What Did T.G.I.F Mean For You?

Remember your childhood? Every adult around you thought anything you did was cute. After you got home from school, where you played half the time, you came home and played some more with your neighborhood friends. I used to play outside with one neighboor firend until it would get dark, and our parents made us come in for dinner. There were no worries while you "played", no one to impress or tiptoe around. Usually, there was no organization in my play either, just running around or lying in the grass was considered play for me.

Watching television as a kid used to be one of my biggest past times. I could just sit down for hours at a time, doing nothing, and not worry about why I'm doing nothing. Now as adults we tend to always be thinking about what we need to do next because we can never be alone, doing nothing for longer than five minutes.

Television is my thing, I mean I'm getting a degree in it, so of course I watch TV now, but only my favorite shows. At some point when I'm not bogged down with both regular and grad school work, I'd like to return to just watching TV and doing nothing. Do you remember Thank God It's Friday, or T.G.I.F? I loved that two-hour block of sitcoms that were on Friday nights on ABC. There was no other night you ever saw a full two-hour block of sitcoms! It was probably the longest, sustained time I watched TV in one sitting, but I loved seeing my favorite shows like "Step By Step", "Family Matters" and "Boy Meets World".

The old cliche "stop and smell the roses", is really something that should be incorporated in every adult's life. But, the demands and the benefits of jobs, making money and adulthood far outweigh the simple pleasures of life we all take for granted. In these case, employers should create more room for an employee's imput as far as creative and imaginative ideas are concerned. There are too many jobs out there that rely on people doing the same thing over and over again without any creative spark. An adult on the job may never get to the point of lying on the ground and interpreting objects out of clouds in the sky or watching hours of television, but any creative imput might bring that adult a little closer to their own carefree childhood.

Television in the Present (Wednesday, December 21st, 2016)

Bare with me, this blog is different! We have now fast-fowarded eight years in the future. Don't let today's date fool you, the time change has still not caught up to us! It's really Wednesday, Decmeber, 21st, 2016! I probably wouldn't even be writing on this outdated machine and blog site, but it's all I can afford! The economy has gotten so much better, but it took years after 2008 to get the economy to where it is now! On the flip side, everything is so expensive. Electronics are still the biggest and most expensive ticket items. But, most of these are brand-new electronics that you wouldn't have even imagined in 2008! Retail stores are selling your year's digital televisions now for the price of VCRs back then. Digital televisions have became the norm, especially after the digital switch-over in 2009 (which I still think was a scam!) The digital televisions that have been introduced the last couple of years are much different than in 2008. There is no more need for Tivo, all digital televisions have Tivo built into the system. That means you can record, watch, and rewind your favorite shows without the need for an extra box. Remote-controls are also a thing of the past, all digital televisions are voice-activated. All you need to say is "On", then "Channel 44" or even just "Vh1"!

The television shows have gotten much clearer as well! Digital clarity was okay in 2009, for it's time, but just two years ago, there were more changes made to the the digital reception that made it even clearer! Now it really looks like you're looking through a window! It's a good thing they made the reception even clearer because now we can clearly (no pun intended) see the changes made during the Television Quality Act of 2014! The act was signed into policy by President Obama (yes, he's still president)that gave all crappy "reality" shows including cooking, dating, celebrity, and shows for your dog, walking papers. That means that shows like: "Celebrity Rehab", "The Hiltons" and "Date My Grandma" no longer exist on network or cable channels. The act required that each network relinquish all their reality shows and restructure their networks so they could bring back quality dramas and sitcoms. Sitcoms are no longer the forgotten, otudated dinosaur of a genre. They are now just as provocative as dramas television shows are, except of course, a lot funnier! This all means only one thing, television is finally back and worth watching again!

"The Office" Writers

It took me a while to start watching the NBC sitcom, "The Office". I saw the show a couple times during it's second season and just thought it was stupid, and not at all funny. Face it, it is not your traditional sitcom: it has no laugh track and it's not a multi-camera show. The zoom-in shots of the characters seemed off-putting to me, like it was some documentary show. Every character broke the fourth-wall by awkardly looking into the camera, and again it really wasn't that funny!

Fast-foward a year, and it became one of my favorite shows! The first couple of episodes I watched I really got involved in the diverse characters of the series and forgot about the strange camera movements and having no laugh track. Each character, especially Angela, Michael, Dwight and Jim have their own unique personality and work ethic. But, at the same time, each character makes up for the other one's faults. After I began to really understand the differences in each character and what they bring to "The Office", I saw the comedy that inherently exists in these characters when they're stuck together in one room for hours a day.

I have recently discovered that the episodes are actually funniest when one of the actors on the show also writes an episode. I had no idea how involved the characters of Ryan (played by B.J. Novak) and Kelly (played by Mindy Kaling) are on the show beyond being part of the cast. They both have written several episodes of the series. Mindy Kaling, for example, doesn't appear in every episode, but when she does, her character appears pretty ditzy and pretty annoying. That must be a facade because she is a brillant writer! I remember one episode she wrote that offended her own character's nationality. The episode put Michael in charge of conducting a "Diversity Meeting". The funniest scene was towards the end where the office played a game that used index cards stuck on people's foreheads that only revealed a certain nationality to another person. The other person had to act out stereotypes so the first person could guess it correctly. Watch the "Diversity Day" episode here!

The other main cast members are also much more involved in the series than just being the actors. Both Steve Carell and Paul Lieberstein (Toby) are also producers and rotating writers for the show. All the cast members of "The Office" are very close-knit, and this obviously makes for a show where you can actually believe the situations their characters get themselves into!

1950s and 2000s Television Connection?

Believe it or not, product placement is still alive and well in television shows today. Product placement not only exists in drama but, reality and even some dramedy shows like “Survivor” and “Desperate Housewives” . If you really think about it, most product placements seem way too obvious today. Shows that include product placement like to think that they’re not shamelessly showcasing a product, but it’s a little hard to follow a story when they’re “causally” explaining the features of a latest cell phone or a brand-new Kia! In recent episodes of “Survivor” and “Desperate Housewives”, these exact things occurred. The “Survivor” episode showed, in full screen, a recording of a message from each of the contestant’s family members on a new Samsung phone. The “Desperate Housewives” episode showed a brand-new Lexus and Kia slowly driving down the street. Also, not surprisingly, the new “Knight Rider” series premise is a walking (or driving) product placement. The premise revolves around a talking Ford Mustang! Wonder who their sponsor is?
The modern product placement phenomenon is also reminiscent, in some ways, to the in-your-face sponsorship of the 1950s. Most shows at that time were sponsored by cigarettes companies, like Phillip Morris. Commercial blocks for shows like “I Love Lucy” featured talking heads explaining the features of a new product. This type of commercial is hilariously parodied in “I Love Lucy” through the “Vitameatagamin” episode. This type of sponsorship reflected the idea that television was a new medium in the 1950s. Network executives had to make some sort of profit out of the industry in order to stay on the air and sponsorship from big companies provided the cash flow they needed. I think that a decline of money and resources in the television industry is the same reason we’re seeing this resurgence of in-your-face product placement today. Viewers are currently engaged in a kind of capricious give-and-take between the online and television worlds. The economy is tanking and more and more people are getting their news and entertainment from the Internet. This change is something that the television world must find a way to weather and still stay in business, hence product placement. Product placement is annoying, especially “in-your-face product placement, but if it’s necessary for networks to stay afloat, then it’s something we’ll all have to endure.