For the next few days, I'm going to try to vary up my morning television habits by watching things that I don't normally watch.
However, you can't really do a comparison unless you also describe your normal habits, in my case that is CBS Sunday Morning, Good Day New York, and the last hour of Today.
Today, the fangs turn towards that venerable arts/news/whatever magazine Sunday Morning.
First, I just have to say that this show would be perfectly fine if they could just get rid of Charles Osgood. I barely remember Charles Kuralt, so it's not a case of Dennis Farina on Law & Order here. To be blunt, the man is horrible. He looks and sounds like a Southern school headmaster c. 1926 and these damn aphrorisms that he pulls out of nowhere work my nerves. (Somehow, I suspect that he is two seconds away from saying "colder than a witch's teat," and then there's his signoff: "I'll see you on the radio." What on God's Green Earth?)
I always wonder who the audience is for Sunday Morning. It seems like they are aiming for classical music lovers and PBS viewers, but the subject matter is more along the lines of hip middle aged art and music teachers. The top story this week is the cost of college. The tone of the piece was very much "I can't believe how much it costs, back in my day..." One interesting thing about Sunday Morning is that there is a certain tone and pitch to every reporter's voiceover. It's hard to describe, the closest I could call it would be "reserved and perky," like a church luncheon.
The weird thing about Sunday Morning is that it is mostly arts stories, but they are interspersed with news stories, such as today, where the college story is followed by a story about whether bin Laden is dead or not. Yet, even in the coverage of news stories such as the bin Laden mystery, the story is looked through a skewed lens, searching for the quirks. Robert Krulwich does this all the time on ABC, but this is Krulwich's style let loose on an entire programme. Hell, even Bill Geist sounds like Krulwich.
To it's credit, Sunday Morning could easily fall into intellectual snobbery, but doesn't. It's hard to be perceived as an elitist show when you have a segment that deals with a cowpie tossing contest, albeit with no seriousness attached to it whatsoever. Much of the criticism of the new Sunday Morning is that it is nothing without Kuralt's travelogues. What is forgotten is that Sunday Morning is basically the television equivalent of USA Today's "States" blurbs mixed in with profiles by correspondents, the latter which have leapt into prominence these days, since I don't think Osgood wants to go anywhere outside of the Mid-Atlantic.
This show is a strange creature: does it want to be an arts magazine? A news show? A commentary show? The whole show morphs into several skins throughout 90 minutes (60 this week, since the last half-hour was pre-empted on WCBS by marathon coverage), and never quite stays in one skin too long.
You could compare it to this week's other profiles/victims (Today, The Early Show, Good Morning America), but it's a little too smart and specific to be an easy fit in that group, which seeks to be everything to everyone. So what is Sunday Morning? It's like a gathering of refugees from some Norman Rockwell-esque town who both reminisce about a hometown that never really was what their memory tells them and also talk about the latest New Soul singer they have downloaded on their iPod. (Or to put it in visual terms, Sunday Morning is a Serbian pop song being performed by characters from an American video game. Viva La Nikolic, I say apropos of nothing.)
Damn you Osgood and your inane folksy aphorisms. ("Twenty-Oh-Six," indeed.)
On deck for tomorrow: Good Morning America, or "Just What on Earth Are You People Doing In Times Square?"
No comments:
Post a Comment