By Myles Ludwig
My guess is the Home Shopping Network fills a critical niche in the lives of others, particularly those rubes living 50 miles or more from the nearest Wal-Mart or the lost chic of Park Avenue, women on Ambien who roam the late night channels, surprised to find a dozen Tanzanite tennis bracelets, a couple of über-blenders, a few NuWave cooktops and a cache of perfect pillows delivered to their classic-six doors a few days later.
Blame it on free shipping. That must account for the lines of guilty facelifts at FedEx returning ill-gotten goods they don’t remember gaining.
But it’s not important to me. And I don’t like paying for it.
It’s one of the useless channels of mass destruction foisted on me in a Dumpster bundle of electronic detritus. OK, I admit I’m infatuated with the charming Rehab Addict and her teardown, rip-it-out and repurpose-it grin. Even pudgy Martha Stewart’s cookies that look like denizens of Old McDonald’s Farm give me a smile. But what’s up with this Airplane Repo, this Storage Wars and this Pawn Stars? These seem to be some kind of lowbrow Antiques Roadshow.
Why do I need to know the resale value of a 1946 Cessna 140 in a world of Fukushima nuclear sushi, moissanite and cubic zirconium 90?
But even though neither I nor any other home video consumer don’t get no respect, as Rodney Dangerfield used to say, I’m still wary of cutting the cord. Why this weird fear of disconnect when alternative steams are beginning to flow with regularity?
What will happen to me, if I do it? Will I be disLiked or deFriended? Worse still, will I lose season two of Boss forever? Season one is already lost, expired from my DVR playlist, a faded Epsilon Aurigeae absorbed by the ethernet. It’s ironic that my friendly DirecTV telerep suggested I might find it on DVD at Wal-Mart or Costco or Amazon or eBay.
I did.
TV is being called the last frontier of Western technology in the post-tablet age. Beyond the borders of cable and satellite, there be dragons … or the Donner Pass of Top Chef.
Ever since Philo Farnsworth turned on and tuned in to show the first TV image, a dollar sign by the way, and Gen. David Sarnoff and William Paley and Rupert Murdoch made profitable use of the cathode ray tube (pre-LED TV, children), ever since the FCC crassly parceled out the public airwaves in Soviet- style privatization, we’ve been tethered to the screen. Only now, it seems, we’ve reached the precipice of advertiser- and subscriber-supported video, an antiquated media revenue model that ought to be stored with nuclear waste, but is instead being fobbed off in the form of rent-a-ware by Microsoft and Adobe.
Why can’t I buy my video a la carte? Why can’t I have Al Jazeera with Soledad O’Brien? Why isn’t BBC on my regular menu? Why do I have to sit at the kids’ table, attached to an electronic umbilical cord?
Pure greed. Remember that dollar sign, the first TV show.
TV providers must think we are as dumb as rocks. They think they can make us choke on these bundles forever and keep on spitting out the per-pixel bucks.
Ever since I stumbled into the media business 40 years ago, the NSA has been eavesdropping on chatter about the coming of Convergence as if it was some kind of anti-capitalist apocalypse. We are the pawns in this game of thrones. Instead of Ed Sullivan and Elvis, we got smarmy Simon Cowell. We lost Ralph Kramden to Nicki Minaj. Instead of Spin and Marty, we got Two Broke Girls. Instead of Sparky and Our Gang, we got South Park by the same duo that went from sexing up a Mormon in their best-forgotten Orgazmo to Broadway’s Book of Mormon. Instead of the Jetsons, we get the Simpsons.
The Higher Powers That Be have been trying to scare us with the specter of blank screens for years. They fight over service fees and call us collateral damage. They take away our channels to punish us. Wherefore art thou, Cinémoi? When dinosaurs fight about money, we get trampled.
Well, we’re mad and we won’t take it anymore. We need to organize. We need to Occupy TVLandia.
We are the revolutionary armies of Wi-Fidom, the freedom fighters of the soon-to-be unplugged. We are on the march. We’ve already wounded the three-and-a-half major networks. Time Warner, Comcast, Direct, and Dish are in our crosshairs.
Watch out, Netflix and Hulu. We’re coming for you.
We’re stoking up our drones.
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.