Misguiding Light

By now, you know that I was quite the sad sack when I was in high school: no friends, no social life, and a job at McDonald's that pretty much provided my only interaction with other people. As a result, I spent a lot of time in my bedroom watching television.

Since I grew up in a house without cable, I had to make do with the limited channels from Washington and Baltimore. Desperate for new programming, I started watching "Guiding Light" religiously. In high school, I would race home from the bus as fast as my fat legs would carry me so I could flip to Channel 11 (Baltimore's CBS affiliate at the time) and watch. The characters of Rick, Philip, Blake, Beth, Mindy, Reva and Josh (a daddy bear and the object of many teenage masturbatory fantasies) became my friends, and I became very involved in the show.

My obsession with "Guiding Light" didn't stop when I went to college. I planned my first two years of classes in college around the show, making sure that my classes were done by 2:50 in the afternoon so I could get myself back to my dorm room so I could crack open a Diet Coke and have my hour with my television friends. When, in my junior year, I discovered that one class I needed to graduate was only offered at three o'clock in the afternoon, I saved my money and bought a VCR at the end of the summer of 1992 so I could still have my fix.

For some reason, I quit watching abruptly in 1993, and didn't give a lot of thought to "Guiding Light" after that. Until now.

One of the websites I visit every day is the "Fox 411" entertainment column written by Roger Friedman. It is a very biased column (which is redundant, considering it is a Fox News column), and one of Friedman's recent vendettas involves Procter & Gamble Productions and their soap operas. Recently, he talked about how on the 29th of February, "Guiding Light" had changed production styles, comparing it to a home movie. According to his column, the show was now shot using hand-held digital video cameras, with editing done on-site. He also reported that the production was now done largely outdoors and in actual rooms rather than on a studio set.

I usually take Roger Friedman's opinions with a grain of salt, considering he has railed against things like "Brokeback Mountain" (insisting it was a flop until it grossed more than $150 million worldwide), and constantly hating on Madonna and her new album (which was one of her best). So I decided to see for myself. I was home at three o'clock in the afternoon recently, so I flipped it on.

This time, Roger Friedman was spot on. The camera work is abominable. I can't help but wonder if, when they hired the camera crew, they made having Parkinson's Disease a job requirement. They also decided that the best way to show the actors is via the extreme close-up face shot. The audio has a near-constant echo, and the different scenes have different volumes. Making matters worse is the glut of outdoor scenes.

This is a clip that I found on YouTube. It should illustrate my point quite nicely:


Basically, I couldn't watch it for ten minutes without getting a splitting headache. I can't imagine going back to watching it for an hour a day, five days a week. I am wondering if Procter & Gamble are trying to save the show by making it stand out or trying to kill it by making it impossible to watch.