America? What makes us? These two questions are at the heart of the new PBS series Faces of America with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Harvard scholar turns to the latest tools of genealogy and genetics to explore the family histories of 12 renowned Americans — professor and poet Elizabeth Alexander, chef Mario Batali, comedian Stephen Colbert, novelist Louise Erdrich, journalist Malcolm Gladwell, actress Eva Longoria, musician Yo-Yo Ma, director Mike Nichols, Her Majesty Queen Noor, television host/heart surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz, actress Meryl Streep, and figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi.

Here’s a spoiler for you — Eva Longoria and Yo-Yo Ma have a common ancestor.

Thanks to my cousin Christina for the reminder. Christina wants us to have our DNA tested to confirm that our mothers’ father is the same man. What makes it interesting is that our mothers were born just 10 weeks apart.

And, yes it’s a documentary, but it really is worth watching.

What You Pay

Via AllThingsD, what cable subscribers pay for channels.

Click to enlarge.

Best line about the Oscars show, so far

“Even Oprah had to do it; needless to say, she did it with bullet-point briskness and efficacy, but still, it must the first time she has found herself in a lineup.”

Anthony Lane of The New Yorker in a critique of the Oscar show.

We like us some hockey

More Americans watched yesterday’s Olympic hockey game LIVE than watched all but two nights of NBC’s Olympic primetime shows (one night of which was the opening ceremony).

Half the population of Canada watched the game, the most viewed program in Canadian TV history.

All my gripes about Olympic TV coverage

… were proven correct on the last day. Phil Mushnick puts it best at NYPOST.com. An excerpt:

Many of us sat down for Sunday dinner after that fabulous game, almost like the Nelsons, the Cleavers, the Waltons, the Huxtables, the Munsters.

When’s the last time you could say that about a World Series game or an NBA final? The CBS-leased NCAA basketball championship now tips at 9:22 on a Monday night. Baseball’s Opening Day, sold at auction to ESPN, is now at night, this year’s first pitch after 8 p.m. in Boston — on April 4.

If NBC, or any commercial network, yesterday had been able to shuffle and deal, Canada-USA would have begun at about 9 p.m. ET to maximize coast-to-coast primetime ad revenues.

And NBC would have much preferred that we watched the game alone — more TV sets tuned in, that way — certainly not in groups.

In other words, NBC (and CBS, ESPN/ABC, Fox) would have preferred that we watched from the same place we now watch most games of national interest: that same chair or from bed, lights out, pillows up.

I watched with friends in a crowded bar where people cheered (for Canada, too). It’s a whole different and vastly better experience to share moments like these. (Ten of us watched the Super Bowl together at Jill’s. Same phenomenon — a wonderful shared experience.)

Best line of the day

“… I realized I’ve been getting cranky in the evenings, just from being blathered to death watching the Olympics. Last night, I started muting the sound, and had a much more pleasant time.”

Garret

Why Won’t NBC Follow Its Own Advice On Live Broadcasts?

This one is for a particular reader. He/she knows whom I mean.

Oddly enough, going online during big TV events has the bizarre effect of boosting the ratings of whatever everyone is watching. Like the Super Bowl or Grammys or the MTV Video Music Awards, all of which saw big boosts in popularity in the last year. You don’t care about the show, you care about being able to talk about the show. This is called “community,” which is also the name of a terrible show on a terribly out-of-touch network called NBC.

Seeking to capitalize on the online water-cooler effect, NBC showed the Golden Globes live on both coasts for the first time this year, and the network reportedly wants to do the same for the Emmy Awards this fall, so the entire country can watch (and chat online) simultaneously.

Super-smart NBC has figured out that what all these big blockbuster Twitter-TV combo events have in common is that they are happening live. Shows that are broadcast at different times in different zones (and probably DVR’d anyway) don’t have the same effect. Yet, they have not applied this simple common sense approach to the Olympics.

Frustratingly, Olympic primetime ratings are also up this year and people are marveling about how sports fans will stay up long past their bedtime to watch events that they already know the outcome to, just so they can be a part of the phenomenon. It’s not because they prefer it that way. It’s because they have no other choice.

Deadspin

Best Olympics-TV-sucks line of the day

“Most emotional of all were probably the television executives who prefer to think of the Olympics as a two-week long soap opera filled with emotional turmoil, heartbreak, and redemption. It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s whether you overcame enough adversity to make your life story worth a three-minute interstitial package.”

Deadspin

Hey, Mom

Speaking of moms, can we talk about how offensive that Proctor and Gamble Olympic campaign is? Not because it completely ignores the contributions of abusive, overbearing fathers in the creation of great athletes or glamorizes the most annoying tendencies of stage/soccer parents, but because the underlying message of every single ad is, “Thanks for supporting me, Mom. Now go clean my socks.”

Laundry detergent is for ladies. Don’t ever forget that.

Deadspin

Best line of the day, so far

NBC anchors, including those paid by the news division, glom onto the glamour and reflected glory of winsome champions, as per Matt Lauer’s no-boundaries embrace of the skier Lindsey Vonn on “Today” after she won the downhill race. He draped a chocolate gold medal around her neck, gave her flowers (“just because we adore you”) and hugged her tight (“we are so proud of you”) — as if he and Meredith Vieira had spent the last 15 years rising at dawn to drive her to training.

Alessandra Stanley – NYTimes.com

Nothing But Commercials (NBC)

An analysis of NBC’s 3 ½-hour program Friday night showed that there were 56 minutes, 41 seconds of commercials over 24 breaks—that’s three more minutes than actual event action that was showed. Ski jumping, which took up about 30 minutes of the broadcast, featured less than two minutes of action, compared with four minutes, 46 seconds of replays (there was, on average, more than one replay per jump). More than half the time during the compulsory-dancing segments showed action, but good luck getting into a rhythm watching the sport: A commercial break separated each routine.

WSJ.com

NBC (Nothing But Communists)

“NBC punctuated its video introducing Yevgeny Plushenko, the Russian figure-skater, with the iconography and symbols of the Soviet Union—Lenin statue, hammer and sickle—a country that ceased to exist when Plushenko was nine.”

Olympolitics: The New Yorker

HBO on your computer.

It’s beta and you have to subscribe to HBO to use it, but it’s a another step away from cable.

HBO GO

I hate Olympics TV coverage

Always have. Always will I’m afraid. Just hate it. Roone Arledge, the creator of all this highlights-based, personality-featured sports coverage should rot in hell forever IMHO. All those channels; why can’t we (if we wanted to) see every performance by every athlete from every country LIVE?

Henry Blodget agrees with me. This is part of a longer rant:

What NBC Sports apparently doesn’t understand (because it has done this to us before, again and again) is that we don’t care who is televising the Olympics. 

We don’t want to watch NBC’s “Olympics show”.  We want to watch The Olympics.  And like every other connected sports fan on the planet these days, we know exactly when the Olympics is taking place and what’s happening there–in real time.

So, right now, for us, NBC isn’t the network that brings us the Olympics.  It’s the network that prevents us from watching the Olympics.   And we hate NBC for that.

Questions for NBC

Henry Blodget has some Questions For NBC, The Network That Prevents You From Watching The Olympics. Among them:

3.  How much money would you lose (or do you think you would lose) if you showed the events live on a subsidiary network and then showed highlights again in your prime time broadcast?  To us, this seems like the best solution.  If you did this, sports fans could get their fix, and the “general audience” you’re obviously trying to appeal to in prime time with segments on polar bears can watch the “Olympics Show” you put on every night without wanting to throw their remote controls through the TV.

The most unlikely Super Bowl ad

The Times has the story on How the Letterman-Oprah-Leno Super Bowl Ad Came Together.

And here’s a good rundown of the Super Bowl ads with clips of many of them.

Super

Adam Gopnik has the best writing you’re likely to see about watching the Super Bowl.

The last Conan Tonight Show

Don't blame Conan

'Let's be careful out there.'

Hard to believe, but it’s been 29 years.

Hill Street Blues, the first network series to include long shots, handheld camera shots and continuing story lines, debuted on this date in 1981.

The Late Night War

Great segments last night with Leno and Kimmel, O’Brien and Letterman. Gawker.TV has the clips.

Reality TV at its best.

Got 44 minutes? It's enough for all four NFL games this weekend.

According to this report at the Wall Street Journal, NFL telecasts have 11 minutes of action (but 17 minutes of replays and 75 minutes of commercials).

Today

… is the 58th anniversary of Today. The morning show premiered with Dave Garroway, Jim Fleming and Jack Lescoulie on this date in 1952. When it began it was broadcast for three hours, but shown for two only. The overlap allowed the program to be seen live from 7-to-9 in both the Eastern and Central time zones. (The Eastern saw the first and second hour, the Central the second and third.)

The Tonight Show began on NBC on September 27, 1954. Both programs were created by Sylvester L. “Pat” Weaver Jr., father of Sigourney (actually Susan Alexandra Weaver).

Letterman Top Ten

Time for an Executive Email Carpet Bomb

“Our inbox has spoken: due to popular reader demand, it’s time to harness the power of the EECB, the executive email carpet bomb, for its most important mission ever: saving the Conan O’ Brien show.”

The Consumerist has the email addresses.

Caveat: I don’t watch Leno or O’Brien.