Here Are Some Things That You Could Put On the TV What With All the Extra Time That the TV Has Now...

Here Are Some Things That You Could Put On the TV What With All the Extra Time That the TV Has Now, with Seth Colter Walls

by Seth Colter Walls

So there’s that thing with the TV people and TV timeslots you’ve no doubt heard about, and how pretty soon there’s gonna be more time on TV for one TV network to fill, because that one guy who was on TV at one time, for awhile, didn’t want to be on TV at another time? So now people are saying that the one guy probably won’t be on TV anymore, or at least not on this same TV place, and the other guy who used to have his TV time, before, will just go back to it now, leaving his other TV time available for something. Oh, it’s all quite amazing, these minutes of the day still with TV left to be crammed into them.

Anyway, the TV people at the TV company with all the extra TV time to fill already have a plan, sorry to say, for this putatively TV-less time, so they don’t need any of your ideas about how to put TV into time, thank you very kindly.

A couple days ago, someone sent me a note at a time when I was not watching TV for some reason. It was an acquaintance of mine who had taken the time to send me a note about TV that had used to happen in the past, with a link about how the TV people spent their TV hours, in the time long ago, on performance things-very occasionally. They called it “The Seven Lively Arts,” and this was on the CBS TV people’s time, decades ago-and once the show put Coleman Hawkins and Count Basie and Gerry Mulligan on it, though none of them were punching each other or anything, which for being on TV as an unscripted thing was kind of interesting.

In my life, I had always needed to spend quite a lot of my time going around to find this kind of thing in places or buildings that I’ve always noticed don’t have TV cameras in them, for whatever reason. But my friend showed me, via the Internet, the proof about the fact that just people making music on instruments used to be on the TV time, pretty unmediated. I thought, hey, I’d watch that on the TV times even today. Here is some more of the TV time that happened once:

Pretty beautiful way to spend time, TV or not on TV, right?

But then something on TV happened that was pretty good-or at least the other people who I knew said it was pretty good-and then I forgot what the other guy had said for a couple days. Also because all the people on the other TV hours started talking about TV hours a lot and it was pretty good TV, I have to say! At least compared to what’s on TV most of these hours, when all the TV hours are nicely accounted for.

So anyway, I was getting ideas, for a time. About how to fill TV time up like that again! Like this one guy Vijay Iyer had a record that all the jazz people thought was the best way to spend jazz time in 2009, and he plays in New York a lot, and could probably spend time on TV very inexpensively, owing to how jazz people today don’t get much time from people anywhere, let alone TV time. And if you said they could spend time on TV, they probably wouldn’t even ask you for cab fare. And if you were looking to spend not much money on TV time, you could put him in a room with most any other jazz player, and they would do interesting things, because the music they play is often unscripted, and they know how to fill up the time anyway, when things aren’t written out all the way.

Another pianist named Robert Glasper also knows good ways to spend your time, both when he does more traditional-sounding jazz things…

…and also when he plays more popular-sounding songs, but in his own way, like Black Star things with Mos Def.

This guy Allen Toussaint spent a lot of time writing R&B; songs, but he also plays jazz clubs today, and can fill time real good with both singing and piano. I bet he’d be good for a whole hour of TV time that people might need to fill!

There is also a guy named Marc Ribot who spends time doing this, and I bet he’d also spend time on TV for very little or no money. He does a Beatles song in a very pretty way that is good to spend time with.

Then there’s also this person Jenny Scheinman, who plays jazz violin but also writes some quite beautiful folk-like numbers. You could put her in a room with maybe lots of these other people, and something interesting and new might happen.

So I was getting pretty excited about the show that somebody could put on TV, if they had the time on hand to hand around to people who know how to spend it. I was just getting started! But then I heard that they, the TV people, were giving the time to reruns of things that had already been on TV for quite a lot of time already, and also new versions of the same shows, essentially, but done a little bit differently, to help mix things up. So I stopped spending time thinking about it, since I’m sure they know what’s best in terms of filling up the entire day with TV.

Seth Colter Walls isn’t interested in a “new comedy panel series about the unpredictable and hilarious institution commonly known as marriage.”