TVSquad

Like Moe from The Simpsons, I usually spend Festivus time with my head in an oven and a "no funeral" sign taped to my back. This year, though, is a little different, because a) I just found out my oven is electric and b) TV Squad asked me to compile a list of the things I wanted for Festivus. There's no time for holiday depression when an editorially-mandated list of things-that-will-never-come-to-pass is waiting to be written!

So, off with the noose and on with the list...

As always, it should be noted that this list is in no kind of order. As my wife will tell you, my wants are all-encompassing and no matter how much I get, I still want more. If you were to rank my omnivorous need to devour all things in my path from one to ten, I'd score a ten every time for every thing. Just assume that I want all of these things completely and equally because, in a lot of ways, I'm like a locust.

1. Networks ban all jewelery commercials during the month of December. Look, I get the equation: women like diamonds + men don't like to think too hard when it comes to picking out gifts = every third commercial being a diamond commercial. The fact that I understand it, however, does not incline me to like the fact that I have to see them. Constantly.

The thing I hate most about them is that after each one airs, my wife will turn to me and say with the kind of smile that indicates that she's joking (but not joking all that much), "Gee, the woman in that commercial seems really happy!" There's a definite double standard here, because when I do the same thing about the guys in Best Buy commercials, all of a sudden, I'm obsessed with silly stupid toys. At least televisions do things. All diamonds do is sparkle. Oh, and get kids killed.

(That's my latest trump card: each time my wife brings up how happy the woman in the commercial looks, I say something like: "They should have the one-armed child who dug that diamond out of the ground be in the commercial. Like, after the man puts it on her, the kid should come out and say, 'I'm glad you like the diamond, it was certainly worth the loss of this limb and the black-lung I incurred from the diamond mines. Now, could you help me tie my shoelace?" Surprisingly, women find the blood-diamond references neither funny nor on-point. They just storm out of the room.)

Try to watch this commercial without wanting to jump through a plate-glass window:

1a. While we're at it, let's stop with the Lexus commercials too. You've seen these. An impossibly perfect upper-middle class family celebrates its Festivus by having the sculpted Esquire model-looking man give a luxury car to the the equally attractive Redbook-fabulous woman while their cherubic little ones look on with glee. Whenever I see these commercials, it makes me wish the Russians had won the Cold War.

The worst one of the bunch, I think, has to be the one where the father calls the mother up and says: "I'm late at work, so I can't pick up our son at hockey practice." The mother gets huffy, "Fine, I'll get him." Cut to the father out with the son. "She hung up," he tells the son. The mother comes storming out of the house only to find the father and son out in the driveway with a brand new Lexus waiting for her. The whole "late at work" thing was just a ruse! Oh, what a clever WASP we're dealing with here!

Does anyone else get as angry as I do watching this commercial? Every time I see it, I pray that the moment the wife sees the Lexus, the husband gets into the car and starts driving it back to the dealership.

"Wait, where are you going?"

"Taking this back. You don't deserve it!"

"But... but why?"

"Because I'm working my ass off here to fill in our hollow consumerist lives with as many useless luxury items as possible. The least you could do is not hang up on me when I ask you for a little help."

"I'm sorry --"

"Oh, save your sorries. We can't afford this thing anyway. I forgot to tell you, we signed a sub-prime mortgage to afford that giant house and now we're bankrupt. Don't wait up for me, I'm gonna stop by the bar on the way home and try to start a Fight Club."

And... scene.

2. Nielsen abandons the idea of a "Season". Much like how our school year is determined by a rural lifestyle that hasn't been relevant for 99% of the kids in the country for about 160 years, our television schedule is determined by 1950s thinking. While it is true that yes, most Americans don't watch a lot of TV in the summer, it's become painfully apparent in the last few years that if you put on quality TV in the summertime, people will watch it.

On top of that, the three sweeps months -- November, February, and May -- were determined back when seasons actually ran 35 weeks. With 24 week seasons (if we're lucky), we have networks artificially moving shows, holding back episodes, and interrupting good stretches of show with reruns in order to keep the sweeps months intact.

If we were to abandon the idea of a TV "season", and just measure the ratings from a week-to-week basis, a lot of good things would happen:

A) The network shows that we love would be much more likely to be shown like they are already on cable -- in a continuous run. Imagine living in a world where Heroes starts in the first week of September, then runs, each week, uninterrupted, until it's finished sometime in February. Wouldn't that make you happy?

B) Smaller shows would be able to find some room to breathe. I remember when I was a kid seeing a documentary on the way turtles reproduce: the female lays about a million eggs on the beach. Then, one day, all the eggs hatch and the little baby turtles make a run for the ocean, which is a few yards away, but for baby turtles might as well be a hundred miles. It's expected, you see, that most of the little baby turtles are doomed to be eaten by seagulls or get mixed up and crawl in the wrong direction. It's assumed that not all the turtles can be winners, so that's why the mother turtles need to overshoot with the amount of eggs they lay.

Now, I'm not blaming the turtles. They can't help the way evolution shaped them. There's no evolution at work, though, in network thinking: just non-intelligent design. Networks ape the turtle method for launching new shows by having them all out of the starting gate in September and then culling the herd quickly and ruthlessly. This method, however, can sometimes cut down a show way too early in its development.

By launching the shows in a staggered method, without having to adhere to an arbitrary "season," it'd be possible that good, but slow-building shows won't get lost in the September shuffle.

C) No more sweeps stunts. If I have to see another live episode or "all-singing" episode or wedding episode, I'm going to set my hair on fire. Further, if a show was measured on how good it was all the time instead of three months out of the year, it might cut down on the idea of "filler" episodes.

3. Pardon the Interruption gets expanded into an hour. In actuality, I'd like Wilbon and Kornheiser to be stuffed full of the same drugs they give Slurms MacKenzie and force them to be on the network 24 hours a day. Unfortunately for all of us, it seems the only person ESPN is willing to try that experiment with is Stephen A. Smith during basketball season.

3a. Bill Simmons is given control of ESPN Classic. If there is any rival to the PTI guys for my man-crush affections, it's Bill Simmons. To give you an idea how much I love Bill Simmons, here's a summary of the editorial notes I got on the first thirty or so posts I did for TV Squad: "Jay, please, stop trying to write like Bill Simmons." I'm not sure if the notes stopped because I managed to find my own voice or because my editors just got tired.

In any event, if you're a regular reader of Simmons' column, you know that he's been clamoring to pick the programming on ESPN Classic for some time now. So far in my life, ESPN Classic has been a channel that seems to exist solely so I can accidentally flip onto it, take note how bad onscreen graphics used to look, then keep flipping to find something else. If they let Simmons run the channel and write about it on his blog, I might actually take the time to sit down and watch a complete game on it. And, after all, isn't that what we need in our lives? More sports?

3b. ESPN cancels E:60. Remember when the Worldwide Leader was a snarky underdog? Yeah, I liked that version of the channel a whole hell of a lot better than what they are now.

4. Talking Head political shows are banned forever. I was originally going to make this entry an entire TV Squad list, with the brilliant idea that I'd name the list: "The worst talking head political shows on television." Then, I was going to list all of them, hoping that people would pick up on the joke that, uh, they're all horrible.

I abandoned this idea for two reasons:

a) There's a better than average chance that I would miss one talking head political show and that everyone would walk away with the wrong conclusion: that I hated everyone except, oh I don't know, Geraldo or somebody. That's a chance I just couldn't take.

b) It's been my experience that subtlety doesn't work all that well on the internet. Just because of the fact that there are more Republican talking heads than Democrat would mean that the conservative people in our audience would probably deluge me with emails accusing me of being the most liberal person this side of William Z. Foster. It's best just to keep things obvious, I think.

So, I'm just going to out and say it: Talking Head political shows are awful. Any time you take a person, put them in front of a green screen, then have them pontificate for an hour about the day's headlines, you're at best simplifying the argument and at worst you're abandoning argument altogether for out-and-out demogaugery. Our national discourse wasn't exactly all that literate to begin with... all these people seem to add is yelling. Is that what we need more of? Yelling?

I think that it's saying something that the Stephen Colbert has been able to carve out a pretty substantial place for himself simply by mocking the talking head tropes. His popularity, I think, speaks to fact that I'm not alone in my hate for these people.

5. Somebody figures out a way to make all my electronics make sense. My newborn son is inching up on his crawling years, which means my wife is on me about "cleaning up our wire situation."

It says something about modern life that we have what could be called a wire situation in our home. Between our TiVo boxes, Slingboxes, cable boxers, and XboXes, every livable room in our home looks like NORAD.

Don't get me wrong, I love all of these various piece of electronics. Here's what I don't like: they seem patchwork and haphazard. They all work, but they work according to their own specs and don't always work all that well together.

What I'd love to see in the next few years is some kind of standardization. I'd love for my TV to know what my stereo was doing and for both of them to know what my TiVo was doing. It'd be great to be able to get from DVD to TiVo to the HDTV Cable box to the Xbox360 in less than forty steps. I'd also like to be able to do it without needing approximately an intestine's length of cable running all over the back of my TV. I'd also like to be able to set it up such that my wife is able to operate it without multiple calls to me.

The Obligatory Festivus Wishes:

1. The writers' strike ends

2. 30 Rock stays on the air forever

3. No one complains about how long this article is

4. Everyone has a safe and happy Festivus!