Final Review Exercise

Please correct comma splices, run-ons, fragments, misplaced/dangling modifiers, apostrophe usage, or any other punctuation or usage error you find. NOTE: Not every sentence has an error, and some sentences have more than one.

I have always wondered this: why am I able to see any random television program, often for less than ten seconds, and immediately recognize which network the show is airing on? To me, the differences seem obvious and undeniable on ABC. Colors are always darker and the definition is softer. NBC programs look more like traditional videotape brighter, sharper, more aggressively modern. Everything on CBS has a slightly grainy, understated appearance, Fox looks like the middle ground between CBS and NBC. When the show Cavemen premiered last fall, I came across the first episode by accident. It was not known what channel I was watching but I did know this: aesthetically Cavemen looked like an ABC show, it looked like Head of the Class, which had looked like Barney Miller. I had a similar experience when I first saw 30 Rock, a sitcom that visually resembles Friends, which visually resembled Silver Spoons. These relationships have nothing to do with content, they refer only to the technical, non-narrative aspects of how the shows are broadcast. For reasons I don’t understand, I can identify the look of any major network instantaneously. So can a lot of other people, we can do it without even trying.

Except that we can’t.

It’s a paradox. My ability to differentiate between TV networks is real. When I watch Lost, I sometimes think this reminds me of Twin Peaks and Moonlighting. I am right, but not for the reasons I believed. I think they look alike, but they don’t, or at least not any more than all the other TV dramas shot on 35mm film. It’s an optical illusion created by my own mind and what’s weird about this particular illusion is that it usually ends up proving accurate. I am tricking myself into seeing the truth, even though that truth is invisible. I have watched so much television that I am now a genius.

And I suppose an idiot.

When initially, pursuing this discrepancy the hypothesis was that these differences must be purely technological. I assumed the answer would be explained by different kinds of film stock ,or by different frequencies used during the transmission of satellite feeds. These possibilities were proved false. All the network producers buy their film stock from outside sources so there can’t be a brand of film that makes NBC look like NBC. It also can’t be a result of frequency because networks use different channels in different markets. As far as I can tell, there is no meaningful difference between how different networks shoot and broadcast.

This dead end made me question my whole premise, was I the only person who saw these differences? I started asking acquaintances if they could tell the difference between CBS and NBC. I noticed that whenever I asked a person who watched lots and lots of television they always said “Of course." But whenever I asked someone who only watched TV casually, they inevitably said something along the lines of, “I’m not sure.” At first, I thought those responses helped prove my point, and I thought they suggested that these aesthetic differences were real, but their subtlety was lost on anyone who wasn’t a sophisticated viewer. But now I suspect a different explanation, in reality watching an inordinate amount of TV causes a person to imagine concrete visual differences, that are merely just the manifestation of abstract subconscious knowledge.