Last night as I was browsing through the stations there was little to grab my attention, that is until I navigated to Bravo which was airing the movie Heat starring Robert DeNiro and Al Pachino. I’ve seen the film before but why not watch it again as I finish a bottle of vino. I started to watch the movie around 10 pm however I believe it actually started at 9pm. It was scheduled to run till 1 am in the morning. Now the original running time for Heat is about 171 minutes so the extra hour and then some would have to be filled with commercials. I figured I’d watch the movie for a couple of hours and then hit the sack.

I ended up watching the entire movie (at least from my starting point) or should I rather say I watched a ton of commercials with bits and pieces of the movie in between. Really, I felt like I watched three hours of commercials rather than three hours of a movie.

I began to time this at the very end. Bravo would show about 6 minutes of movie and run 5 minutes of commercials. Do the math and one is quick to realize that some of the original movie was cut just to fit in all the commercials.

It is bad enough to sit through a three hour movie and have to watch that many commercials but in Bravo’s case, the majority of the commercials were for their own shows. I watched the same commercials for Top Chef and Real Housewives of Orange County over and over again. It seemed like every 6 minutes of movie and I was forced to watch commercials for these two Bravo shows as well as many other repetitive and internal commercials.

Now I realize why it has been forever since I watched anything on Bravo – they suck! And it will be forever again. In fact I was so frustrated of having the climax of Heat interrupted with the same repetitive commercials Bravo was airing that I vow to never watch the station again.

In fact, I think the next time I want to watch any movie that I come across on a commercial-driven television station, I’ll just jump on my PC and add the film to my Netflix queue.