Backchannelmedia

MiamiHerald.com, February 02, 2007

In a Television Trance

By Glenn Garvin

They want me to write about the Super Bowl and sloth. Not gonna happen. I haven't been off my couch in a week, not since the Food Network Football Party Planner Weekend Cooking Block threw me into semi-catatonia last Saturday night. Seven hours of shows about sandwiches! The violent East Coast/West Coast tailgater feud! The history of Dixie cups! Cups! Since then, I've lacked the will to live.

OK, that's a self-absorbed yuppie exaggeration. There are reasons to live. The main one is the existential crisis that would confront my remote if I weren't here to click it mindlessly from the NFL Network (105 hours of Super Bowl coverage!) to the special Indigo Girls Super Bowl concert on The Early Show on Saturday to the halftime show of pancers Sunday on Fuse.

''Pancers,'' by the way, means dancers without pants. Only a couple of years ago, this sort of thing was called a ''wardrobe malfunction,'' and a couple of years before that, ''stripping.'' But American culture moves at warp speed these days, buddy, and the only way to keep up is to drop everything and watch the thousands of hours of TV programming devoted to the Super Bowl. You can call that ''sloth'' if you want, though my editors prefer the term ''half a step from unemployment.'' But all I hear is the remote whispering sweetly in my ear, hold me, feel me, CLICK ME!

Oh, and I do. Embedded here in the couch, my hand fused to the remote, I can't remember the last time I changed clothes or even moved. But I remember each of the 19 football movies I've watched this week. The Program nine times, The Longest Yard seven. I know those numbers so precisely because some extremely anally retentive outfit called Backchannelmedia is keeping count. The Super Bowl unsprings some deep-seated human urge to count things.

The Nielsen people, for instance, have counted an extra $5.4 million worth of one-pound frozen poultry dinners being sold this week. Over at Sony, they took a poll and counted 74 percent of Americans who would prefer a free 70-inch Sony SXRD HDTV television set to free Super Bowl tickets. I'm guessing that's about 74 percent more than even vaguely care about the poll results, but that could just be the remote talking.

Tough Decisions

The remote wants to know what we're going to do Sunday, when grim and momentous choices await. Easy enough to say we'll watch Norman van Aken, Douglas Rodriguez and Bobby Flay compete in a Super Bowl Iron Chef contest on CBS this morning -- I mean, who's going to miss that? -- but what happens when the DIY network's Super Knit Sunday goes up against the Animal Planet's Puppy Bowl III? Three hours of cute puppies sniffing their own butts versus six hours of lessons in how to knit important Super Bowl garments, including possibly a codpiece (9:30-10 p.m., Naughty Knits!) for Peyton Manning, who Sony says is the quarterback American women most want to see in high definition.

Not to mention the Hallmark Channel's show during halftime of the game, when Engelbert Humperdinck hosts the breathlessly awaited From The Heart -- Favorite Commercials From Hallmark Cards. The tingle of anticipation I would doubtless be feeling right now if I'd had any actual sensation in my arms or legs since Monday is exceeded only by my confusion about how to spell ''Engelbert Humperdinck.'' Luckily I'm not actually writing this -- stop whining, I told you that way back up at the top -- I'm just dictating to an intern, so the spelling is his problem. And since I'm speaking through a mouthful of one-pound frozen poultry dinner, he probably thinks I said Pussycat Dolls, anyway. Hey, speaking of them, whatever happened to the Lingerie Bowl? I'd ask somebody, but the remote wants us to be alone now.

Getting Nauseated

So I'll see you later, maybe during the six-hour CBS pregame show Sunday. Last month, when I still resembled a functional human being, I asked CBS Sports boss Sean McManus if anybody could possibly watch six hours of pregame clichés without become nauseated. ''They may be nauseated, but they still watch,'' he replied. Added CBS football analyst Boomer Esiason: ''They don't get nauseated until about 6 o'clock.'' Wow, just 60 hours to go.