WHY GOD CREATED YOUTUBE™: "Only On NBC" Promo (1988)

A very particular symptom of my love/hate television psychosis is my fascination with network television promos. While it's always exciting to see what horrible new shows a network has cooked up for the year, when they choose to promote them with an overblown production number like the one above, the cringe factor rises to new levels of intensity. Is it wrong that when I see television actors being forced to dance and sing along to cheesy marketing slogans that I am somehow reminded of the dance of death in The Seventh Seal?

And while this promo doesn't have the best jingle in the world ("Let's All Be There" will always be the true NBC classic), it does feature everything you could ask for from a misguided network promo: three-camera coverage of Michael Landon holding a balloon, Jay Leno with black hair, and Estelle Getty in a football uniform.

We also get to see how many of the "real" stars of shows can't be bothered to film this promo crap, as Fred Dryer from Hunter and several of the cast members of Cheers sit this one out. And, as per usual with these NBC promos, their decision to ultimately oust David Letterman is foreshadowed by not including a single shot of anyone connected with Late Night. But at least they went through the hassle to hire a dancer stand-in for that ridiculous sequence with Michael Landon, which leads to my favorite YouTube comment on this video:

"Seeing Mike Landon dance like that makes be [sic] sad, thinking how a guy with so much energy would be dead three years later."

Reading moronic YouTube comments like that makes me sad, thinking how a guy with so little ability to delineate fantasy from reality would actually be able to operate a personal computer.

Truly, this is why God created YouTube.