"It's a Wonderful Life" -- the Unrated 3-Hour Director's Cut?

I was looking at the TV directory tonight and noticed that "It's a Wonderful Life" is being broadcast. It has been a few years since I've seen the outstanding Frank Capra classic, and the thought of settling down with the TV was just taking hold when I noticed that 3 full hours of time were blocked out of the Saturday night schedule for the movie.

Excuse me while I take a moment. ........

Alright..... Did we just say... Three hours....? With a straight face?

You know, I had forgotten that "It's a Wonderful Life" was a road picture. Funny. I don't even recall where they put the intermission...

Well-justified, cable-directed sarcasm aside for a moment (I may require it again despite my best effort), I do not have an entire evening to waste (time is money, you know, and Americans are busy, busy, busy) seeing an atmospheric cinema favorite that has been fine-tuned with a hatchet.

You see, the actual running time of the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, according to Leonard Maltin's expertly edited books, is 86 minutes.

Eighty-six minutes.

For those of you who like things boiled down a bit, 86 minutes is 4 minutes under an hour and a half. Only 90. Minutes.

But NBC sets aside 3 hours... I can only imagine what fabulous and worthwhile DVD extras NBC might provide during the holiday presentation to occupy the remainder of that prodigious hunk of time.

Surely there must be another half of the evening loaded like a Horn of Plenty with rich additional materials.

The alternative would be that NBC's "holiday presentation of a beloved American classic" grinds along at an interminable and indecypherable HALF SPEED. With commercial content as long as the movie. As long as the movie. As long as the movie.

When TV was absolutely free over the air, commercial breaks were shorter than they are now that cable charges at least $60 a month for a marginal, analog, hype-laden product.

Think about that. For this kind of unrestrained butchery of your programs, programs which are why you turn on the TV, some otherwise smart Americans have been conditioned to pay $60-150 a month for a coaxial cable drilled through the siding.

If you're paying a lot of money for MORE commercials than you used to get for FREE with a UHF or VHF antenna in your attic ... You have been given the silver-plated shaft by the cable or dish or fiber-optic business in the last few years. Either commercials finance TV, or we do. But not both.

There is still time to kick the habit before the delusion that we have to pay $150 a month for commercial TV takes hold.

Here's an effective prescription for descriminating viewers -- As long as they insist upon trying to insert ads into your programming -- Go to Radio Shack. Get yourself a $50 attic or roof antenna to attach to your co-axial cable.

Watch commercial TV for nothing, as it was intended.

Commercial TV, or radio, was never supposed to cost money. The ads are the price you pay for free TV. Any other pitch is just cable wire and snake oil.

If somebody wants to SELL me media hardware or software, fine, but I peel off the ad labels when I get home, I put that media into my own personal home theater, and enjoy my media clean and uninterrupted.

If you load your product with ads and other graffiti? -- It's a promotional give-away. Don't expect ME to forget that.