TV Tag and Bad Content

Competitive tag (the schoolyard game) is a televised sport. Like on ESPN. That is absolutely bananas. Worse, it’s poorly produced. The premise is that grown 20-or-30-somethings chase one another around for 20 seconds. One person is it. One person runs. Everyone else watches.

The show that I skimmed (thank god for fast-forward on YouTube), featured more delays than competition, which almost makes sense. After all, this is a 40-minute show that relies on maybe 10 minutes of actual sport. It’s as if someone said, “What if we took the worst parts of watching football and made that into a show?”

Todd suggested that the show was designed to be cut up into social clips, which also almost makes sense. The thing is, this kind of contempt for viewers has reached absurd proportions.

ESPN is what makes cable so expensive. When people look around and see what kinds of garbage they put out, it isn’t any wonder cord-cutting is a thing.

The problem for me, though, is the cable company and the internet company are the same for most people. That means that increasingly people who don’t have or watch cable are funding this failed institution.

Grownup professional competitive tag is the symptom. ESPN is the disease. God help us all.