I think the idea there is people would rather see ads than pay the mi h larger sum that would be required to fund those shows without ads ... Funny thing, economics.
It seems like he was also objecting to the character of the ads...
I left the U.S. in the '90s. However I do occasionally see some American TV on trips, and it seems different than what I remember, full of creepy bizarre ads for drugs and the like.
TV ads in the old days obviously weren't great art, and were often annoying, but there seems something palpably ... wrong with the state of things now. "Creepy" seems the best description.
HEAD-ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD!
HEAD-ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD!
HEAD-ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD!
Sadly, most recent commercials lack even the charm of that. I have an OTA antenna just for occasional live sports, but TV is just abject now. One time I found like three celebrity gossip shows on at the same time, on broadcast networks! The networks used to be more dignified than that. So just to protect my will to live, I always change my tuner to the Mexican station before I turn the TV off. Not that Mexican TV is any better, but my intelligence is that much less insulted when I don't understand what they're saying, and it is ever so slightly more surreal to watch than the Chinese stations and occasionally has soccer highlights.
There was a serious change in the nature of TV after the late 90's.
Just after TV realized that O.J. Simpson, and Amy Fisher, and Nancy Kerrigan could feed a news cycle for months, if not years, TV lost a lot of charm. It was the popularity of the O.J. Simpson case that spawned the Court TV channel.
Right around the time when the constantly scrolling, but nigh-unreadable news ticker showed up on all of the news channels, TV mutated into this hideous disease that vomited itself into my living room.
Somewhere amidst the election ads and the telephone ads, the Big Pharma ads came along, with Montel Williams and Rikki Lake and Jerry Springer, and then Realty TV exploded for beyond the already intolerable spectacle of MTV's The Real World. Vapid scummy channels like E! spewed forth with shallow, narcissistic tabloid hopelessness. MTV itself devolved into TRL and Britney Spears and then 9/11 and Iraq blew all the gaskets open.
With every celebrity fearing for their pathetic career, at the very premise of disagreeing with a "Wartime President", that very chilling effect of self censorship attenuated all intelligence on TV.
The internet, meanwhile, was uncensored, unfiltered virgin wilderness to explore. Hard core pornography and gore sites were immediately available, and you didn't have to skulk around the adult section of the video store for Faces Of Death or Debbie Does Dallas. You also didn't have to pay extra to get a glipse of tits or hear some curse words on HBO. TV knows this, and has grown even creepier still, in an attempt to compete with the total lack of boundries found on the internet, to the point where it feels disturbingly questionable that Cialis ads are directly juxtaposed with Honey Boo Boo episodes.
The rationale for Court TV finally died about a decade and a half after the O.J. Simpson case, and by then it had transformed itself into a dumping ground for re-runs of To Catch A Predator and COPS, and then rebranded as TRU TV, and now also includes shows about repo men harassing irresponsible poor people.
At these times scales of ten to fifteen years for a complete life cycle of a trend like the one caused by O.J. Simpson, I shudder to think what TV will be like when the 9/11, Iraq War, Fox News trend cycle wraps up. The current trend feels like it still needs about ten more years to fully play itself out.
It's not worse, but prior to the late 90's you didn't see this sprawling degenerative wasteland for what it really was.
The oddities were still out there, as a subculture, but no one was actively shoveling them to the forefront of television in hopes of a slight ratings bump at the sheer spectacle of yet another train wreck.
TV didn't have to try hard back when the only competition was movie theaters. In the 80's, before cable became a fashionable norm, some television stations could still rationalize "going off the air" between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m.
