Making Daily Headlines · Page 8
Television Offers an Appointment Without a Productivity Goal
· New York time
CBS has published a preview of the October 18 edition of Sunday Morning, hosted by Jane Pauley. The Emmy-winning program's weekly selection of features offers an alternative to choosing individual clips from an apparently bottomless menu, with a host and a broadcast date already attached. A broadcast preview is a small act of resistance to the modern entertainment arrangement. Instead of asking a viewer to browse indefinitely until exhaustion makes the selection, it proposes that something will be on at a particular time. The decision can be made before the sofa has absorbed the entire afternoon. A schedule reduces the work of choosing, while a curated program delegates some of the discovery process. Viewers can decide whether the offering suits them without becoming temporary managers of their own content warehouse. Somewhere, an unwatched queue of recommended videos must endure the professional disappointment. There is something quietly ambitious about a medium suggesting that attention might be spent rather than continually optimized. No streak needs preserving. No dashboard must certify personal improvement. The viewer may simply watch a feature and retain an interesting thought, a transaction so modest that an app would struggle to identify the premium tier or explain why the chair needs an upgrade.
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