Tonight on Fox

 

Everyone thinks it is easy to promote Fox shows during the World Series or during football games. They don’t even consider that anyone even writes them. I bet most of the brainless hogs sitting there with their mouth open watching some roid-addled doofus try to hit something with a bat (big deal, I hit things with bats all the time and instead of being given millions of dollars I am usually asked to leave) think that Joe Buck simply goes off the top of his head and says things like “Tomorrow night it’s an all-new Grease Pyramid. Three more contestants try to climb the grease pyramid for $75,000 but they’ll have to fend off the Whackers, the Smackers, and their own friends and relatives. Are you slippery enough to beat the grease? An all-new Grease Pyramid tomorrow night. On Fox.” Do you think Buck actually could come up with “beat the grease?” Well even if you do, he didn’t.

Every day I wake up and open up The Box, which is a heavy safe that contains a half dozen different brands of smelling salts and I stick my head right in it and scream at the top of my lungs. Then I sit and watch four to six hours of new Fox television programming that I will need to come up with a promo for. This is a lot harder than it looks. You need to get to the essence of the show and sell it in a couple of sentences. You can’t just loiter around the point and hope the audience will get there because they are a bunch of dead-eyed cattle who think it’s impressive that a fat guy can throw something 90 miles an hour. So you can’t take 35 seconds to tell viewers that next Thursday on an all-new Stack, Stack faces his greatest threat yet: his own dad without telling people that Stack is actually a dog that turned into a man and became a detective with a powerful sense of smell like Phil did that time. You can’t just assume that people know that Stack is a dog-man!

You need to know what gets to the heart of the matter. There is an art to writing “Wednesdays on Fox, you’re gonna be glad you don’t have smell-o-vision with a brand new episode of America’s Stinkiest. Who is going to be the one who brings guest judge Breckin Meyer to his knees? America's stinkiest. After an an all-new Wyoming Plaid.” That requires a totally different type of promo than when you’re writing for “The Stink,” which is about a detective nicknamed “The Stink” who is as brilliant as he is irascible. These shows did not overlap, by the way. 

You think I care what happens to these shows after I write my promos? I don’t really watch TV anyway outside of work. The only thing that I know, for example, about Mantis & Mantis is that it is 2002’s hottest law drama and on this week’s episode a high-powered attorney’s biggest case yet is how to conceal his steamy affair with the opposing lawyer. Or that tomorrow night on Fart Circus, someone’s going to get farted on “real bad.” What I like to do is I go out late at night with my friends to an industrial park and line up a bunch of empty cans and we drive our motorcycles through them repeatedly which we call “riding the shark.” That’s the kind of stuff I’m into.

So the next time you hear Joe Buck say “Tuesday, it’s America’s funniest and rockin’est new comedy Butterface. Five friends. One band. Can they make it in L.A.? Who will end up with the bassist next door? And will the record company make them change their band name from Butterface? With original music by Shep Lunk. It’s Butterface, Tuesdays, on Fox” you’ll know that it wasn’t just some dumbass who came up with that. This is what I do.