Tony Talk

So I signed up for the free trial of Paramount+ in order to watch the Tony Awards special and I couldn't get it to work on my TV. Everything was outta sync — sometimes so wildly that I was watching one winner accepting the trophy while hearing the speech of the next winner. This was only on this one channel. The other streaming channels I checked were fine.

Resets and reboots didn't solve the problem but I did see a lot of menus showing me what else I could watch on Paramount+. I realized I really didn't need that channel so I watched the Tonys on my computer — where it played fine — and then canceled my subscription.

By carving the Tony Awards into two separate shows, they effectively wound up with two hours of The Stuff You Have To Sit Through To Get To The Good Stuff, interrupted by a little of The Good Stuff. This was followed by the two hours on CBS which featured most of The Good Stuff. I enjoyed the CBS segment but wonder if we'll ever get back to one Tony telecast that mixes the awards and the musical presentations. American Television needs to face the mounting reality that the public really doesn't want to watch people get awards…especially people they've never heard of involved with shows and films they haven't seen.

Both shows were marred by occasional slip-ups and technical problems but, hey, that's live TV. I enjoyed the presentation on CBS and, as they intended, I sure felt that Broadway is back.