Dinner & A Movie

I’m fairly certain that Dinner & A Movie is as close as we’ll ever come to the perfect television program. If only it were on broadcast television so that the entire nation was guaranteed viewing access. The show inner-splices a movie, a cooking show, and commercials; it doesn’t get any better than that unless you’re paying extra to watch it on HBO without the commercials! It airs on a Friday night, which is perfect because it gives women an entertaining distraction from worrying about their husbands that have gone out on ‘business’ AND shows them how to cook new and tasty dishes for their husbands when they return. If only there was a way to allow the women to watch TV in the kitchen so that they wouldn’t have to run back and forth…

In relative seriousness, though, I do find Dinner & A Movie to be fairly decent. The movies chosen are generally middle-line movies that can appeal to the largest demographics possible, so there’s not a lot of chick-flicks. Another thing I like about Dinner & a Movie is that they act intelligently naïve. They are almost always plugging a certain product within the cooking segment of the show both through product utilization within the normal cooking segment, as well as with cut-aways where one of the cooking segment’s talent endorses the product in the classic style of the fifties sponsor-promos. To see a program attempting this archaic and already-seen-through promotional system would be amusingly ridiculous in any other program, but Dinner & a Movie not only uses the system but also utilizes the ridiculousness of the system by presenting to promo in a sardonic way, which allows the product to be successfully advertised because the viewers both enjoy the commercial and are exposed to the product. The show has in no way broken from TV’s tradition of pushing consumable products, but they have begun to utilize the knowledge of the tradition to help continue the tradition. So PoMo. Retchingly reflexive. Still enjoyable, though.