Here’s Looking at You, Pool-Friendly Diapers

Did You Say Diapers?

Certain aspects of Spanish television put TiVo-type technology to the test. Take, for example, the anything-goes editing techniques the networks apply to primetime broadcasts of feature films. Zipping through a commercial interruption is maybe not quite so special when the moment of said interruption, the actual cut-to-commercial, falls somewhere in the middle of a scene, randomly splitting the narrative into two disjointed, non-cohesive parts. I don’t mean cliff-hanger cuts. Cliff-hanger cuts are frustrating, but they make narrative sense. I mean cutting to commercial randomly in the middle of a scene. Not at the moment the plane runs out of fuel and the prop sputters to a stop (tension mounting, stay tuned); not after our hero has brought the plane safely to the ground (tension released, exhale); but at some arbitrary instant in the struggle. Consider the conclusion of Casablanca. “Here’s looking at”—CUT TO SKIN-CREAM COMMERCIAL, POOL-FRIENDLY-DIAPER COMMERCIAL, FROZEN-PIZZA COMMERCIAL—“you, kid.” The prose analogue to this would be, you are reading this sentence and then at some random point we DEODORANT BODY SPRAY, DISHWASHING LIQUID, FIBER SUPPLEMENT and then pick up again here. Whether or not you can rip on past the interruption TiVo-style, narrative coherence is pretty much shot.

In other respects, Spanish television beats TiVo at its own game. Episodes of imported dramatic series, for example, normally run without commercial interruptions. What’s fun is, said imported episodes arrive with the fade-to-commercial cuts built in, which means that every fifteen minutes or so we will fade out—then fade directly back in. If the cut has come at a moment of released tension—the CSI team has just ruled out a heretofore primary suspect, say—we will fade up on a new scene; it’s as if we’ve simply turned to a new chapter in a book. But if the cut comes at a cliff-hanger moment, we will fade into the exact scene we just this second faded out of. The assassin has put our hero in the crosshairs, we fade out…and then immediately fade up to…the assassin has put our hero in the crosshairs. Same camera angle, same facial expression—the same shot. It’s as if somebody in the control room accidentally hit the stop button, then quickly corrected. The nuts and bolts of narrated, documentary-style programs from the U.S. are even plainer to see: our narrator will say, in dubbed Spanish, “When Wild Riots 3 returns…”, and then, directly, Wild Riots 3 returns. Under these circumstances, “coming right up” actually holds water. Whatever is “Coming right up on Vigilante Justice 4…”, comes right up, just after we pause for the speed-metal guitar lick and flashing of the title logo—twice in a row, of course: first to send us out and then to welcome us back. Stay tuned!—guitar-lick/title-logo [beat] title-logo/guitar-lick—Welcome back!

So what happens to the commercials? Where do they go? They’re backed up like effluent in bad plumbing, waiting at the end of the episode to descend on the viewer in a five-to-fifteen-minute tsunami of sales pitches. This is the time to go make a sandwich, load the laundry, what have you. What’s really nice (for viewers, if not for advertisers) is that most networks are good about telling the viewer precisely how long the block of commercials will last. Volvemos en 7 minutos, the screen will announce. “We will return in seven minutes.”

“Well, thank you,” a viewer might say. “So will I.”

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Charlie Geer is the author of the novel “Outbound: The Curious Secession of Latter-Day Charleston.” His work has appeared in Tin House, The Sun, Bloomsbury Magazine, and The Southern Review.