Liked the Show? Maybe It Was the Commercials

Liked the show? Maybe it was the old commercials. The "Taxi" and "Happy Days" research appears to fail to distinguish between a program being interrupted by today's commercials versus yesteryear's commercials. Many people delight in old ads, whether they be newspaper ads, magazine ads, movie posters, or whatnot, because they're history. They show us the changes in design esthetics, cultural values & propaganda, fashion, and so on. (I happen to be keen on fonts and women's eyebrow styles.) That's why such things have value as collectibles. I can't help picturing the research subjects smirking at the "bad" ties worn by the Michael Brownstein lawyers.

Liked the show? Maybe it was the pacing of the program for commercial interruption. TV ads are not injected at random intervals. They're injected between scenes. But not just any scenes. They're injected after scenes which were written to be followed by a commercial break. In other words, the TV show was designed to be enjoyed with the breaks. For example, contrast made-for-TV movies (designed for breaks) with made-for-theater movies (designed for continuous viewing). Watch an adless video of a made-for-TV movie, and you can see the story build to a little climax every few minutes, and more frequent climaxes as the story progresses. The ever-increasing climaxes get so tiresome, in my taste, that they cry out for interruption.

I can honestly say this is not the case in my experience. When we visit someone who has cable, its a shock similar to the one I feel when I install a new Firefox that doesn't have NoScript yet. There's all these interruptions, lame cliffhangers, and sometimes you can't even rewind it if you missed something. WTF?

One strange habit I've noticed as a result of no commercials is an increasing impatience for the interesting bits of the content. We've gotten into the habit of FFwd through the slow bits of shows though. There's a surprising amount of non-content in what gets sold as the actual content of movies, TV shows, etc.

I'd pay for legitimate TV if I could FF everything and get all the shows I like on demand when they actually air. Life's just too short to sit through 30 minutes of maybe-interesting content, 5 minutes of total filler, and 25 minutes of commercials and interruptions. The industry needs to start respecting the viewers' time.

Could just be cognitive dissonance: the more we pay for something, the better we have to think it is, so that we don't feel stupid. Watching commercials is like paying for watching a TV show, so we have to deceive ourselves into liking it more ("it was worth the commercials"). Since in the experiment the researcher only asked for individual estimates of happyness, it seems to me cognitive dissonance could explain it.

For the TV show - the massage example sounds more interesting, but not enough details about the setup are given (ie what kind of interruptions).