The Boston Pops and the Glorious Fourth

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I have been whining and complaining about CBS and its miserable broadcast of the Boston Pops annual 4th of July show from the Esplanade in Boston for about ten years now. It looks like the Pops and CBS separated after the 2013 Fireworks Spectacular, as unless you lived in Boston the only way to see the show in 2014 was on a live webcast. That remains the same this year. If you live in Boston you can watch on WBZ-TV from 8-11pm EDT, otherwise you have to watch the livestream.

Following last year’s first-ever live webcast of the event, the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular will stream live online AT BOSTONPOPSJULY4th.org, bringing Boston’s famous July 4 celebration once again to a worldwide audience.

Well, good. The webcast can’t possibly be any worse than what CBS had done with it over the past years. This is from 2010:

Okay, CBS, you’re officially on notice about your Pops telecast; I won’t bother watching again. You opened the show with a one-minute picture of the cannon being fired for the 1812 Overture, then went to some seemingly-drunk MC who introduced Toby Keith, who sang two songs. Then you showed the Pops playing a singalong medley. Then, after a bunch of commercials, you showed the drunk again, bragging about the upcoming fireworks display. (Was that Craig Ferguson and is that his normal schtick?)

Just after the half-hour mark of this hour-long cut of what is a three-hour performance for the locals you started showing the fireworks. Yes, they are spectacular. But I wonder if the viewers of WBZ in Boston and those on the Esplanade heard what we did: canned pop music accompanying them. The Pops were neither heard nor seen for the entire twenty minutes of fireworks.

Back in 2006 the CBS geniuses enlisted Aerosmith to play their own music, rather than the Pops playing American patriotic songs.

The webcast sounds better and better.

3 Comments

  1. No matter how I word the question, neither google nor yahoo will tell me what year the first national telecast of the Boston Pops July 4 concert
    occurred. The CBS telecast apparently began less than 30 years before it was cancelled in 2013. But I recall my family watching it many years before that– or so I thought. Maybe I’m confusing it with “An Evening at the Pops”
    broadcasts I saw as a kid, with Arthur Fiedler conducting, but I could swear I’ve seen July 4 concerts with Fiedler at the podium. Is it possible I could have viewed such a broadcast in Chicago while Fiedler was still conducting?

  2. The first network national broadcast was in 2003 (see this timeline). CBS signed two consecutive five-year deals, but they declined to renew, blaming falling ratings. Most attribute that to the Macy’s show repeating itself in the same time slot the Pops show was broadcast.

    It was on A&E for a long long time for at least two hours each year before CBS bought the rights and began to show only one hour of what’s a three-hour show in Boston. Yes, you did see Fiedler conducting it. The 4th of July show began in 1974 and Fiedler retired in 1979. John Williams replaced him. He conducted through 1994, and Keith Lockhart took over in 1995.

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