Power Brady Lunch Bunch

Is there any more miserable programming than mid-day CNBC? If so I would like to see it because I’ve been catching Power Lunch while on the treadmill at the gym whenever I can sneak out of the office during lunch. It always feels like the same routine, I first put on Sportscenter to watch Chris McKendry and Jay Harris dissect last night’s Royal’s game in more ways than we dissected that frog in the 8th grade. I then try to watch some Judge Judy which makes me want to stab myself in the eye with an ice pick and finally find myself surfing over to channel 14.

Now I’m have my issues with Mad Money or Fast Money but nothing is more brutal than their mid-day shows. The set they us is a cross between Hollywood Squares and Around the Horn and they have about 15 people sitting there on the air, the only thing missing is Bruce Vilanch sitting center square.

But when you get into the nuts and bolts of this show, I can only describe this as watching sports-radio on television but instead of having one host and one caller, they have about five hosts and another 10 callers and they all talk at the same time. It’s enough to make you want to poke your ears out with an ice-pick. What the shtick seems to be that CNBC (fresh off their beating by Jon Stewart about two months ago) is so afraid of being wrong about anything that they just get 100 guys in the studio and have each guy defending every stock or position so that they are completely covered and cannot be considered partisan or a bunch of cheerleaders for the market. So instead of being insightful they are so unspecific that there is no longer any position at all.

So they set up in the Brady Bunch format and the anchor (one of whom looks like a bit like Courtney Cox) asks them a general question and they all pass the baton without any of them saying anything. The one thing they all seem to agree on is that they don't want to have the channel take any position on a stock. The concept is basically like Around The Horn where they throw a question to the peanut gallery and undoubtedly you will get one idiot to say "sell" another idiot to say "buy" and a third idiot to say "hold" and i'm left to say "where is my ice-pick"