Once I under­stood “Beavers Tails” weren’t actual cutie beaver’s fried tails but just a name for a kind of waf­fle, I started to relax. I had mas­tered North Amer­i­can super­mar­ket (80% frozen food, 10% junk food and 10% health bars), I could drive an auto­matic car, and I had learned to check addresses before walk­ing miles-long streets hop­ing to bump into the right build­ing.

But there were one thing I couldn’t yet fig­ure out : the TV.

“There are many ways to speak about TV, but in a busi­ness per­spec­tive, let’s be real­is­tic: at the basis, TF1’s job is help­ing Coca-Cola, for exam­ple, to sell its prod­uct. What we sell to Coca-Cola is avail­able human brain time. Noth­ing is more dif­fi­cult than obtain­ing this avail­abil­ity. This is where per­ma­nent change is located. We must always look out for pop­u­lar pro­grams, fol­low trends, surf on ten­den­cies, in a con­text in which infor­ma­tion is speed­ing up, get­ting man­i­fold and triv­i­al­ized.” (TF1, French pri­vate network’s CEO, Patrick Le Lay)

See, back in France, it was quite sim­ple. I had a small black & white TV with a bro­ken antenna I had to trap between a pile of books and the edge of the couch in order to get a clear recep­tion. I only watched TV when : 1) I was copy­ing Chi­nese lessons 2) I was draw­ing 3) I was pluck­ing my eyebrows.Well, yeah. What was I sup­posed to do ? Watch it ??

We had 6 chan­nels. Really, only five. Or four.

• TF1, a pri­vate TV net­work, is basi­cally the right-wing cam­paign head­quar­ter. It boasts excel­lent news at 13:00 where you can learn about the last guy who make hand­made oak cast­ing rod in a small vil­lage, how civ­i­liza­tion destroy this poor citizen’s busi­ness, all that because of the immi­grants and the youth who doesn’t even go the Mass any­more. Cru­cial news, usu­ally broad­cast prime-time.
• France 2 and France 3 are pub­lic net­work, the for­mer being very regional. France 2 was the chan­nel I watched most back then, with a lot of talk show – not the Jerry Springer kind, more like “Middle-East pol­i­tics towards peace” headgames.
• Arte is Franco-German. Do I need to explain more ? Alright. Black and white silent film about blind Ukrain­ian dancer per­form­ing for the first time in Uzbek­istan. “Is red the key to exis­ten­tial­ist paint­ings“ talk-show. All sub­ti­tled in German.
• Canal + is pay tele­vi­sion with a monthly X-rated movie on the first Sat­ur­day of the month. Only rea­son I know that is because back in high school, guys would brag about watch­ing it, even though all they could see were encrypted pix­elized naked body.
• Finally, M6 is another pri­vate net­work which thrives on US series badly dubbed in French. The chan­nel is mostly famous for intro­duc­ing reality-TV in France in 2001 with Loft Story.

With so few net­works, no need to say that I never had a remote. I just stick to one chan­nel for the night and never both­ered channel-surfing. Never saw the point as well…

You see where I’m from, you prob­a­bly see where I’m going. I’m hold­ing the remote in my hand right now, and I see 998 chan­nels. Granted, we have cable. But still ! Why on earth would you have a chan­nel ded­i­cated to the weather ? To plan land­ing ? To biogra­phies ? What’s the idea here ? “Oh, I feel like watch­ing planes land­ing tonight” ? Or “gee, I’m so lazy I can’t step out to see what’s the weather like” ? “I des­per­ately need to know more about San­dra Bul­lock while I’m eat­ing” ?

Oh yeah… that’s because every bloody five min­utes you get twenty min­utes of com­mer­cials ! I see !

France is straightforward-borderline bor­ing when it comes to com­mer­cials. Pri­vate net­works do have one com­mer­cial break dur­ing movies or shows. One. And pub­lic net­works only have one break before and after show ! Yes, French don’t pee appar­ently, nor they eat, makes calls, do home­work or go grab a beer when they watch TV. When French watch, they sit their butt in front of the screen and they don’t move for two hours ! They don’t change channel !

Can’t blame you though. The first cou­ple of times, I didn’t mind the com­mer­cials. But hey, like every­body else, I got sick of see­ing clean toi­lets being scrubs, happy kids being fed, great fam­i­lies buy­ing SUV’s and poor lit­tle rich women apply­ing for high inter­ests credit cards. Here I was, intro­duced the won­der­ful world of chan­nel surfing.

Step one, pick up the remote. Step two, select another chan­nel. Even­tu­ally, it would have com­mer­cial. Pick the remote again or best, keep it handy. Select another chan­nel. Etc. Basi­cally, search for actual shows or pro­gram and avoid com­mer­cials. For­get abut actu­ally watch­ing a show – that’s not the point. Duh. The point is to avoid commercial.

Com­mer­cials are okay. Say­ing “fuck” is not. In which kind of world are we liv­ing for, I’m start­ing to won­der. Cause in France, com­mer­cials are bad but hosts, politi­cians, the audi­ence are expected to swear. France doesn’t beep ““merde”, “enculé” or “putain”. This is punc­tu­a­tion. The mag­nif­i­cence of French lan­guage. Art. “Beeep” isn’t. Beep is cow­ardice. If the talk-show theme is “my sis­ter is hav­ing sex with my les­bian part­ner” don’t expect much polite­ness for fuck sake ! (excuse my French). The way US TV man­ages to be puri­tan yet extremely offen­sive will always baf­fled me.

Now if you don’t mind, I’m just gonna read. A book. In between commercials.

Related arti­cles:

1. Dif­fer­ent, you said ?
2. Polit­i­cal Pawns
3. Things That Suck
4. Work­ing Class Hero Is Some­thing To Be
5. The Land Of Plenty