Month of Fury

It is nice to know that even as the internet becomes our society's (and concurrently my) main way of communicating with the outside world that infomercials haven't died out yet.

TV programs are pretty good sometimes. They have a plot and characters and sometimes even funny jokes, but the simple fact that how well they do depends on something as fickle as ratings has made TV writers la-a-azy. As often as not, if a TV program does really well it's because it's on immediately after American Idol. Or because buzz builds up around it and that buzz sustains itself in that way pop culture stuff seems to do. (Why can't I have a buzz? I have way more content than The DaVinci Code.)

Infomercials are like TV programs would be in a perfect world. Why? Infomercials know what they want. TV programs are all about getting you to keep watching through the commercials so that you might see something you want and buy it and also if you are a Nielsen family then your TV viewing habits get sent to TV headquarters and someone gets cancelled depending on whether you watched the show (or was it its commercials?) or not. This is just an unbelievably stupid way of running a TV program. Pay-per-view is even worse because I don't like to sign up for things.

With infomercials you have cut the middleman so badly that he may never show his face in polite society again. They operate on an awfully simple concept. You like this? Give us a call. But wait! There's more. The sitcom may have the overweight husband and sassy wife but the infomercial's cliches are ten million times better. User testimonials, call-in-the-next-ten-minutes, scientific experts, peppy hosts and junk science I love it.

Even the products are exciting. You have Ron Popeil selling his latest piece of junk. These are definitely the blockbusters of infomercials. No expense spared there. Even a studio audience. Just set it and forget it. You have Cornerning the Real Estate Market. I have to confess I find these a little boring especially since I am not sure what they are selling you. Manuals? Anyone dumb enough to buy them is not going to make a killing. There are Medical Secrets they don't want you to know and for good reason.

And there are excercise routines you can do at home. I was watching one of these last night. They were selling a video of dance-the-pounds-away exercise moves. The main one was called "The Wheel" but I think a better name for it would have been "Atlas Shrugged". You were guaranteed to lose "ten pounds and ten inches in ten days." Think about that slogan for a minute.

Questions for Discussion:

1. Why are all the products shown on infomercials so crummy? Not cheap, or even designed for poor people, but just bad. Like internet spam ads. Is there something about the infomercial format that makes it most effective for selling bad products?
2. Why don't they show infomercials in the daytime? Yes the space on TV is more expensive, but only because they have that many more viewers. Then they could afford to put the effort into even awesomer infomercials.
3. Why is the range of products sold on infomercials A) so narrow and B) almost completely different from the products sold on spam ads? I realize some of the difference is due to decency standards and they can't go selling porn on TV that innocent children watch. But lots of non-sexy things are sold in spam. Why no overlap?
4. Why don't infomercials have ads? I realize that normal TV programs have ads because that is how they raise revenue. Infomercials raise their own money. But just think. How much more money they could raise if they ran ads in between their sales pitches. TV cannot get more delerious than that.