First, if you missed our first two-hour show, you missed arguably one of our best shows to date. We talked workplace crazies, we talked sports and we talked television commercials (with a touch of skanky old women in leather halter dresses) all in 120 minutes. You can find the replay in our player above.
But Sunday … let’s say it wasn’t an easy road to get to that two hours.
There’s a lot you don’t get to see in terms of what goes into doing a show. To start, all four of us — me, Jeff and Ed and the executive producer Paige — have 40-plus-hour-a-week jobs. That doesn’t leave a whole lot of time to do show planning, especially since only 50 percent of us actually live in the same area code.
Sometime around today or tomorrow, I come up with the main theme with the help of our team and whoever else feeds my brain with ideas. I look for articles, do a lot of reading and a lot of worrying, call Jeff a couple of times a day, freak out to Paige about how we’ll never fill two hours and ask Ed what I missed on “Ron and Fez” this week because I wasn’t listening (they sometimes have GREAT ideas) and see what he’s thinking in terms of our music for the week.
Once all of that starts to come somewhat into focus, I start watching a lot of TV and forgetting about it all until Saturday afternoon … and then I panic again.
Because we’re still getting used to the new setup at NowLive, we’ve been doing some test shows. For now, we’re keeping them available because, well, trainwrecks are funny. It’s funny to hear what happens when people try out sound effects, go through several volume checks and cue the startup music a few times.
This past Sunday … in a word? Hilarious.
At 5 p.m. we decided to do a cast call (haha!) for a sound check. The reason? My home Internet service, Charleston’s cable provider Suddenlink Communications, is a little less than reliable. In fact, I’ve started to think of Internet service at home as more of a gift rather than something that actually gets paid for. If I come home at night after work and the gym and it’s there, so much the better.
About 10 minutes into or soundcheck this week, I started getting “choppy.” Paige said my voice was cutting in an out and Ed was having hard time hearing me on the line. I start closing extra applications to make sure that I’m not dragging down my connection speed on my own. About this time, Ed decides to hang up and call back from his other phone just in case it was AT&T’s reception where he was hanging out.
Ed hangs up.
My Internet is gone.
And at that point, I realize that even if Ed calls back, nobody can take him off of “mute.”
(Which, hey, some weeks that would have been OK, right?)
And at that minute, Paige (who by this point has conferenced me in to keep testing our options) and I start laughing.
Really, really hard.
Ed calls back. Ed’s on mute. Ed thinks we’re playing a joke on him and just “trying to keep the man down” and “silencing the comic genius.” He keeps waiting for us to take him off of mute, despite our insisting that we can’t. He then begins to entertain himself in the chatroom listening to us make fun of him.
The segment’s locked because I lost my connection before ending the segment and NowLive.com hasn’t recognized that I’m actually gone.
Oh, and nobody can end the show but me. And I’m at least 7 miles away from a stable Internet connection.
(I would suggest actually listening to the test show and reading the chat log from that run to really get the whole picture of how it all went down … it’s high quality entertainment, actually.)
With the help of a Super Big Gulp of diet Mountain Dew from my neighborhood 7-Eleven, I make it to what henceforth is known only as “our undisclosed location.”
And then the printer didn’t work.
But I had an Internet connection!
I’ll be working on this weekend’s show the next couple days, so really, if you’re one of this site’s visitors, why don’t you go over, register for the forum and leave your ideas? Or you can leave them here as a comment. We’re not doing this because we like hearing ourselves talk. OK, well, we kind of are, but we’d much rather be givin’ you what you want.
No, not that, sicko.
We’ll see you back Sunday night at 8 for another two hours. Oh, and get off your ass and call in, OK?
Filed under: life, show news, show topics
