Saturday, October 21, 2006

Rant: Spoiler Warnings

OK, do websites and magazine have to blurt out every plot twist and surprise outcome these days? What happened to spoiler warnings?

More and more media outlets are getting like that annoying kid in school who always read the class book project first and told everybody how And Then There Were None turns out.

For a while it seemed publications were being pretty good about saying "In the next paragraph we reveal the fate of Jack, Kate and Sawyer so read ahead at your own risk," but now, when there are more delayed ways to view programming than ever--DVR, VHS, iTunes, the web, My Space, DVDs just to name the legal ones-- I keep seeing publications trumpet details.

I mean "IN YOUR FACE" annoucements vs. just dropping something in a paragraph in the body of an article.

Ruining Runway
I logged on to yahoo.com Thursday to check e-mail, only to be hit with a giveaway of the Project Runway finale that was sitting on my DVR because Christine and I like to watch that together and couldn't on Wednesday night.

I'd avoided blogs since Fashion Week so I wouldn't find out who won in advance, only to have the Yahoo! home page emblazoned with a picture of and blurb about the winner.

The Project Runway winner is such important news it has to go at the top of frickin' Yahoo? Couldn't it just be a link reading "Find Out Who Won Project Runway?" so the revelation is kept a secret for those who want to see it for themselves?

I know there's a long tradition of throwing out things like World Series victories in headlines, but there's a little more immediacy to watching a sporting event than there is a reality show that's taped in advance and kept under wraps, sort of at least.

Even Bravo doesn't expect everyone to watch when its first broadcast, given that there are Runway marathons scheduled pretty much around the clock before and after the finale.

It's for fun, so why take the fun out of it?

Breaking Prison Break secrets
You could say it's my own damn falt for being behind, but I opened the front cover of TV Guide the other day and had a major element of Prison Break shot at me.

William Fichtner kills (_____).

How do you not read that? You can't blink fast enough. That shouldn't be on the first page of a magazine about television, right?

It's a busy world. Everybody doesn't watch television when it airs anymore.

Cut it the f out!

2 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

I agree with you on the spoilers. The media feeding frenzy is so great that now they're eating their own young. People just "gotta know," but I don't know why.

Clifford said...

Mainstream media hasn't caught up with the DVR generation yet.

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