doodledee

NBC's Thursday night comedy line-up* is referred to as "homework" by some of us at the office. The idea is that, no matter how late you need to stay up, you literally *have* to watch the shows the night they air, because recapping the plot and recycling the jokes is such a cube farm ritual that by not watching, you can actually wreck your coworkers' Friday. They want to come in and draw a mark on your hand, punt somebody's garbage can, and set their im status to something "funny", etc, etc. I'm sure we're far from the only people who behave this way, though to be fair, we're probably more dorky than most.

And that's where NBC isn't helping us out. Example: last night's Office featured a running joke about a crazy ringtone. Great stuff. Of course the first thing work.buddy.Hoffmaldo does when he finishes the episode is jump on the NBC website, credit card in hand, ready to fork over a couple of bucks to buy the ringtone, just for the 15 minutes of yucks it will get the next morning. And it would have been genius. Except for one thing. There's no ringtone for sale. Just like there were no bathrobes a couple weeks ago. Or Dundee statues before that. Or Timberlake boxes. Or Timberlake box song ringtones. Instead, they offer [free] bonus clips or the [free] producers cut. And when you think about how hard they push people to GO TO NBC.COM after every show, it's dumbfounding that they aren't cramming 'buzz-driven' junk down your throat. Seriously, duh. Especially for the easy digital stuff (ringtones), super duh.

I must be missing something.

* - Scrubs, Office, and 30 Rock (now minus Scrubs, because it suddenly sucks, and I gave it up.)