"HEROES" & "AMERICAN GANGSTER"

There are whores sitting on the Peacock Throne.

It all started with the bugs. Those little ID tags in the corner of the screen to let you know what network you're watching. Then came those ever-expanding promos for upcoming shows that pulled your eyes away from the show you were watching.

It's no wonder the WGA wants a piece of the DVD game - they must know people are going to wait until a series is out on DVD so that they can finally watch it without such interruptions!

But now they've really prostituted themselves with these on-screen promos and crawls. At least with the bugs and the promos, they were basically trumpeting themselves. And that's just natural, right?

However, during 'Heroes' on Monday night, right in the middle of a very tense scene with "HRG", up came an ad for "American Gangster", the new movie starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe.
So what if it's a product of NBC-Universal? It was still for a movie, nothing to do with Television!

David Bianculli had this to say:

Now that TiVo and DVR technology allow viewers to time-shift their favorite shows and zip through the commercials, product placement within shows is way up, and newly released Nielsen ratings confirm the common wisdom: Give people a chance to skip commercials, and they will. Since broadcast TV is a commercial medium, what's a network to do?

Stick ads right into the shows, where they can't be fast-forwarded through, that's what.

NBC has a term for these: "snipes," a word borrowed from construction-site papering of ads.

Here's an even more sinister-sounding term, and one with a noble TV history: "blipverts," which suggests both the quickness and pervasiveness of an advertising message. The term comes from an episode of ABC's "Max Headroom," and was coined almost 20 years ago.

If we don't complain now, and loudly, blipverts are destined to be our future.
[from the New York Daily News]

He's right. We should complain. Not sure where, but I would guess there must be some forum at NBC.com in which our voices can be heard. (There is a feedback link at the bottom of the page and then there's myNBCcommunity link near the top. Both of them require registration, however, so I assume they're counting on people to shy away from doing that.)

But if nothing is done, it's only going to get worse.....

BCnU!
Toby OB