Larry King LIVE Has Lots of Commercials

I don't watch much television, and when I say that, I mean it.  Grandma says it all the time, but she's LYING.  She not only watches TV news shows, she also keeps up on Oprah, Anderson Cooper, Sunday Morning, and MSNBC (not for the financial counseling, but for the salacious evening programming.  When I was here in June we watched a show called "Call Girls: The Real Price of High End Prostitution.") to mention a few.

Last night I spent what felt like an ETERNITY watching Kate Gosselin avoid Larry King's probing questions.  Kate's hair was dramatic (to say the least) and her cool, calm and collected attitude was contradicted by her carefully crafted sentences, all the while Larry is trying to disarm her with "unexpected" deeply intimate questions about her situation.  Most of the drama came at the commercial breaks, though, when Kate would be on the brink of tears as the cameras cut away to some bad computer generated animated animal advertising things people don't need.  Grandma was quite opinionated about all of this, of course, but because she doesn't watch TV felt compelled to remind me that she had no idea who this woman was, and that she hadn't watched Larry King in AGES, before going into (and criticizing and ridiculing) every minuscule detail of their personal lives and the complete history of their respective shows.  We agreed to turn off the TV once Kathy Lee Gifford showed up, and I don't know why but it took about fifteen minutes...  (Grandma never watched Regis and Kathy Lee either.)

Something that consistently drew comments from Grandma were the commercials.  They are: too loud, too long, too many, too bright, too flashy, too fast, too stupid, too cheesy, too crappy, too dull, and too annoying.  Whatever her feelings (or familiarity) with television, her feelings about the commercials are quite clear; "it's junk! junk! it's all junk!"  The thing is, there are SO many commercials, and they last so long, and she comments on almost each and every one.  She talked at greater length and depth about the damn ads than she did about Larry, Kate or Kathy Lee!  She barely touched on the Gosselin kids, the ethical issues surrounding reality television, or how "real" reality television really is.  Hell, she didn't even discuss the hair/make-up/wardrobe!  It occurred to me that maybe she really ISN'T watching television, oh no, she's watching COMMERCIALS! 

This is why I'm burning DVDs for Grandma.  Let's hope she's not adverse to actual content in her evening entertainment. :-)