One of my oldest New Year’s Eve irritations is that for decades the 200+ million Americans who don’t live in Manhattan or the Eastern Time Zone have to settle for Times’ Square’s temporal hand me downs. Every year we’re treated to Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rocking Eve (and don’t get me wrong, it was good to see him back again last night) and other Times Square based programs, we hear the countdown and see the ball drop and the confetti flies like todays God-on-Duty (G.O.D.) was Rip Taylor and some 70s band plays and all is fine.
I don’t for a minute deny New Yorkers and those in Times Square their fun. I hope to spend NYE in NYC myself someday, seems like a blast. But here’s the thing- most Americans don’t live in the Eastern Time Zone, so the ball dropping there is a pre-game show. Currently I live in the Central Time Zone, so for the tens of millions of us here Americans what do the same networks do? Do they show a ball dropping in Chicago, or St. Louis, or Memphis, or New Orleans, or some other metropolis in our time zone?
NO!
They rewind the NYC footage and replay it for an hour like they’re giving us our big brother’s old worn out sweater! We’re forced to watch something that happened an hour ago in a city that’s not hours with people cheering who in fact have passed out or gone home by now and for all we know Dick Clark’s had another stroke and Ryan Seacrest was so stunned he came out on nationwide TV right after it and if I wanted to see something that happened a long time ago and affected people who weren’t in my CTZ I’d go outside and look at the stars! Grrrr! Irritating. We deserve our own time zone ball dropping on nationwide TV, and also a Lear jet to take us to where we want to go and a hostage til we get one!
BUT… Fox actually remedied this last night. Rather than just show the replays of Dick Clark/Regis Philbin/Anderson Cooper/whoever the network’s host is, other networks were showing (hello, we just saw Regis and his wife slaughtering that song an hour ago!), they really did have camera crews in New Orleans, Nashville, and coolest of all- Manhattan, Kansas (which is a lot larger than I’d have thought). They really did have live coverage of the ball dropping in those places rather than “Meanwhile… well, alright, an hour ago, in Times Square”).
They also had a computer animated recreation of Katrina as a mini-doc for New Orleans in case people had forgotten (even skewering FEMA and the Bush Admin’s response), but mostly they had country music in KS and TN and revellers in N.O.LA and we finally got some representation. I usually loathe you, but I have to say “Thanks Fox News!”
Now if you’ll pardon me I’m going to go dip in lye the hands that wrote this.