In the evening, we usually stream something on Netflix or Prime because there’s nothing of interest on network TV. Yet Sunday night there were three things we wanted to watch: Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary special on NBC, PBS’s All Creatures Great and Small, and the first episode of the new series of The White Lotus on HBO. We watched SNL, knowing we could stream the other two later in the week. Last night we watched All Creatures Great and Small, which quoted lines from Lewis Carroll and Hughes Mearns (“I met a man who wasn’t there.”) You don’t get nonsense poetry from The White Lotus.
The New Yorker is observing its 100th birthday at the same time that “Saturday Night Live” is celebrating its 50th. The former institution has paid tribute to the latter – with a long profile of Lorne Michaels – while the latter has not reciprocated. Though, according to Maureen Dowd in yesterday’s New York Times, Michaels offered an office to William Shawn in 1987 when he was ousted from the magazine after 35 years as editor.
I have always liked John Dickerson, but as a news analyst, not a news reader. Putting him behind the desk of CBS Evening News seems like a massive misuse of talent. And there’s another man sitting next to him, Maurice DuBois. Can’t he do it himself? Two people delivering the news is not as odd as two people writing a book – “like three people having a baby,” one wag once said – but it is wasteful. It means not only an extra salary, but extra time in the daily news meeting, as decisions must be made on who is to read what.
Yesterday evening I sat down to watch Jeopardy! and was disappointed to find that ABC was showing Monday Night Football instead. OK, I said, I’ll watch the Australian Open; earlier in the day, the Tennis Channel had informed viewers that coverage on ESPN would start at 7.
ESPN, sadly, was showing Monday Night Football. Must be on ESPN2, I thought, and, changing the channel, found Monday Night Football again. Then I remembered that ESPN’s coverage of the Australian Open – one of the year’s four majors – has been beginning in the evening on ESPN+, which we don’t have a subscription for. It is one of many things that annoy me about the networks.
And I have nothing against football – I watched a bit of it over the weekend – but do we need three channels to cover the same game?
A friend wrote on Facebook yesterday about her dismay on finding a dangling modifier in The New Yorker. It was in the David Sedaris story I wrote about a few weeks ago: “While walking on that first afternoon, a man stopped his truck, introduced himself as Rocky, and asked me what my favorite color was.”
I messaged my friend that I had heard Sedaris read that story, and that he had prefaced it by talking about the magazine’s rigorous fact checker and, at the conclusion, had spoken about his run-ins with the sensitivity reader. Perhaps, I said, they should invest in a line editor with a knowledge of grammar.
Early last month my “40s Junction” channel on Sirius XM was temporarily taken over by “Holiday Traditions.” It seemed a little early to me – I didn’t start listening till after Thanksgiving – but perhaps, I thought, they wanted to make sure they got in all of the great Christmas carols and songs.
A week before Christmas, I now realize they wanted to bombard us with a few select standards: “Jingle Bells,” “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” “Little Drummer Boy,” “Joy to the World.” Even carols I love, like “O Holy Night,” I’m getting a little tired of. I have not heard “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” (a beautiful Advent carol), let alone “In the Bleak Midwinter.”
I don’t know why I expected more. The situation is the same on the pop stations. Gordon Lightfoot, according to Sirius, wrote two songs: “Sundown” and “Carefree Highway” (in my opinion, two of his least interesting). OK, sometimes you hear “If You Could Read My Mind,” but never “Approaching Lavender.” With Simon & Garfunkel, you get a handful – “Sounds of Silence” and of course “Mrs. Robinson” ad infinitum – but never “Old Friends” or “April Come She Will.”
In a country, and a time, that’s all about diversity, we get very little of it on the radio. And don’t get me started on television.