A guide to late night TV

As some of you know, I am a night owl (is that redundant?). I prefer to work, browse with TV on at night. In course of my “work”, I become a self proclaimed expert in late night TV watching. So, here is your guide to late night TV. When I said late night, I was not talking about 11.30PM or 12 but 12.30AM to 3AM.

Night time TV can be classified as the following

1) Paid programming – Interesting or addictive advertisements

You will be amazed to find out how addictive they can get. I watched that stupid “Magic Bullet” 100 times by now. Well, they all start in “very boring” mode. If you are careful enough you can get out of them at this stage. If not, you will be lured into “not-so boring” phase. In this specific example (Magic bullet – an all purpose mixie/blender which is shaped like a bullet), a couple with Australian accent (you would wonder why?) started chatting with their friends who join them at Kitchen counter. In a sane morning mind, I would have flipped the channel. But night mind is simply more tolerant. 2 more minutes I told myself. They promised that everything can be done under 10 seconds. Well, I don’t care, I told myself. But let us see whether they walk the talk.

He prepared omelet in 8 seconds and she prepares 2 kinds of muffin in 10 seconds. Hmm..they are keeping up till now, but again it is just breakfast, how about lunch or dinner? Fettuccini Alferdo was done in 8 seconds and 7 seconds is all it took to convert left-over chicken into sandwich. By now, I stopped working and started following seriously. They made nacho-cheese, dips and frozen drinks in one digit seconds. And topped it with sub-5 seconds completion of chocolate mousse and fruit sorbet (the word I wouldn’t have known otherwise).

The show is really exciting by now. Right when you want more, they want to sell the product. :) Pricing is whole other thing. It starts with reasonable yet too-much-for-unknown-product range. 250$ says the announcer. Then comes the real offer “50% off”. And boom comes another one, “another magic bullet free”. I lost interest with the dry marketing talk. It won’t dry grind for sambhar/rasam I told myself before flipping to next paid advertisement showing “Miracle Blade”.

2) Movies – did I mention crappy

I always wondered how they don’t pick good movies even by mistake in Tamil TV channels. And late night movie watching will prove this talent is not local to Sun TVs but it is very universal. They hand-pick bad movies and show them till the tape calls timeout.

Then there is re-run of famous movies. Channels prefer some actors and movies and don’t want to change them for ever. Tom hanks top the actor list and Shawshank redemption tops the movie list.

There are few more categories like "Paid programming - selling the book or concept", "Talk show" etc. But I am too sleepy at 3.35AM typing this mail so good night and good luck.