TV BAD

Hope all is well. Things are picking up around here at Peacock Productions. Working on live programming for the Travel Channel which will air on New Year's Eve. They're running a string of No Reservations (Chef Anthony Bourdain eats his way around the world), and starting at noon we're doing live segments at the top of the hour about New Year's traditions in countries that Anthony is visiting and some others too. I'm actually supposed to be scripting some of those right now, but this is a great way to procrastinate.

I'm going to tell you a few bad things about television, show you some cute video and then get back to work.

According to Time Magazine, "The average U.S. household has more televisions (2.73) than people (2.6)." The survey goes on to report that we spend over two and a half hours a day watching television, that's more time than we spend doing everything else in our lives besides working and sleeping.

I can't emphasize enough what a waste of time this is unless you happen to be watching any combination of the following: The Wire, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Ugly Betty, Chef Gordon Ramsay, Project Runway, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Talk Soup, The Closer (sometimes) and House (Hugh Laurie is great, but I watch less and less as the show gets muddled with too many characters). Should mention that Back to You is good theater and Keith Olbermann has his moments. So, again, I can't emphasize enough what a waste of time television is.

In other TV BAD news, Gawker has an item about Viacom, the owners of MTV, VH1, CBS and on and on. According to a Viacom staffer nearly 50% of their employees are freelancers. This means they make tv for the company without benefits and can be fired at will. The rest of the employees are "staff" and get full benefits, contracts and nicer holiday gifts. I'm a freelancer hoping to be made staff at NBC. I get no benefits and could easily get canned for blogging while I should be working leaving me without any immediate means to support little baby Clyde who you'll see in action later.

Previously at Viacom you had to work for a year before getting any kind of health benefits. Now they're upping the work-week to 50 hours but giving benefits to employees who work 25, 50 hour work-weeks in a given division. On the surface it seems like a better deal. Employees get benefits faster, BUT, and there's always a BUT, if they get shifted from their division (a regular occurence) they lose all their hours and have to start at the beginning again. Something tells me our friends at Viacom will be working the shell game like you read about in the months to come. Anything to keep from paying benefits and making it look like you have too many staff employees which makes investors nervous and drives your stock down. Almost forgot to mention that Viacom plans to give freelancers the news when they go to pick up their Christmas party invites. Now that's classy.

Also salaries for the tv entry level positions in television (this means you soon to be college graduates) are so low that unless you have inherited money or some ongoing support from family you can't afford to work in television in New York. The system insures that, by in large, only people with money can work in television. This means the vision will tend to be homogenous and the product will suffer accordingly. I am, of course, an exception to that rule, no really.

Enough about TV. I've decided to put the medium to good use. Here's a clip of my son Clyde taking some of his first steps. 9 months and 3 weeks, a Felsen family record, but who's counting.

Clyde the Glide

Happy Finals!!

DF