CBS Television

Did anyone try to watch Jeopardy tonight? Did it seem like a bad LSD flashback to you?

The first half of the program was ok, then they broke for dead airspace and came back where Alex is interviewing the contestants – deja vu all over again. Recognizing their mistake, CBS immediately went to broadcasting dead air again.  Somebody must have pointed this out to them as they grabbed a Harrah’s tape and put it on continuous play for 5 minutes.

We jumped to final Jeopardy, but only long enugh to flash up the question and then launched into a psychodelic mix of commercials, promos for the 11 O’Clock news, and dead air. Somewhere in this mix, the Clue Crew came up with their end-of-program factoid. All this was finally punctuated by a test pattern just before we cut back to the game – already well in progress: the contestants were filling out their cards for final Jeopardy.

But all that pales in comparison to what I experienced on CBS a couple of weeks ago: I was watching a football game. It’s 3rd and 4 on the 30, the ball is snapped, the quarterback fades back, ”Hello I’m Barak Obama…” (if it were only a voiceover it would have been bad enough) we cut back to the game to see yellow flags being thrown. I didn’t know Barak did play-by-play for CBS.