Thread: Lewis Black Monologue on the Emmys

The comedian, Lewis Black gave a pointed monologue criticizing network executives for interrupting programs with pop ups, crawls, banners and any other obnoxious, intrusive stuff they distract you with during the program you are watching. The audience seemed responsive with their chants and applause. I hope network executives get the message and stop all the garbage they continue to interject in programs. I also hope that movie and tv executives who make the stuff we watch on tv also put pressure on the network executives to stop what they are doing too. Kudos to Lewis Black.

Originally Posted by richiephx

The comedian, Lewis Black gave a pointed monologue criticizing network executives for interrupting programs with pop ups, crawls, banners and any other obnoxious, intrusive stuff they distract you with during the program you are watching. The audience seemed responsive with their chants and applause. I hope network executives get the message and stop all the garbage they continue to interject in programs. I also hope that movie and tv executives who make the stuff we watch on tv also put pressure on the network executives to stop what they are doing too. Kudos to Lewis Black.

Network executives are not running crawls for weather alerts. Local affiliates are.

He was more focused on pop-up promos for other shows (although he certainly could have included the even more moronic "You are now watching..." promos. ), and the high speed squeezed credits that are illegible.

The crawls he was slamming were the ones on 24 hour news stations. While an anchorman is talking about the war a crawl is letting us know that "65% of Americans feel that they have no feelings"

It was hilarious, but some of it did not get the same amount of applause.

Moving to the Network Programming forum....

According to the NYTimes, here is a summary of what he said:

Lewis Black, the comedian, skewered network producers for their now-common practices of placing text on-screen to promote coming shows and for squeezing credits off the screen at the end of a show.

“We don’t care about the next show; we’re watching this show,” Mr. Black intoned in his usual screech. He also lambasted the networks for the practice of moving production credits to one side of the screen and running them so fast that even a speed-reader would have difficulty keeping up with them.

“Don’t clutter up the screen so we can’t see who worked on the show we just watched,” Mr. Black said. “They deserve to see their names.”

To applause from the audience, he asked network executives, “What is it you do, except come up with bad ideas?”

I wish I had a transcript of his whole monologue. It was right on.