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I grew up watching the Tournament of Roses Parade (or as we called it, “The Rose Parade”) every New Year’s Day. Even now, when I wake up on January 1, I immediately think “gotta watch the parade,” and this year was no exception. The parade has had its ups and downs, and I think last year it didn’t get much coverage. But this year the Grand Marshall was George Lucas, and there was a lot of Star Wars-related publicity.I started watching on ABC, and I have to wonder – did they have a sound engineer in the booth today? Was anyone at ABC actually watching their own coverage? I don’t see how they could have let the bloody awful sound quality continue if they were. If I were an ABC exec I would have been on the phone firing people left and right! The sound of the bands and the float performers was horribly muffled, and even worse, you could barely hear the commentators at all. Often that’s not a bad thing because the commentator banter is pretty terrible itself, but it is nice to be able to hear that a float won this or that award, and some of the related trivia. I was also struck by how amateurish the camera angles and direction were – it was like they had their third-string team on the job today. In short, it blew.

At that point I switched over to NBC, where I found things not much better. At least you could hear the commentators – but in this case that was not such a good thing. Nancy O’Dell and Billy Bush of Access Hollywood were providing the extremely annoying and banal chatter. Billy Bush is one of these douchebags who really annoys me. I mean, I can’t stand him, no matter what he’s on, and the parade was no different. And the other thing that completely sucked about NBC’s coverage was an affliction that ABC’s also suffered from – too many damn commercials. Not only did they break for commercials frequently, but when they were showing the parade itself they were flogging their own shows non-stop with “on-screen” ads that took up 1/3 of the screen real estate (not really a great idea when you’re watching a visual presentation like a parade, folks).

So thank GOD for HGTV. Their audio level was a little low, but I got around it by turning up the volume (something that would not have helped ABC’s muffled, problematic mixing). Their commentators were professionals who didn’t talk TOO much and didn’t say outright stupid shit (like Billy Bush) when they did talk. There was no flogging of network TV shows and NO commercials! That’s right, HGTV had commercial-free coverage, which I thought was totally awesome. Way to go, HGTV!