TV Commercial Hell

I remember the old days of broadcast television when television stations would broadcast their programs and everyone had antennas on their roofs to receive the signal. The TV stations broadcast the signal for free, but made their money by selling commercials.

One day I hear there is this great thing called cable TV. If you pay for cable you get a perfect signal and you get a bunch more channels to watch. Surely the additional cable channels wouldn't have commercials since the cable company is charging a nice monthly fee. Wrong! No such luck-- all the channels have commercials.

If it isn't bad enough paying for TV and still having commercials, now everyone seems to be coming up with lovely new innovative ways to add commercials right into shows. First, I started seeing these messages pop up covering the bottom portion of the screen advertising other shows the station wants you to watch. Annoying? Yes! Then some of the admittedly cheesy reality shows that I watch start wasting more programming time running voting polls to get people to spend money voting for absolutely asinine things. And then these same reality shows have now started featuring every commercial product under the sun right into their program by involving the products in the show in some way. It's gotten to the point where sometimes I feel like I'm just watching commercials and 'the show' is a 'no show'.