Lisa deMoraes, my guide to snarkiness, counts up the “Friends” overexposure:
Having sat through last night’s two “Friends” reruns and the two-hour edition of NBC News’s “Dateline” devoted to the sitcom (because it is the most important breaking news story of the moment), you’re planning to devote tonight to NBC’s hour-long “Friends” retrospective, after which you will watch the one-hour very last episode of the sitcom that forever changed the genre, only not really because then how do you explain “Everything’s Relative”?
And this is because “Friends” will be gone forever from NBC after tonight, which you know because you’ve read the miles of newspaper and magazine stories that millions of trees gave their lives for, all heralding the show’s end. Right?
Ha.
This Saturday, the network will rerun that two-hour “Dateline” broadcast devoted to “Friends” but starring Katie Couric and Matt Lauer.
On Sunday, May 16, NBC will rerun tonight’s one-hour clip job on the comedy series.
And, on Thursday, May 20, NBC will rerun the show’s final three episodes, including tonight’s finale.
In that way, NBC has managed to churn out 11 hours of “Friends” programming for its May ratings derby. Which is pretty darned impressive when you consider that the network had just two original episodes — one half-hour episode and the one-hour finale — going into the May sweeps.
That count doesn’t even include Jay Leno’s show tonight, which will be telecast from the Central Perk set that played such an important role on “Friends” during its 10-year-run, and which will be devoted entirely to the cast.
NBC has become expert at stretching out what little actual program content they have. I’m reminded that for the last few months, “Will & Grace” episodes have run only about 18 minutes long, and yet they are stretched out with commercials and promos so that they appear to be 34 minute “super-sized” shows.
TiVo really clues you in on how much content there actually is on these shows. I’ll bet they HATE TiVo.
