I was watching TV tonight and the show wasn’t really holding my attention. Big surprise, I know. This is the week a bunch of new shows start and a bunch of old shows start up again. Really, I was expecting more from my TV week. It’s more than half over and things need to pick up or I might need to turn to my homework for distraction. Tragic.

Since the show wasn’t really doing it for me, my mind began to wander. I started noticing things you never really notice, like commercials, for example. Most of the time I record the shows and skip through commercials, but even when I watch in real time, my mind kind of skips past the commercials. The TV people have trained us to do that. I think in the old days before DVR, people used to use the commercial breaks to go to the bathroom, change the laundry, make a sandwich, or other semi-productive activities. Now I see my parents do what I do. We look at our phones.

Not tonight. Tonight, for some reason, I started watching the commercials, which might mean some Ad Agency people haven’t completely wasted their lives. But mostly they have. As I watched, all three of the commercials were very familiar to me. Actually it was, like, six or seven commercials, but some of them repeated and repeated again, once back to back. They do that a lot now. It’s a little like someone flicking you on the end of your nose to get your attention. I’m not a fan.

So I watched these very familiar commercials and decided that unless I made it a game to figure it out, I had no idea what product each commercial was selling. I mean I could tell one was for a phone service. I just couldn’t remember which one. That started me thinking about the internet and my surfing habits. I like a good list as much as anyone, and I will reflexively click on the click-bait even knowing what I’m getting myself into. I just really want to see which seven NBA players someone really thinks are the hottest, or which wives, or which ten text breakups are the funniest. You get the idea.

The advertisers have come up with all kinds of ways to sneak their dark arts into my shameful list consumption. My favorites are the ones that steal your screen and redirect you to the App Store for something completely unrelated to anything else on the sketchy click-bait site you were willingly visiting. But at least all of those annoying, in-your-face, dirty tricks seem relatively cheap. Sleazy kind of makes more sense when you pair it with low-rent.

So with all that in mind I’m watching these commercials — some of them over and over — and thinking someone spent some real money on them. I’m not saying Tarantino was behind the camera or that the Star Wars people did the effects, but I’ve seen enough of those self-indulgent behind the scenes shows about a show to know that even commercials have to have writers, a director, “talent” (minor though it may be), and a small army of assorted technical people for the lights, cameras, and stuff. Also, I’m assuming the commercials aren’t just the random dreams of some car company executive. Seems like they probably fit into some bigger plan that includes, among other things, the sleazy screen grabbing ads on my favorite sleazy click-bait sites. Those people probably get paid for doing what they do.

The point is, each of these commercials, which I have seen many times but only noticed because the show they were mixed in with was so dull I couldn’t help myself, cost someone a lot of money to put in the middle of that awful show. Kind of ironic that I only notice the commercials when the show isn’t good yet I’m pretty sure good shows get to charge more for their advertising time, which I know from Netflix is 18 or 19 minutes out of every hour of programming.

But that’s not my point. It’s interesting, but it’s not my point. My real point is that I feel bad for all the people involved in making those commercials. I’m sure they didn’t believe they were creating great art like, say, Pretty Little Liars, but they are probably very creative people who honestly put their little hearts into those commercials that no one really watches anymore because DVR and smartphones, and our own brains have rendered commercials pretty much irrelevant.

My sympathy for the commercial makers also failed to hold my attention for long so I started thinking about things in shows that are there without being noticed. The best one I came up with was the laugh track. A lot of shows don’t have laugh tracks anymore. You could say “live studio audience” instead of laugh track but we are all a little too cynical to believe that. Just like we assume every live singing performance we see on TV is a lip-sync, because most of them are. If you think about it too hard the laugh track can make you mad, as in “golly, I’m so glad the TV people put those laughs there so I would know when I was supposed to think something is funny.” The truth is laugh tracks have been part of TV for so long you almost notice them more when they’re missing. Some shows are better without them and some seem to work better with them. Or maybe you just get used to it either way.

That got me thinking deep thoughts. I started wondering if the people in the shows realized they were fictional people. Maybe the only way they can tell is the laugh track, because life doesn’t have a laugh track except sometimes when you do something dumb in public and you have really crappy friends. Or maybe they think the laugh track is normal — like clouds or thunder are to us. And then I wondered briefly if I might be a fictional character. Frankly, it would explain a lot if the annoying stuff that keeps happening to me is really just for other people’s entertainment.

Then my head started to hurt a little so I went back to watching the boring show and the slightly less boring commercials. And I tried to put out of my head the fact that sometimes I can almost hear the laugh track playing in the background as I stumble through my days. I hope somebody is enjoying it all, even if they are laughing at me instead of with me.