Saw the parade on TV only in chunks; cooking and football, of course. The first hour on CBS was way better than NBC’s coverage. On NBC all we saw were musicals. The one break (for the “Wimpy Kid” balloon) we couldn’t even see the balloon because Al Roker was busy interviewing the balloon walkers! The NBC coverage got a lot better later on, which brings up two issues:
–Why doesn’t NBC just do two hours of parade coverage and shunt the musical numbers to a separate show?
–Why doesn’t CBS show other parades like they did in the past? Better to show a parade from Chicago or Hawaii (even on tape) than have dead spots in the Macy’s parade.
I would imagine their contract with Macy’s specificies that they must show the start of the parade, and they have all that filler material to keep them from showing empty streets while they wait for the parade to arrive.
I remember in my youth the TV coverage was much more balanced: the networks had cameras throughout the route allowing them to show the parade much earlier in the coverage. And the broadway fillers were spread out throughout the entire broadcast. In retrospect, that was probably a production nightmare because they had to record the filler segments and insert them into the live coverage.