RIP-TVRIP-TVRIP-TVRIP-TV
RIP-TVRIP-TVRIP-TVRIP-TV
RIP-TVRIP-TVRIP-TVRIP-TV
RIP-TVRIP-TVRIP-TVRIP-TV
2001-03-05
Weather news. Public television fundraising. Weather news. Public television fundraising. Which is worse, which annoys me more. I really can�t decide.
I remember the first weather news. The year was 1978; the place was Massachusetts. An enormous blizzard stranded many people at their workplaces, notably two congenial news anchors�Chet and Natalie�and a skeleton crew at a local television station. For a week, the happy couple (we learned a great deal about their lives in the days that followed) stayed "on-air" and talked about the weather, night and day�they took phone calls, they passed along rumors, they sent cameramen out to film reporters standing in snowdrifts, they �did� weather news�all week, until someone came and dug them out. And because everyone else in the state was stranded too that week, we all watched Chet and Natalie.
The week ended; the snow melted; and the local news began to advertise: �Watch because it�s Chet and Natalie. Because they were with you through the storm. Because you trust them. Chet and Natalie.� And because this was Massachusetts, the planet�s primary hot zone of infectious bogus sentimentality, the station�s marketing strategy worked. Chet and Natalie�within a few years everyone called the 11:00 news �Chet and Natalie.� The two of them were stars; their producers, their station managers, were stars. They were all incredibly well paid. Chet bought Nantucket. Natalie got more and more tanned, more and more inscrutably butch. Twenty years later their divorce made headlines. Meanwhile the television news industry took note�and this is the content of that note:
"Get a job in TV news and hope that you�re on call when a really big storm keeps people trapped inside their houses watching TV and eating outdated canned goods for a week. Then re-negotiate your contract."
So yes, please, show us more pictures of Long Islanders evacuating their homes because they believed what you told them a few hours ago. Keep smiling, ruefully, when you scale back your snowfall estimates by eighteen inches or more and keep saying, �Don�t worry, it�s still going to be a nasty commute out there.� Don�t try to keep the disappointment out of your voices, really, we�re disappointed too. We were so excited for you, we knew what this meant for your careers�don�t worry, we�re still pulling for you. In fact we hope the storm doubles back on itself and quadruples in size and winds up leveling every station signal but yours, for days and days, so that there�s no one on TV but you; we look forward to memorizing your every ill-timed grimace, speech impediment, and unnatural gesture; and then next year we want to watch you play yourselves in the four-hour miniseries about Your Ordeal. I just hope they don't schedule it against Doo Wop 50!