Program scripts from week of December 30, 2013
My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Year In Review
I like to take a moment at the end of each year to look back at the stories I’ve talked about here over the last 52 weeks. To be honest I’m always amazed because I have forgotten many of the topics in the course of cranking out new programs each week.
Among the stories are the memorials to folks from the media world who have left us each year. This year that included one of the most influential movie critics of all time, Roger Ebert. Among the others this year there was Dear Abby, Dr. Joyce Brothers, actor Richard Griffiths (Uncle Vernon from Harry Potter among many, many other roles), cowboy yodeller Slim Whitman and the Etch a Sketch. As always it’s an interesting list.
The top topics of the year seemed to be centered on journalism and the news. The question of what is news and what is the best way to report it popped up several times during the year. Kind of attached to that was also the question of what we mean by real these days. Reality TV has been shown to be about as far from reality as you can imagine and there were several times during the year where the concept of “reality” got stretched pretty badly. As has been the case the last several years we’ve spent a fair amount of time looking at industries that have and have NOT adapted to the new media environment. Curiously it was not the big media players who stepped up their game in a really flashy way at the Super Bowl this year as much as the folks at Oreo cookies did. It’s what I love about the media world. You never know who is going to surprise you.
And of course we talked about Duck Dynasty. Both good and bad this year. Let’s just leave it that, OK?
Scattered in among the “big stories” were lots and lots of little ones. Those are often the most fun because they cover all kinds of topics. Thus we find shows about squirrels and zombies and
Cheerios and Angry Birds and Miley Cyrus and internet trolls and Superman and the Oxford comma. And that barely scratches the surface of the topics of the year of 2013.
On the whole I thought it was a pretty interesting year in the media. I hope you did too.
I know I can hardly wait to see what the new year brings.
I know some folks think my passion for commercials is a little weird. Sorry, I am who I am. Curiously my two favorite commercials were both from cell phone service providers. I will stop what I’m doing to listen to the latest in the Sprint Unlimited Texting series starring James Earl Jones and Malcolm McDowell. Two great actors just hamming it up with some silly texts as dialogue. Right next to it was T-Mobile’s “Jeremy” series as we watched Jeremy’s parents desperately try to get their internationally travelling son to stop chewing up the expensive international data. Great stuff.
Didn’t see a lot of movies in the theaters this year but the favorite by a mile was the Formula One racing movie “Rush”. For a racing fan like me it was a great racing movie but at the same time there was great acting and a solid story for those for whom the sound of screaming engines doesn’t raise the heart rate. Other than that two movies really stood out for me. The American version of “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” took me places I didn’t expect. The same can be said for last year’s Academy award winner “Beasts of the Southern Wild”. Two very different movies but ones that made outstanding use of the medium.
Read a fair number of books as always. Two relatively new ones really grabbed me and two classics. “The Men Who Lost America” looks at the key figures on the British side of the American Revolution. You’ll get a completely different view of our history. “The Lost Cyclist” follows a champion bicyclist from Pittsburgh who attempts to ride his bike around the world and is never seen again. On the classic side were Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and Dumas’s “The Three Musketeers”. Both were surprises to me how well they stood up.
Finally there’s TV. Two shows jumped out for me. First is the comic inspired “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”. Just over the top fun. The other is “The Black List” starring James Spader. Spader is just chillingly evil as he helps the F.B.I. bring down the ultimate bad guys for reasons that are still unexplained.
I can hardly wait to see what 2014 has in store.
One For the New Year
Well we’ve reached the end of the year and the beginning of the next. There’s been a lot of media that has flowed past us. One study a couple years ago said that we spend as much as 8 hours a day in front of screens. That wouldn’t include radio, print, billboards and the like. So the amount of media that you’ve been exposed to in the last 12 months is pretty staggering.
With that in mind I’d like to make a suggestion for 2014. You might think this is where I put in the plug for less media. That might be an option but the reality is that most of the media you’re exposed to isn’t the stuff you choose. So while we could all probably benefit from the occasional media fast that’s not actually what I want to suggest today. I want to suggest something more radical.
Try something different.
If you’re not really into the whole digital media world my suggestion is to take a look. I’ll start off by giving you a pass on cute animal memes and videos, ultimate fail videos and service members being reunited with their families. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with any of them but they’re really NOT the World Wide Web at it’s best. Check out a great blog, find a website designed to make you a little smarter, look for a great video (they do exist) or a podcast. There’s actually some amazing things available out there if you’re willing to look.
Now on the other side there are those folks who spend a lot of time online. You play games there, you get your news there, you have a big portion of your social life there. So I want you to think about pushing away from the digital world and trying something different too. Here’s the most radical suggestion for you. Don’t just leave the screen behind. Leave your house behind and go see something live. Check out a performance in a club, go see some live theater, catch a concert in a concert hall. Maybe even listen to a speaker live rather than as a TED talk. Check out a classic book or watch a classic movie. See how stories were told old school.
A month or so ago I made the point that I think this is the golden age of media. What good is living in a time like this if you don’t take advantage of it?
And along the way, taking that break from the media might not be a bad idea for the new year either. Just don’t waste the year when there’s so much out there to explore. Happy New Year.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
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