I think it’s a waste of time.
I wish all shows were taped, edited and then aired.
They always say “When it’s live, anything can happen!”
Well, no. Usually nothing different happens except dead air, an occasional bee in the studio, a few misreadings of the teleprompter, people who call in with questions that are really speeches, etc…
And on a taped show, anything like that that worth watching, like a star tripping on his laces and diving into the audience, will still be shown.
They never cut out the stuff people want to see.
Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl would have been cut. And people definitely wanted to see it. At the time it set a TiVo record for the most “live-TV-rewinds”.
The streaker at the Oscars.
On the other hand, I’d love it if sports were taped and edited to skip all the time-outs. Why the heck should a college football game with 60 minutes of regulation clock time and a 20 minute halftime take almost 4 hours to televise, even before any overtime? Especially since every game I went to when I was in college (mid-1980s) was over in about 2 1/2 hours.
If you’re talking about awards shows, the problem isn’t that they’re live. It’s that they’re incredibly, incredibly boring. Just read about it in the paper. I promise: you’ll have missed nothing.
With sporting events they should certainly all be live. You can always TiVo them if you want to skip past the commercials, replays, and other various boredoms, but sometimes the snail’s pace is nice. Hear me out: If I’m watching a basketball game & it’s a one possession game in the last minute, I like all the time outs and commercials and crap because it draws out the suspense and allows for chatter with co-watchers. I know others might get bored, but some of us enjoy it.
Also, the SNL season one comment is perfect. It was recently released, FYI
SNL, then, as now, was also pretty mediocre. People have convinced themselves that SNL was the most brilliant thing in the history of the Universe in the past, and that it currently sucks balls. In fact, it’s just that they only remember the good bits from decades ago and have forgotten all the stuff that sucks.
I think a review of Season 1 would be a good exercise for the folks who like to bitch and whine every week a new SNL is broadcast. You’d see how much of it was truly awful crap, occasionally interrupted by shear brilliance.
I didn’t see a live Saturday Night Live until I was in college. Why? Because I was going to college in the Eastern time zone after having grown up in the Mountain time zone. Everything “live” here that isn’t honestly, truly live is on tape-delay by one hour.
The mountain zone is the red-headed stepchild of time zones. Truly live events come on two hours earlier–it’s really nice for football and other sports. Monday Night Football, playoff baseball, and so on are so much easier to watch starting at 7 PM. Heck, if the game is fairly short, you can watch the entire game and still switch over in time for all of late night. Everything taped comes on at the same time as it would in the central zone–primetime starts at 7 PM local.
