I was nine years old when David Letterman's Late Night premiered on NBC, and I think he was really hitting his stride around the same time I was becoming aware of the world and getting interested in television.
I fondly remember staying up late on summer nights when school was out after my parents went to bed around 1985 to watch television, perching myself right in front of the living room's wood-cabinet 25-inch Zenith in the dark with the volume turned up just loud enough so as not to awake the parents but also to be audible above the steady hum of the wall-unit air conditioner. Carson was fun, but Letterman was something else entirely; I immediately felt a connection to his sardonic and self-deprecating style. And who wouldn't love watching people throw watermelons and televisions off the roof of a steep New York building?
In later years, we also have Letterman to thank for fine Late Late Shows with Tom Snyder, Craig Kilborn and Craig Ferguson (Ferguson had the best late night show of the last 10 years, hands down). It's hard to believe there won't be any Dave in late night after tonight, and it feels like a piece of my life is going away.
I've always been a Weather Fan, and I've watched more Weather Channel through the years than I'd care to admit. Not so much in the last 10 years or so, however, when the channel's relevance has been dimished by the immediacy of weather information via the Internet and iPhone apps. Still, I remember one long summer day in the '90s of following the channel when two lines of storms were bearing down on north Mississippi — one moving east and one moving west — putting the two on a collision course. The meteorologists warned of the dangers of a "merger" situation. I've never seen anything like that before or since. If you tuned in today to get a radar view, however, you might be greeted with a reality program instead of weather coverage. Such is the bitch of cable television, in which channels carve out a niche and then systematically set about abandoning it in favor of the ratings chase.
Now, in the storm of carriers of versus content creators, The Weather Channel is kicked to the curb by DirecTV. The reality is that channels are asking for obscene amounts of money each year from the service providers — satellite, cable, fios, etc. — resulting in my bill going up each year. So, I don't mind if DirecTV plays a little hard ball. Dish did it with AMC Networks, resulting in AMC being off for months. I think the best interest of the consumer generally rests with the satellite/cable companies in these corporate spats.
These disputes always turn ugly, but The Weather Channel has taken it to new levels of stupidity. In addition to getting posterboy Jim Cantore fired up, they began a campaign to get irate consumers to contact their congressmen. This is where The Weather Channel incinerated any credibility it ever had — to suggest that it is some sort of public utility, and anything other than a business out to make money — is marketing manipulation of the lowest kind.
WeatherNation, which DirecTV fiendishly added just ahead of the contract dispute, is no great shakes. But, still, good riddance to utter bullshit.
I was nine years old when David Letterman's Late Night premiered on NBC, and I think he was really hitting his stride around the same time I was becoming aware of the world and getting interested in television.
