While the wife was baking an apple pie, the kids and I curled up in front of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on NBC, which turns out to be an awful steaming infomercial of a mess. So we started toggling back and forth to the CBS Thanksgiving Day Parade That Just Happens To Be Associated With Macy's, And Which Tries To Make Up For Not Having Any Float-Based Performances By Pitching Upcoming CBS Specials And Delicious Holiday Recipes Made With Pillsbury Crescent Roll Dough. Just awful, absolutely awful.
Next year we'll just project live, mute webcam feeds with the sound off.
Yes, it's pretty disappointing. We watched the grandma-gifted "Santa Buddies" last night - it's pretty awful too, though the 6yo liked it.
What? Thanksgiving? Didn't that happen over a month ago?
Thanks so much for this post. I was feeling guilty because the only two years we've been on American soil for my kids' lives we didn't own a tv to watch the parade. Now I don't feel badly anymore and am happy we watched soccer (hey it's a kind of football!) instead.
Same at our house, with possibly a higher rage level from the husband, and we didn't know about the CBS option. It wasn't always like this, was it? I'm not just being nostalgic, am I? Did it used to be Anita Bryant singing from the Tropicana float?
It's not the parade itself, necessarily. I mean, it had Rocky & Bullwinkle and Snoopy and the Nestle Quik bunny back in the day, too. I wish the problem was just John Stamos singing show tunes, but he's just the symptom. It's NBC and the over-produced schlock and the mortal fear of silence or ambient sound. And the insane number of commercials and sponsor messages.
We started out watching the parade, at the request of the kids, but flipped to the Mythbusters marathon during the ads. Pretty soon we stopped flipping back, and a good time was had by all.
I turned on NBC's coverage, expecting a parade, and got the Tony Awards instead. The lip-synched number from "Billy Elliott: The Musical" - a holiday tradition!
Part of the problem, no parade at all for the first hour (apparently until it started crossing in front of the big Macy's sign). But yes, the worst part is the inane chatter. It's maddening.
We held out for Yo Gabba Gabba, with a lot of mute until the cast showed up to sing an abbreviated "Party in my Tummy".