I am at home visiting family for the holidays. For a variety of reasons, I didn’t have anywhere to go to ring in the new year, so my wife, my father, my mother, and I all watched it on TV from home. And therein my agitation started.
Whether you could consider “Colosse”, the city I come from, to be a “major city” is at least partially a matter of perspective. It’s larger than Birmingham, but also not the largest metropolitan area in the south. (I typically don’t answer guesser questions on what it is, so don’t ask.) Nonetheless, there was a big New Years Party downtown. But even if Colosse is too bush league, there are plenty of great cities in the central time zone. Including the nation’s third (Chicago), fourth (Dallas-Fort Worth), and sixth (Houston) largest cities. Or if those places are not cool enough, you have Austin, Nashville, Memphis, San Antonio, or New Orleans.
There is no shortage of iconic cities outside the eastern time zone. So when we are counting down the new year, I respectfully request that we get to easily watch something other than a rerun (“time delay”) of New York doing the same. Seriously. I don’t care how awesome New York City is. It could be the most awesome place in the entire world. I don’t care. I would rather watch a Spanish broadcast out of Mexico City of people celebrating the New Year than watch a rerun of Dick Clark in NYC.
This is not hypothetical. When flipping through the channels, we ran across a Spanish broadcast. I didn’t actually think it was coming from Mexico City, but thought it might be coming from somewhere in Texas. That maybe the Spanish-language networks had more sense about such things since Spanish-language residents are split between the time-zones and that they might rotate between Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California. No dice. They were all about California.
I went to CMT hoping that maybe they might have something from Nashville. It was a feint hope, but I was getting desperate. There was one network that was coming out of Las Vegas, but they were basically announcing that they were going going to use a “New York Feed.” Which means, unless New York is dropping the ball every hour for four hours, a rerun. So even a broadcast out of Vegas was going to New York.
This is simply unacceptable.
Most of the country does not live in the eastern time zone. We deserve better than a retread of their celebration. It might be too much to ask that local news networks all (or mostly, or just sometimes) go really local with it, but it’s not too much to ask that we get to celebrate it with more than a damn VCR recording of New Yorkers. If we can just get one blockbuster site in each (continental) timezone, I will be happy. New York City, Memphis, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. There. Done. Get to it, you cities. Or rotate it. I don’t care. But middle America (and western America) need more pride than this.
We were continuing to watch after the ball fell in NY and noticed this as well. The other thing we noticed was that just about all of the performances from midnight eastern time were from LA (and even then, I think they were taped…not sure, and regardless were mostly filmed inside a club….it’s fishin’ Southern California!). It really is as if the Central and Mountain time zones didn’t exist. I mean, seriously, how difficult would it be to put something in Chicago? Or New Orleans? The Mountain time zone might be a little tougher, I suppose – Phoenix, Denver and Salt Lake City aren’t known as cultural meccas, but still I’m sure it wouldn’t be difficult to work something out.
The production in Times Square has an additional advantage — because the major networks all have studios right there in NYC, it’s cheap and easy for them to send crews and talent out to do it. There are fewer major network studios based in places like Nashville and New Orleans and Dallas.
This does not fully explain the lack of similar low-cost coverage from Los Angeles, though — perhaps the reason for this is that Los Angeles does not have a single focal point for large gatherings analagous to Times Square; Dodger Stadium, the Staples Center, the Colloseum, Venice Beach, all could be, with enough work and thought put in to logistics, made to host a public party like that but it’s a chore for most Angelenos to drive there (and get drunk there and then drive home). I guess the closest thing to Times Square here would be Hollywood Boulevard, but again that requires some logistics on the part of the city to shut down several blocks and get a lot of police out there. And even then, nearly everyone would have to drive there and figure out somewhere to park, and then figure out somewhere to sort of sober up before driving home. The El Pollo Loco on Fountain and Vine isn’t gong to cut it.
I am a little surprised that CW doesn’t have a “Nasvhille New Year.” Seems like an obvious fit. Cut a deal with the Grand Ole Opry, for cryin’ out loud, and there’s no shortage of major talent to hire.
I actually chose Memphis as a site for the central time zone because of the Liberty Bowl. ABC has camera crews there already!
May I propose that we go backward instead of forward? Rather than having different TV moments for dining in the New Year, how about not using the TV at all?
Kissing at midnight after watching people cheer on TV seems unromantic.
I tend to prefer going out for New Years. I used to go to my favorite music bar year in and year out. Unfortunately, the local music scene sort of dried up a few years ago (corresponding, I should add, with the smoking ban) and my bar didn’t even have a show this year.
The thing is, New Year’s is kind of “New York’s Holiday”, in the same way that Mardi Gras has come to “belong” to New Orleans, and the Fourth of July to DC (though that, at least, we can all kind of get behind — and there are a lot of local July Fourth televised fireworks displays, too).
I live in Chicago, and on Thanksgiving, one of the local networks gives a tiny amount of coverage to our own Thanksgiving parade-with-Santa-at-the-end (they’re the network that sponsors it), but most of the rest air New York’s, sponsored by Macy’s or whoever. And then there’s football all day.
There are local New Year’s celebrations in many cities, with local traditions, but somehow, culturally, the US seems to have decided that New York’s is the ‘Real’ one, with a secondary LA one (because LA can watch New York at dinner time and then have time to ramp up to their own).
Central and Mountain are used to having their TV delayed or messed with to match New York, anyway, so that may contribute.
I wonder what they do in Hawaii.