I have never been a big fan of award shows. I don't watch the Oscars, the Tonys, the Emmys, the BET Awards, the CMT Awards, or any other WTF Awards show out there. Instead of being about the fans and the entertainment, award shows end up being industry love-fests where celebrities drool all over each other. And few, if any, of these awards shows are worse than ESPN's ESPY awards.
Way back in day, I used to be excited about the ESPYs. I not only watched, but even taped the first ever ESPY award show. An award show that celebrates the best in sports over the last year? Sign me up. Then it began to pander to celebrities - actors and actresses and the like. No thanks.
So with my normal Sunday night routine of unwinding to baseball destroyed thanks to the ESPYs, I embarked on a channel surfing journey to find something interesting to watch. Admittedly, I am not an avid TV watcher and I don't have any routine shows, so I was embarking into the vast programming unknown. Fortunately, I only had to travel less than a dozen channels before I landed on CNBC's Marijuana Inc, an exposé on the pseudo-legal marijuana business in Northern California.
Now I am not going to push my opinion either way, nor admit or deny any prior usage, but I have always been interested in the weed business. Back in my college days, I used to play Dope Wars non-stop. Perhaps you remember that. Perhaps not.
Anyway, CNBC's broadcast went behind the scenes in Northern California's Mendocino County, a place where selling weed is a booming business and millions in marijuana money is brought into the local economy each year. Thanks to a tangled web of federal, state, and local laws, growers are allowed to grow, buyers are allowed to buy, and smokers are allowed to smoke. CNBC talked to cafe owners who sell out of storage areas, entrepreneurs who want to turn parts of Oakland into the second coming of Amsterdam, housewives who attend classes on how not to get caught selling, and the poor DEA and local authorities who are trying to restore order in this Mecca of Mary Jane.
After Marijuana, Inc ended, what to watch then was a no-brainer. The next show on CNBC was a similar expose on the porn industry entitled Porn: The Business of Pleasure. You can't tell me the folks at CNBC didn't know what they were doing, broadcasting two hours of content on two topics my demographic (18-35, male, single, and bored) love as much as sports. You are correct, CNBC, in lieu of sports, weed and women work just fine.
Although there were the expected images of bikini clad women throughout the broadcast, the porn business expose was not all about the T&A. Did you know the porn industry is worth over 13 billion dollars? Did you also know that adult DVD sales have dropped between 30 and 50% in the last few years? That's what this show covered, the money, the people, and the technology behind the business of horizontal body banging.
All in all, it was an enjoyable night of television entertainment. I did find it interesting, however, that the host of the weed documentary was casually dressed in jeans and a polo shirt, and the host of the porn special was gussied up in knee-high boots and heavy make-up. And I also had a chuckle every time they mentioned women in executive positions of the porn industry being "on top". I'm not sure if those things were worth noticing, or if they were a big deal to anyone else. Maybe I was thinking too much.
Maybe I should have relaxed, rolled one up, popped in a movie, and conducted my own research.
