I was watching American Gladiators the other day (cut me some slack, it’s a guilty pleasure–I used to watch it when I was younger and was very excited to hear that NBC was bringing it back) when I noticed some "liberal editing" that seems to have been going on for several weeks now.  After the third or fourth commercial break into the hour, the program returned with a "recap" showing several events that had been excised from the show altogether along with a missive to "go to NBC.com to watch the events" in their entirety.

Here’s the trouble with that.

When I’m parked on my couch watching American Gladiators on the television, the last thing that I want to do is pause the TiVo, go to the computer, go to NBC.com, find the American Gladiators homepage, figure out where they keep the "full-length unedited video clips," figure out which clips are the ones that I’ve just been denied the right to see, and then watch them before returning to the show.  It’s pointless for me to watch them after the fact, since I’ll already know who won.

The fundamental problem here is that the producers of the show, perhaps in a well-intentioned effort to lengthen the amount of content contained in the show, have off-loaded a sizable chunk of it to the Internet, which is admirable, but it illustrates a misunderstanding of media consumption modes.  The idea is this–when a consumer is engaged with a particular form of media, it’s distracting and sometimes difficult (not to mention annoying) to put that consumption on hold in order to deal with another form of media.

Here’s another example.  If you’re at the gym on the treadmill listening to your iPod while you run, you can look at the bank of televisions overhead (and if you’re lucky they’ll have closed-captioning turned on, but usually at my gym they don’t), but if you see something interesting such as a bit of breaking news, in order to devote your full attention to the TV you have to pause your iPod, take out your headphones, readjust to the ambient sound level around you, and hope that the sound on the particular TV you were just looking at is turned up.

I’d suggest that the Gladiators producers offload some of the extraneous interviews and filler that they do with the contenders to the website rather than the events themselves. Wouldn’t that make more sense?