thediastema's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- More about local TV. Master, a disclaimer:
Cool. Okay, I'm not sure if these ad spots run other places (Cardston and Phoenix, maybe?) but around here the Mormon church runs public-service-type messages on the local Big-Three affiliates. At first, the ads were pretty generic: there'd be some sort of Chicken Soup for the Soul-esque interaction between two or more people who were presumably related, and it'd close with a voiceover guy saying "Family! Isn't it about ... time? A message from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." And, y'know, I'm fine with that, because in a cosmic sense, a lot of stuff is about ... time, and while family isn't really my favourite thing in the world (we all know that that's cheques) I certainly don't think it's, y'know, bad, at least not inherently. So, okay. But the ads started getting weird after the first couple batches. For one, that ellipsis between "about" and "time" started getting longer, and longer, and longer, and now I'm starting to think that's not just the speed I've been doing, you know? Seriously, you could fit a decent Orthodox wedding in there. It's like a mammoth dialogue beat. Another thing that's changed is the quality of acting. First they showcased their best and brightest -- fresh-faced, wholesome-looking juveniles and ingenues with plethoras of milk-fed offspring, sort of like the Osmonds with better orthodontia. And they could do oral interp okay! Maybe the verisimilitude was a little short of gritty, cold reality, but on the whole, the inflection was right and the eyebrows were controlled. But then they brought in their second string, a bunch of guys with shaky delivery. Add to this increasingly-twee scriptwriting and unintentional self-parody came into play. A little weird, is all I'm saying. Weirder still is the fact that while the scripts continue to smack of platitude and gorp, the plots have fallen by the wayside in a very noticeable fashion. At first the ads involved reading of scriptures and, I don't know, like, sharing of twinsets, and it was all right. And then there were the ads that displayed a young man taking a job in his dad's random blue-collar workplace after being forced out of his office job and being heckled by the bitter redneck coworker, and that was a little weird, but I could still kind of see the point. But lately it's like there's a fire hydrant talking to an egg carton, and then they both turn into spaceships, and a bunch of people dressed in overalls and/or tutus come parading by carrying signs that say "nothing to see here, folks," and then a bunch of people dressed in potato sacks descend on the scene out of nowhere and start playing pantomime croquet, and if you're still with me, maybe then you hear the voiceover guy deliver the "Family! Isn't it ...?" schpiel as if the lot of it is self-explanatory, and to my uneducated TV-consuming mind it's totally not self-explanatory anymore! So I just wanted to throw that out there and see if anybody could figure out what I'm missing here. If not, at least you're that much more prepared for the local coculture's complete overtaking of the media in the next couple of days. ~ETK 20:27 - 04 February, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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