I was originally going to blame the networks because, let’s face it, its always their fault. No longer (if they ever were) run by creative types, they are a bunch of money-counting financiers who only care about the bottom line. Then I thought, I have no idea what a producer does, so I’ll blame him instead. Stupid, untalented, ass-kissers whose only job is to blow the coke and cock of their shadowy, money’d interested. But a lot of these titles (when they are actually displayed) are integrated into the show, it must be the directors! Overbearing, faux artistic douchebags who don’t care about pragmatism if it lets them try some stupid directing trick they learned from a shaman living in a cave in Nepal. But ultimately, I think, its everybody’s fault: TV shows should ALWAYS show the title of the episode at the beginning!
As a long time viewer of free content, I feel they owe me something. All I ask is for quality, accessibility, low number of commercials, free to me whenever I want it, and the god damn title at the beginning of the episode. It seems their scheme has worked, I don’t really notice when shows don’t show their titles, only when they do, and when that happens, its jarring because I think to myself “Why the hell doesn’t everyone else do that all the time??” Nowadays, it almost seems like you have to go searching for the title to see it. I can’t just watch the damn shows anymore, I have go hunting for its title too?
As a reader, I would never pick up a book without knowing the title. I won’t read a magazine if I don’t know what it is. I’m not going to buy a dish off a menu if it doesn’t have a name (even just “fries” is good enough). But we are supposed to devote hours of our lives following a show, engaging the characters, dissecting its nuances, and debating its merits without ever being able to refer to the episode in question as no more than “that one where they go to the beach” (and yes, I know that Friends names their episodes like that, but that’s part of the problem, they don’t show it either!). Hell, every TV movie has their title displayed, is it too much to ask that TV shows do the same?
I don’t remember a lot of shows that do show the titles. Sitcoms almost never, I think. Maybe some at the end of the episode in the credits, but that’s it. I don’t know if they used to do that, but its not done now. I watch Simpsons, Family Guy, BBT, Seinfeld, and a bunch of others I’m too embarrassed to name, and they all have titles, sometime quirky, funny, smart ones, but no a single one shows it at the beginning! Why? What possible fucking reason could they have for not making it clear an important and descriptive piece of the episode??
Would my 10 year old self understand what “Last Exit to Springfield” referred to? No! But my 30 year old self still doesn’t but would at least think its kind of cool. Plus I’d get a lot of other references, just not that one. Having a title gives the viewers a small idea what to expect, it properly introduces the episode to the viewer, and done well, as the viewer watches and the meaning of the title dawns on them, a whole new understanding can be gained. “Oh, so that’s why they called it ‘The Soup Nazi’, there’s a soup guy and he’s kind of a nazi about it”. It would literally take no more than seconds, maybe even just one, to flash the title in the corner of the screen, then have it fade away. People who want to remember it and see it, and people who don’t care can ignore it. I give a lot more fucks about the title than I do the names of the director or producer they display at the beginning of every episode. They can go fuck themselves and/or each other if they didn’t want to put the title there
Whoever’s doing this, get the fuck over yourselves. You’re not the next Harry Potter book, whatever you think you’ll spoil with a title will be known to the viewer in the next 30-60 minutes. You’re not revealing a key piece of information about the episode that will turn millions off from watching it and if that does happen, hire a smarter monkey to write the titles.
This annoyance hits upon a lot of my pet peeves, being that its such a small, almost insignificant change, that they feel they have to withhold from us. Its just like Windows 7 and that stupid forced auto-arrange they have: it will cost the company next to nothing to implement a small bit of control for the consumer yet they go out of their fucking way not to do it. As if they expect us to just forget about it. As if they expect us to not march on them with pitchforks. But one day their reckoning will come. When I’m Emperor of the World, all TV episodes will have titles prominently displayed at the beginning of every episode. NO EXCEPTIONS! And if you disagree, imagine how annoying it would be if this post had no title, or an undescriptive one. You’d want to stab somebody in the pancreas too, like I do. And at the end of the stabbing, I’d carve “The Pancreas Stabbing” on the person’s chest so he knows what I did