Why, why, why do they let Dick Clark in front of the camera? I don’t deny his credibility but, dude, you gotta know when to fold ’em. They are obviously grooming Ryan Seacrest to replace him so while Dick stayed in the warm comfort of the studio (I guess to prevent cardiac arrest), they made Ryan wear those goofy headphones and introduce the acts. One of the acts he introduced was Mariah Carey who apparently has made a comeback this year which I wouldn’t know had I not watched New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. Watching Mariah made me feel somewhat embarassed for the state of American pop culture–no wonder the rest of the world hates us. (Oh, an Mariah, we all know that you can do that really screechy high-note thing, so just don’t do it anymore because we don’t need to be impressed.)
ESPN is supposed to offer guys a place to go on the TV where you are very unlikely to see Mariah Carey and can escape from Top 40 hell and see some sports. Not on New Year’s Eve. ESPN felt it necessary to put Stuart Scott (“DJ Stewey” to those Jim Rome fans) in a stupid hat hosting the same camera angles that you can get on sister channel ABC. Not sure why this is necessary.
Using what now seems to be a quaint technology, my wireless remote control, I moved on to FOX. I’m not sure why I don’t dislike Regis Philbin. I think it’s because he’s just SO cheesy that you sort of blow it off. I’m not exactly sure why anyone would watch this crap and, if you are, why wouldn’t you watch Dick Clark? There’s no need for Regis.
I even watched Univision for a few minutes just to get another perspective. I like watching TV in other languages because you can only focus on the images and it makes your realize just how BAD TV really is. Other than indicating that the images were “En Vivo” from “Nueva York” and with an elderly host wearing some kind of wierd Russian-looking hat co-hosting with a bunch of hot latin babes, the images that you see are teh same.
Basically, all of these broadcasts are the same. They are all panning over Time Square, showing the same people, telling us who the top 10 pop music acts were and showing us their lame hosts try to “host” performances of lame musical acts. I just don’t understand the draw and the little window into pop culture is more confusing and embarassing to me than entertaining. CBS was the only major network who had it right–they just bailed on the whole thing and showed an episode of CSI.
So, I just gave up on attempting to uderstand pop culture and, with Natalie curled up asleep on my chest, I flipped on the wireless laptop, got my wireless headphones and settled in to type my blog entry while watching an episode of Nova that I had recorded on the TiVo. No Mariah Carey, no Dick, Ryan, Regis, D.J. Stewey or bizarre Spanish-language equivalents, just a sweet little baby, decent TV content and my blog to ring in the New Year.