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What is happening to television? Doesn't anyone believe in integrity? There's so much sham, so much deception, so much manipulation.
Take the cliffhanger, a classic TV maneuver to inflate ratings. The furtive strategy calls for a series to end its season on a contrived note of mystery that entices viewers to tune in at the start of the next season to find out what happened.
Is there no honor in TV, no principle, no sense of decency? Using artificial stimuli to hype a series is not only a sellout, it's a betrayal of art itself, a shameful, contemptible trick that should be banished from the airwaves.
On CBS, "Murphy Brown" pulled it. . . .
Uh, just a minute. My phone is ringing. I'll be right back.
"Hello? What? I thought I told you never to call me here again. Stop pestering me! We're through, do you hear, through? And don't bother threatening me, either. It won't work! I'm on to your games!"
Sorry for the interruption. As I was saying about underhanded tricks, "Murphy Brown" pulled one at the end of this season by having Murphy get pregnant with the identity of the father...