“Fast tracked”
You see it on the Seven, Nine and Ten networks.
Ladies and gentlemen, this week’s episode of House will not be artificially held back for several months it will be fast-tracked direct from the US. The new hit series Flange will not be held back to see how popular it is with US audiences first, it will be fast-tracked to our screens.
Every now and then an immensely irritating buzzword will make the rounds. Fast-tracked is one such irritation. It means nothing. It means that instead of sitting on new episodes for a few months, they only sit on them for a week or two. Basically Australian TV networks are being a little less sucky and trying to pass it off as a favour.
Let’s take NCIS as an example. This week’s episode, Agent Afloat, aired on US television on September 30th. It will air here on October 7th. That’s a delay of just seven days. How does that compare to those sad sad days before the wonderful and lovely era of fast-tracking? Well, an episode from last season, Recoil, aired locally on August 26th and in the US on 5th June. That’s a 51 day delay. I’m not saying fast-tracking is a bad thing, I’m saying it’s something that you should be doing anyway, so stop acting like you’re doing me a favour!
And another thing, it’s not like Australian networks have to tape these episode from US TV and then play them back to us the following week. All networks, US, Australian and worldwide, get these episode from various distributers, I’m thinking, weeks ahead of time. It’s just a matter of scheduling, and yet they let the marketing folks get a hold of it and now it’s fast-tracked this and fast-tracked that.
It means nothing! It’s just a load of marketing rubbish! Ahhhhhh!
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Post-script: It usually takes me a few months to craft these blog entries, but as a personal favour, this entry has been rapid-pathed to you, my reading public, in one single afternoon. A service that is exclusive to Blogge de Tom.
Update: Spotted last night – “Fastracked”. Notice that the last ‘t’ from ‘fast’ and the first ‘t’ from ‘tracked’ have been merged into one. My fury grows.
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