get your priorities right

talk about “needing to read the room”…

…i need to reach out to my local fox affiliate.

i’ve been heavily into the simpsons since they started shortly after i got out of high school (yes, i’m that many years old). i, unlike a lot of people my age, don’t think they’ve lost it ages ago and should have retired. on the contrary, i think they’re still cranking out good product. and it will live forever and ever on streaming services and in syndication, and it’s that last one i’m talking about now.

most of the time when they run in syndication on our local fox station (the oldest station in the atx, in case you’re curious – formerly owned by president l.b.j.) it’s between midnight at 2am, and there’s usually two or three episodes run at a time. but more often than not the first one is half missing due to some travel show, or celebrity watcher show, but then to keep their run times right they “…join their regular program already in progress” so we get the last seven to eleven minutes of the simpsons, minus all context, and that’s it. now, the other two will be complete, but that first one is basically an empty shell of itself.

here’s a note to my fox station – know your audience. read the room. do you know your audience at that time of night/morning? they don’t care about where the guy found good tapas in borneo. they don’t care about that one girl from that obscure streaming show who found good nail polish at sephora. they’re high. they’re unemployable. give em their simpsons tree house of horror xxxviii and be done with it.

they’ll be happy. i’ll be happy. and you still got your ad revenue, although i know blocks that late aren’t tracked or rated so it’s where you throw the free ads that people get as part of their package, so it’s always for lawyers with shady ethics and eight figure pay outs. it’s where we all learned about mesothelioma. it’s been fun to watch the evolution of the ads to that from the phone sex number that, for some reason, do still exist. but put our simpsons back on. just end the other show prematurely and say, “we now join the show you wanted to watch in the first place” and be done with it!