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No Pop in the Culture
When I got into the television business in 1983 I pulled into the station parking lot every morning just as the sun began to cast long shadows of our tower across the black asphalt.
I was a broadcaster. Appealing to the largest possible audience was bred into me. Broadcasting with the emphasis on the broad.
Those were still heady days. Three commercial networks and a thriving independent base of stations. There were rumors that Rupert Murdoch was considering a fourth network. Was he out of his mind?
ESPN was barely five. CNN was syndicating half hours of its Headline News channel because it was hard to get clearance on cable systems.
We lived and (mostly) died by the ratings.
Flash forward to today. The talk of the industry are shows that aren’t the talk of the nation. They’ve taken the Pop out of Popular.
Last year in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson observed:
The most essayed-about show might be Girls. The most tweeted-about show is, statistically, Pretty Little Liars. The most talked-about, right now, is House of Cards. But the most popular show (which is barely essayed-about, rarely tweeted-about, and hardly talked-about) is NCIS, whose audience is literally as big as those three other shows—combined … times two.
Or put more succinctly, “The people reading about TV and the people watching TV are living in two separate worlds.”
The divide used to be generational. It’s increasingly becoming something else, more class oriented. Talking about, writing about and reading about what’s on the subscription channels is what counts. If you have anything to say on what’s still being broadcast to the low-brow ignorant masses it had better be disparaging.
On Vulture.com, former GQ Russia editor Michael Idov recalled a meeting of the magazine’s international editors and British editor Dylan Jones lamenting, “Mad Men is such an absolute brand fit for GQ. We have to write about it. We can’t not write about it. If it didn’t exist, we would have to create it. Too bad we can’t make people watch it!”
In How the Media Forced Mad Men Down the World’s Throat, Idov wrote, “For almost eight years now, I have been a proud citizen of a world where Mad Men is the absolute most important show on television. That world uneasily coexists with the real one, where Mad Men is an elegant little bonbon that everyone talked about in 2008. The twist is, we were the “everyone” talking about it then, and we are the ones still talking about it now. We are, God forgive me, the media elite.”
There are 320 million Americans crammed into 110 million homes with television. Netflix and HBO are now in parity with a little over 28 million subscribers each, many of which overlap. Two to three million of those will now get to say what’s culturally relevant.
The rest of us can all go to hell.
Published in Entertainment
Quality art results from skillful and careful artists producing works according to their tastes, through editors who advise without dictating, for an audience those artists actually understand and respect.
Sadly, many critically revered artists are not talented or careful. Many editors demand writing to formulas or polls which they do not understand well enough to fulfill. And folk interests are anathema to them.
Note that I am not calling for a return to Romanticism, as if folk art is inherently worthy. Rather, popular appeal hints at transcendent truths which artists are best equipped to reveal… while editors rub the artists’ noses in the dirt of harsh reality.
Incidentally, the primary reason NCIS is so popular is because it cleverly combines plot-driven narrative with character-driven narrative. It’s the character interplay and fun-loving dialogue that keeps formulaic plots compelling.
Plus, the babes!
Advertisers will not pay to reach men over 54. Which is why the history channel runs pawn stars. Got to,d this straight from their marketing vp
Or men mentally over the age of 15.
Aaron’s right. There’s a whole genre of fan-made Star Trek shows that rely on crowdfunding, and they range from earnest attempts to recreate the original look to – well, this. That’s a fargin’ fan film.
The tools to produce high-quality content are getting cheaper and cheaper. The top-down mass-market limited-choice model is done. This is a good thing.
These days, teenagers can pull off amazing technical works. And many of them will do it for free!
WETA Workshop is awesome, but generally unnecessary. Movie studios are stupid to pay out the nose for anything besides actors and directors with big fan bases.
Eh, it ceases to be a fan film when all the parts are played by professional actors. It crossed the line into a professional passion project at that point.
Are we so jaded when independent projects get a “meh” because they have some real actors? ;) I mean, there’s another ST:TOS reboot out there with Walter Koenig and William Windom. It’s not very professional by modern standards; does that mean it’s inside the line? Or maybe there isn’t a line at all anymore?
I think maybe the music industry is doing fine.
I’d say the last artists who tried for popularity were the Romantics, who were all about educating people to be really people. Ever since, what are called artists realized like the Romantics did, that this was not going to work. Romantics tried to get in bed with science, with political Revolution, with any new thing, including newer Christian sects, I’d bet.
Since, artistic movements abandoned even the Kantian talk about the need for popularity.
Artists turned cruel because they thought–rather wisely–that there was no place for them in the new bourgeois world. That there are insights into what it is to be human that people neither want nor will tolerate & therefore people have got to be forced out of their comfort by endlessly mysterious writing. Hermetic or esoteric writing is now a resistance strategy.
Like the Wallace Stevens quote about poetry resisting the intellect–well, whatever intellect there is mostly ignore him, whether or not he resists.
Or the Byron jokes about how Wordsworth poetry is poetry, says Wordsworth, & how Coleridge’s explanation of–Kantian–metaphysics requires an explanation.
You all have time for TV with Ricochet to read?
Not lately-
An era with Murder, She Wrote is an era worth living in.
Great year for film too.
That is an illuminating (and potentially damning) statement. So – then the TV industry must either change – or go the way of the buggy whip manufacturers, right?
Thx for this post, btw, EJ. I always enjoy the insights of industry insiders.
I just want to go back to 1983.
Yep. The model has changed — and while we might wax nostalgic over the days of flipping through 3 networks, those days are gone. The old model is dead and it kind of killed itself. There comes a point in increasing viewing options that the option of just not bothering becomes a very favorable one.
We kept our cable package far longer than we needed. It was crazy to be paying for 500 channels when we were only watching two — and not even regularly. Dumped it last year and haven’t missed it.
Netflix, which is mainly used by the kids. Any television series we’re interested in we get on DVD. Sure, we might have to wait until the entire season has aired, but that’s okay, we still have stuff from four years ago we’re trying to get caught up on.
The new models that Netflix, Amazon Prime, et al are developing/have developed look to be the lasting model for awhile now. Direct delivery to subscribers. No more cable-company middle-man.
It helps, I suppose, if you’ve got your house all wired up so you can stream right to your giant HD television. And I don’t. Probably another reason I’m still using DVDs. But I suppose physical media is on the way out, soon, too.
Except in Cabot Cove, in which case you were likely dead.
1984 might be even better for both TV and film. I’d choose it over most any recent year.
At dinner last week I said “As soon as I can figure out how to get live sports and news I’m dumping DirectTV. Everything else is available either on Netflix, Hulu or HBOGO.”
My buddy suggested JetStreamBox. I haven’t researched yet other than their website. For a one time payment you have access to pretty much everything available on television, including live sports, movies, radio, etc….
EJ, or anyone else… have you heard of JetStreamBox? Is this a reliable alternative?
As recently as 1986 AM radio was dead. Then the Fairness Doctrine was file thirteened. Humans are incredibly adaptable. Assuming the TV industry is populated with humans, an arguable point, the industry will likely evolve.
You mean like Hulu-plus which not only charges a monthly fee but still embeds commercials that you can’t skip over?
I couldn’t quit that scam fast enough. I think my membership lasted less than a day.
Whoa. “One Day At A Time” was still on the air in 1983? I remember watching that show when they were doing President Ford jokes.
On the other hand, Newhart, Remington Steele, Magnum PI, Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, and Cheers. That’s some good TV.
Steve C. & Drew,
I’m taking your two comments as one. Let’s assume that Steve is simply right that T.V. needs to evolve. But to what? Now let’s look at Drew’s assessment of the new media utilities available.
Everything is streamed. There is no specific broadcast times necessary as content can be watched any time. You can buy one episode or the whole series at once. You can stream it, down load & store it, or buy a blue ray of it. Physical media doesn’t make very much difference.
1) First New Parameter: Time isn’t part of the equation. T.V. is more like going to the movies now. You decide when to go & watch. You can make a date or an event out of it but that’s up to you. No need to even program a recorder in advance.
2) Second New Parameter: There is no quantity of content that makes for a fixed length of story. Of course, people still get tired after the 2 hr mark so you can’t make your episodes much longer to maintain drama. However, there really isn’t any reason to make an exact season’s worth of episodes. If you like a series you might want to watch it twice a week or more. If you don’t like it you don’t want to see it period. The number of episodes is now an artistic choice not a business one. This makes it more like reading a book. You don’t expect to read a book or series of books in a particular year. If you read a review and you think you’re interested you get started. Doesn’t matter if the book was just written or 100 years ago. Doesn’t matter if there is one book, three books, five books,..etc. in the series.
What does Mr. Long say to this?
Regards,
Jim
James – While you successfully outlined two new parameters, you’re not addressing THE parameter, i.e., funding.
This past season Netflix produced 62 total hours of original series programming and charge $8 per month.
The original big three nets presented an average of 484 hours EACH. (Fox programs one less hour every night bringing their total to 330 hours). Would you pay $62 per month per network for their programming?
And as a comparison, ESPN presents 4,800 hours of live, original hours every year.
Are you really ready, willing and able to embrace ala carte on demand television?
hahaha. Exactly. Had to be the highest murder rate per capita in the universe.
Jessica was Dexter before Dexter.
I looked at the website they set up for prospective distributors and the first thing on their FAQ list was this: Our Android TV box is 100% legal! All our software does is provide links to content that is already posted on the internet. We do not host any content nor do we know who does. We do not promote illegal conduct of any kind.
In otherwords, their business model is providing you a box that’s linked to their privately produced list of pirated content. They think they’re covering their behinds with that “we don’t host/we don’t know who is” line… but they’re not.