“The View From the Phlipside” is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Monday through Friday just after 8 AM and 5 PM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moments notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2013-14 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Program scripts from week of February 24, 2014
My name is Jay Phillippi and I’ve spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
The New King
Every time NBC’s flagship late night show “The Tonight Show” pops back up in the news feed I feel a little awkward about commenting. While I certainly understand and appreciate the historic place of the show in the television pantheon I can’t speak from anything even approaching a personal point of view.
I don’t watch the show. I’ve never watched the show.
In my five plus decades of life “The Tonight Show” has always been there. It’s actually four years OLDER than I am. Early in my life I was a fan of the show’s original host, Steve Allen, but as an author. Growing up it was always “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” and that was an old folks show. Of course by the time I was actually old enough to stay up that late Carson was comfortably into his 30 year reign. While I appreciated some of his stuff the fact remained, “The Tonight Show” was for old people. When I was in college the young and hip were much more focused on the hot new “Saturday Night Live”. And then my career in radio was mostly morning drive so I never stayed up that late.
So “The Tonight Show” is an interesting academic question for me. So the question of who the next host will be is not the burning issue that it is for most in the television industry. With Jay Leno retiring, again and hopefully finally, it was time to come with the next leader for this institution at the Peacock Network.
Jimmy Fallon has been on for just over a week now and I’ll confess I still haven’t seen the show. I’ve looked at a couple video clips of monologues and guest interviews. He seems confident and competent and comfortable. All good.
The real question is – will it work? Fallon has always appealed to a younger audience than the traditional for the show. So far his ratings have been solid but not spectacular. I’m also interested to note that NBC is at least thinking about the change in audience. Fallon’s online viewers and YouTube numbers are being closely watched.
Don’t know that I’ll ever be a fan of “The Tonight Show”. But this new host may be bringing a new audience to the time slot and a new way of thinking about what a successful 21st TV program looks like.
And that may be worth watching all by itself.
Netflix Settles
It was just a month ago that I talked about the latest bout of concern about a concept called “net neutrality”. Just a quick review – net neutrality says that everyone on the net, from the smallest user to the largest, should all be treated the same. You shouldn’t have to pay extra to get the best service on the internet.
When I talked about this in January I mentioned that one of the central figures in the issue is the movie streaming service from Netflix. According to some studies, at the highest usage hours Netflix accounts for more than a third of all usage on the world wide web. Movies and games require a lot more resources to stream than just about anything else.
So more and more Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have taken to doing things like imposing maximums on the amount of those resources. And that sets off the net neutrality folks.
Well the news this week is really going to set them off. Netflix has reached an agreement with Comcast, one of the biggest ISPs in the country, to pay extra for more direct connection to Comcast’s servers. Now if you’re a Netflix user on Comcast who has noticed that the streaming services seem to have slowed (and reports say there are a LOT of you out there) this may not seem like bad news. It should restore your speeds to something more like what you want.
The problem is two fold. First of all, Netflix is going to want to cover the costs of this deal. Now around here we don’t have Comcast, we have Time Warner so maybe you think it doesn’t affect you. Except for the fact that Comcast and Time Warner are trying to get a deal through the regulators that would merge the two companies. Do I have you attention now?
The other problem is that it sets a precedent. If the best service is going to go to the highest bidder it could lead to higher prices for everyone. It also means that the Internet could become a segregated society. Where only a limited, throttled down Internet could be available to you unless you are willing to dig deeper to pay more.
And that’s why net neutrality is going to continue to be an issue in a world where so much of our lives take place online.
Seems like it’s been a while since I’ve given in to the urge for a good old fashioned rant. Just giving in to all those pent up irritations and annoyances that are simmering gently deep, well sort of deep, in my heart and soul.
It all began one lazy afternoon recently when I had nothing better to do than cruise through my movie channels looking for something new. I stumbled on what looked like a fun little British romantic comedy called “Love’s Kitchen”. Parenthetically, this is not a very good movie. It holds the unofficial record for worst openings in the United Kingdom. Opening a grand total of five theaters it earned less than $300, total. That kind of bad.
Anyway, it’s a pretty predictable romantic comedy, boy meets girl, boy and girl can’t stand each other, blah, blah, blah, then at the end they discover they can’t live without one another and there’s a big kiss.
And THAT’S where the problem begins. Because they don’t just kiss. They try to inhale each other’s faces. As near as I can tell they try to swallow each other’s heads. You know what I’m talking about.
Don’t get me wrong, I like kissing. I’ve done plenty of it and I’ve seen other people kiss. I’ve seen couples reunited after a service person returned home from overseas duty, I’ve seen young people kiss, old people kiss. Wait, that sounds a little creepy. You know what I mean. I’ve never seen anyone kiss the way people usually do on TV and in the movies.
Really, what’s the point of that in our entertainment? In our common everyday viewing do you really want to watch people trying to swallow each other like a python with a rat? To be honest it makes me a little queasy. There’s romance and then there’s borderline cannibalism.
Somewhere along the line Hollywood seems to have lost touch with the beauty and the passion of a simple kiss. Watching that seems a much more reasonable thing to be doing
Until you start thinking about that whole watching other people is as entertainment is creepy thing
Stories Are My Life 
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