Thursday, April 2, 2009

77 seconds of TV

Why do writers of TV shows like "Destroyed in Seconds" (guess what I'm watching right now?) and "The Detonators" insist on repeating what you've already watched after returning from each commercial break?  Do they really think that Americans are of such limited intelligence that we can't recall what's happened in the first ten minutes of the half-hour show across the 2-4 minute break?  Or that we've forgotten what is going on just before the break?  I've decided that, given this phenomenon, along with the "repeated video" during the episode, we get roughly 77 seconds of original material per half-hour show, as follows:
  • intro: 23 seconds
  • outtro: 23 seconds
  • four 3-minute commercial breaks: 12 minutes
  • one-minute recaps after each commercial break: 4 minutes
  • title credits: 2 minutes 30 seconds
  • ending credits: 3 minutes 30 seconds
  • super-slo-mo and repeated, multi-angle video of the same event for each segment of original material (assuming seven original video segments and 51 seconds of repeated/slo-mo per segment): 5 minutes 57 seconds
  • original material: 77 seconds (i.e., 11 seconds per each of seven original segments)
Wow.  I just spent 1/2 hour of my life for seventy-seven seconds of original material.  At least it's the "perfect" or "complete" amount of original material, eh?

1 comment:

Christy said...

I think they just don't have enough material themselves, so they do this as filler. It is annoying.