More thoughts on late night TV

Another thing that really struck me about late night TV was the advertising. It's terrible.

See, most ads these days are anti-ads, they appeal to you by trying to be slightly ironic. They know you know its a commercial, so they want you to feel in on the joke as they sell you their beer or sneakers, etc.

Late night TV is not that subtle. Late night advertising is like a hammer of obviousness to your face, with a dash of completely weird sprinkled on your corpse. Here are some examples:



Air Wick commercials. The one I saw had a frog-mother type. These here are rabbits. Notice rabbit-mother, forced to entertain for drunken husband-rabbit. See husband-rabbit hung over, and later, aroused by Air Wick scents. See useless husband-rabbit inable to get lights on the Christmas tree. And the rabbit has an English accent, naturally.

Most of the commercials on late night TV are geared toward impoverished people, old people and people with health problems. It's incredibly depressing to watch, because you feel like defacto members of those groups. There are also the commericals for the "chat" or "talk" lines which may be phone sex-related. You find yourself repeating over and over, "I'm not old, I don't need Mucinex, I'm not dirt poor, I'm not dying." Except you know only like half of those things are true (I am pretty broke, and we're all dying).

This is why I need at least 100 channels. If I'm forced to linger on any one channel for too long, I start to notice things like in this post and the previous one, and my head starts to spin.