Thanks to his presidential campaign, TV stations cannot air reruns of L&O in which he appears. The rule, to be inexact, is that a TV station/channel should not give more airtime to one presidential candidate over the other. And right now that's effecting the number of Law & Order reruns that can air.
I can deal with that. I'm not a big Law & Order fan, and besides, it's not that hard to get a fix of Law & Order. It's the Whammy of TV. You can flip through the channels at any given time, and if you flip long enough, you'll end up landing on a whammy (unless you memorize the board pattern, like this guy did), in this case a rerun of Law & Order. If you don't hit it on TNT, or TBS, there's USA. Even the Weather Channel has a special Law & Order: Environmental Crimes series on it.
Whatever. I can deal with it.
But I need my f*cking Tom Clancy movies on TBS, okay? I like Forrest Gump as much as the next guy (as long as the next guy is not this guy), and Rocky is tops. But once in a while I need some "Hunt For Red October" to switch it up a bit, you know?
Well f*ck if that isn't a Fred Thompson movie. So it's on the no-view list until he drops from the election. And it gets worse... here are some Fred Thompson movies we aren't getting to see:
Die Hard 2:
Yippee Kayyay Motherfucker. That's the best one! Did you know that Die Hard 2 won a Japanese Academy movie award for "Best Foreign Film"? I guess this is where I should link to Ben Stiller spoof of "Die Hard"? For the record, the original Die Hard, whether you like action movies or not, is one of the most iconoclastic movies of all time. It's like Rocky, in that it set the script for every movie that followed it.
Or how about this one:
That's right, it's Tom Cruise as the only athlete he could play, a race car driver (though he play a horse jockey, too, I suppose). This won an Oscar for "Best Sound", though not for the score, which was by the incredible Hans Zimmer. In fact, the multiply Oscar nominated Zimmer has scored lots of movies, but probably none worse than this one. His best score, in my opinion: "Point of No Return" (the "La Femme Nikita" remake).
Another example of a movie you can't see:
Now that's one sports movie that I actually want to see. It has Sinbad, Jason Bateman, Kathy Ireland, and Scott Bakula. Unfortunately, it also has Fred Thompson, so you can't see it until his presidential run is over.The same applies to Cape Fear, Class Action (that's the one where Gene Hackman gets into a court battle with his daughter), No Way Out, In The Line of Fire, and that one episode of Matlock.
For the sake of diversity on TBS (and Tom Clancy's residues)... Fred Thompson, please stop campaigning already!
Thanks to The Marathon Man for bringing this to my attention today.
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Jack Cobra always blowing up my spot! Who the hell under-50 watches AMC anyway? And since when do they show movies that aren't black & white?
I have basic cable and for some reason I have AMC, too. I watch a lot of movies on there. There have been a lot of movies the past week or so because of Veteran's Day. They have some good (but edited) movies on there.
Is this a law that only affects broadcast channels, not cable channels? Because I've been seeing plenty of Law & Order on TNT, including Fred Thompson episodes. I've become addicted. Granted, I watch the show differently than most people (sometimes I skip the first half hour because it's boring; I really only like the lawyer half of the show. And when I do watch the first half, I'm always wondering why the cops are so mean to everybody they talk to and speculating on how close they are to violating the Constitution).
Pacifist Viking: Good question. This blog post right here gets into the details of the law, and points out the FCC has really yet laid down a clear decision on how to treat cable channels:
"Of course, the Colbert Report does not appear on broadcast television, and there is language in the law that applies equal opportunities only to local origination cablecasting. Some read this provision to exclude network cable programs (witness the continued airing of Law and Order on cable). However, that issue has never been definitively decided by the FCC."
Hunt for Red October has been on AMC like 60 times this month