The credits crunch

There has never been a better time to say you’re in show business.

No, not because of the proliferation of cable networks. It’s true that there are now a billion cable channels, from the Speed channel to the Slow Motion Replay channel. And all of these cable channels offer programs that are live, or at least that’s what the titles say. There’s “Live With Regis and Kelly,” “Emeril Live,” “London Live,” “Golf Talk Live,” “Saturday Night Live” and “Sunday Night Live With Father Benedict Groeschel,” to name a few. But remarkably, almost all of these shows aren’t live. Well, there were live when there were taped, but you’re not seeing them live. And even more remarkably, a lot of live shows feature people who are now dead. There are more live people on an episode of “Ghost Whisperer” than there are on a lot of “live” shows. And as long as “live” shows can get away with using a bunch of dead people, it’s going to be tough to find work in show business.

And yet there never has been a better time to say you’re in show business.

No, not because of reality TV. It’s true that there are fewer shows that seem to require “actors” and more shows that seem to require “real people.” And because of that, you might be seriously considering leaving your dead-end job in Kalamazoo and heading to one of these reality programs. But be warned. You have to audition to be a real person, just like you have to audition to be a fake person. It’s not enough to be real. You have to pretend to be the kind of real person that reality show producers want. And ask yourself this question: If reality shows just want people who are acting like their normal, regular selves, why do these shows all have a director? Yes, all of these reality shows have someone directing you how to act sort of real. At this rate, I expect that sometime soon someone will open up an acting school for reality shows. It will take years of intensive training for you to be real enough to be on one of these programs. You’ll have to learn such important things as asking the director, “What was my motivation for sneezing just then?” And so there will be actors in fake shows and actors in real shows, and it will be as tough as ever to find work in show business.

And yet there has never been a better time to say you’re in show business.

It’s not because of all the channels and not because of all the reality shows. It’s because of the credits at the end of all the movies and other programs you see on TV.

There used to be a time when a show would spend a couple of minutes rolling the credits over the full television screen so you could see the names of all the people in front of the camera and behind the camera. And Aunt Martha back in Tonganoxie could see the name of her nephew Jimmy and be proud of the fact that he had a job on “Different Strokes.”

But for Aunt Martha to feel that same kind of pride these days, she needs to be a speed reader with 20-5 vision. That’s because what once were full-screen credits that lasted a couple of minutes have been smooshed into a tiny corner of the screen and sped up so they take all of five seconds. Television networks use the rest of the screen to tell you what the next show will be, trying to hook you into that program. They’re deathly afraid that if they end a show properly with a decent listing of credits, you’ll get deathly bored, grab your remote control and search elsewhere for amusement.

Aunt Martha in Tonganoxie be damned.

So Jimmy could quit his dead-end job in Kalamazoo, go out to Hollywood, hit a bunch of show business dead ends and finally get a job running rides at Disneyland, but still tell Aunt Martha to look for him in the five-second credits at the end of “CSI: Dubuque.”

And that’s why there has never been a better time to say you’re in show business.