There’s something profoundly weird about watching the product of your entire day’s work (and in most cases at the show, significantly more work) go over the TV airwaves.
I realized that there’s a big difference between working on a TV show, and realizing you’re working on a TV show when you actually see the finished product on the air.
Example: I’ve been working for a few days with the girls that were brought in for our “Let’s Pimp Out Our P.A.!” Dating Game-type segment (more tactfully called “Jeff’s Search For Love” on the show).
It’s actually been quite fun, the girls have all been extremely nice and pretty chill about everything, which has obviously made my life and those of the segment producers much easier.
But despite the fact that I work with all these people and know that they go out to the stage and I have to run around trying to wrangle things and I’ve watched the video feed of the taping, somehow, it doesn’t seem like it really happens.
That is, until I watch the stuff I tape onto TiVo of each afternoon’s broadcast. Somehow, when commercials are inserted, it all seems a lot more real, and you realize that millions of people have just watched what you, in some small way, helped create.
It’s very surrealistic, especially because the show airs a day after we tape it, so it’s like watching some weird replay of two days ago by the time I finally watch it.
I’m sure after a couple more weeks, I’ll laugh that this has given me something of an existential dilemma. Until then, however, I’m still gonna be pondering the oddity of it all.