As we polish off the last of the Thanksgiving leftovers, yet another reason for our gratitude: this year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade got its biggest TV audience ever, with a staggering 28.5 million viewers tuning in. Not only does this make it the most-watched entertainment program of the year, it also surpasses some NFL numbers — “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” indeed.
This auspicious win for humble, wholesome tradition becomes all the sweeter when you consider TV’s biggest losers. Emmys ratings hit an all-time low last year (the strike has postponed this year’s broadcast until January), while the MTV VMAs couldn’t quite crack a million viewers (a far cry from the 2011 peak of 12.4 million). Most satisfying is the dismal viewership for this year’s Oscars, which despite a 12% bounce to 18.7 million viewers was the third-least watched Academy Awards in its history (last year’s Will Smith hissy fit edition was the second-worst).
This of course has to do with all the seismic changes the internet has caused. But it also has at least a little bit to do with our increasing disinterest in watching our supposed moral superiors celebrate each other in a bloated, self-important ceremony that lasts longer than the average Easter Vigil. Not even the promise of more celebrity-on-celebrity violence is enough to justify spending three and a half hours in the company of that human COVID vaccine Jimmy Kimmel.
The hokey, yet comforting display of yesteryear’s intellectual property gliding serenely above Sixth Avenue is another matter. And why not? Parade floats don’t express their poorly considered political views (although this year some “pro-Palestinian protesters” tried and failed to impose their artistic direction), make stale, labored jokes, or indulge in ginned-up controversy. Nor do they demand our rapt attention. They’re perfectly happy to float on in the background of our annual family gathering while we attend to the more important matter of talking and eating and, yes, even arguing.
What is this media-driven obsession with Thanksgiving table combat, anyway? It’s as if the media want us to dread this family time as much as possible, to see it as an onerous obligation to be gotten over with so we can get back to the endless scrolling and clicking and commenting that keep them relevant. The truth we risk forgetting is that in normal, in-person interaction, people instinctively focus on what they have in common, not what divides them.
The most talked-about “star” of this year’s parade was a giant inflatable acorn. It used to be paired with a float of Scrat, the animated prehistoric squirrel whose doomed pursuit of this treasure was a running joke throughout the half-forgotten “Ice Age” franchise of the 2000s. Both floats were retired after 2017, but in 2021 parade organizers realized the acorn worked just fine on its own. How delightfully generic it is, unmoored from any dreary invitation to consume. An acorn: a symbol of fall and the harvest. But also maybe a symbol of our — and our country’s — potential for new growth after destruction. An acorn, after all, becomes an oak, a mighty tree whose extensive root system and thick bark allow it to survive even the most devastating fires. But maybe I’m reading too much into a simple parade. It’s remarkable how the mind wanders once you clear a path for it.