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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
I don’t watch any of those shows.
I was surprised to learn that Mad Men began in 2007, because I’m pretty sure I didn’t hear of it until 3 or 4 years ago.
Read this while listening to Rob Long harangue about HBO’s programming on GLoP. Only old guys watch CBS.
Old gals, too…Don’t forget.
And I am in the market they eithher miss or don’t give a damn about. I never watch TV. Certainly not on their schedule.
This is basically how art and poetry got ruined too.
So Casey says a democratized culture is crap anyway.
Well that’s true but what I mean is the insiders elite-ify a thing and draw all the attention and money to that thing and people get fed up and bored with it and walk away because it’s ruined now.
Is there anything to be said about NCIS, week after week? My daughter watches a show about profilers, and every week it’s the same thing. Murder, investigation, conclusion. Doesn’t mean it’s not worth the time for the people watching, but there’s not a great deal of depth, and the quality – while leagues above the TV of my childhood – is predictable. It’s like writing long pieces about “The FBI (A Quinn Martin production!)” every week. (Vulture.com, BTW, is rather ecumenical about what they cover.)
Quality and mass appeal aren’t incompatible, and it’s nice when they coincide, but I’d rather have a world with lots of small channels or non-traditional content providers trying interesting things than three pipes pumping out shows aimed at the widest popular audience. Anyone really want to go back to the 1983 TV schedule?
The media critics write about the prestige shows because they either flatter their views of the world, like “Girls,” or they’re high-quality shows that merit a close look. And there’s another factor: Amazon or Netflix doesn’t cancel a show in the middle of the run because it didn’t get enough eyeballs. I gave up on network TV when they’d hook me with a premise and drop the show after six eps, never explaining the mystery / arc on which the show was based. You like “Marco Polo,” you’re guaranteed the thing will proceed to its conclusion.
That never happened in the old days, because each show was self-contained. Mannix could get his head blown off in one ep and he’d grow another by the next week.
I absolutely want to go back to the 1983 TV schedule. That looks awesome!
It’s going to be a few more years till Amazon and Netflix and HBO are out in front. I eagerly await the breakup of cable bundling. I’d pay to get 2-4 channels, or the odd premium sports game or other event, rather than pay for the huge bundles out there now.
Which makes it all the more surreal that the cultural elite pimp them so. The culture has largely been despised by more people than not for years now, and increasingly the culture appears to be one big Stuff White People Like blog post.
EJ,
Normally I’m the one demanding we hold to the old standard but on this one maybe the job is how to ride with tide and go with the flow.
How do we develop an Internet Network? Wasting time watching Network TV die and Cable trying to manipulate the government into a Lenin’s Tomb for CNN type news is hopeless. Somehow we’ve got to move on to the next big thing. You are talking to the last guy on earth who knows how. I just know when the ship is sinking under you it’s time to innovate.
If Mr. Lileks is correct maybe the problem isn’t the delivery system maybe the problem is the critics. The Glop guys have their tongue in their cheek most of the time. Maybe they should take themselves more seriously.
…….hmmm…media criticism from the right..I’m not the guy to do it but somebody around here could….
Regards,
Jim
Some related thoughts from Marshall McLuhan, excerpted at Isegoria
Perfection of the means of communication has meant instantaneity:
There’s probably a lot more people that quote “Gibbs’ Rules” and give a friendly proby slap than you imagine. And while it has taken a bit of a left turn since Donald Bellisario was sidelined several years ago, its popularity still tells me more about America than Breaking Bad or anything on Netflix.
Besides, James, admit it… you loved Manimal.
The A-Team ruled!
CBS Thursday nights would be, I’m sure my mom was watching. And Emmanuel Lewis was cute.
The critics say, “It’s all been done before! We want something new and fresh!”
So, the artists innovate, and the people say, “What is this trash?”
I love it when a plan comes together.
There are a LOT of people trying. And failing.
I’m sure Rob can speak more authoritatively than me but scripted film work is expensive. (I can budget you a sporting event just fine!)
Even a built in audience doesn’t mean success. The online revivals of One Life to Live and All My Children barely lasted four months.
Like the airlines, the TV industry is financially structured in one age and trying to operate in another.
So this explains why CBS, NBC,ABC, and FOX are getting subscriber fees from the cable customers. Just hope they realize subscriber fees are but a mere stopgap while they try to monetize streaming video a little better.
I think demographics are driving the TV boat under, in terms of traditional programming. I’m 47, ditched cable altogether a few years ago, and don’t miss it. Thought I might, but I don’t. The old habits of coming home and turning the TV on disappeared when I didn’t have anything on TV to watch.
Except what I specifically wanted to watch. Which is entirely different, and the new models of menu-driven watching have been successfully monetized. Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, a host of others – you don’t need a cable subscription, and it turns out you never really did.
TV watching is a habit, like going for a run after work or smoking cigarettes. Some habits are better for you than others. What’s fun to watch are the misty-eyed ideologues lamenting the loss of the “great” TV shows, while the rubes slop up CSI: Ad Infinitim and Duck Dynasty.
I don’t care what the “elites” think, any more than I worry about them stepping out of my way, effetely, in the aisles at the local Food King because I know, and they know, they are sissy fellas, who carry their insecurities draped loosely about their slumping, doughy shoulders.
When network broadcasting began in the US (1926 for NBC, ’27 for CBS) the networks paid their affiliates to carry programming. When programming costs began to soar the nets started demanding “reverse compensation.”
And the money they want a piece of are those cable retrans fees. As the nets see it, the only reason the local stations are picking up those fees is the original programming that they’re providing.
CBS is the first to start charging for next day online access. ($6/mo)
Arahant, re innovation – When an artist innovates people eventually catch up. But I’m referring to something like The Painted Word. That artists, rather than innovate, create a little closed society where they create things they know people won’t get but the insiders get.
Eventually people strive more to be on the inside than to innovate and create and then the thing is basically ruined.
Well, those are forms of innovation, just not the good ones. Trust me. I’m one of those artists on the outside who has no use for the insiders.
Well I guess that’s true. One could add a feature to a car that makes it nearly impossible to drive unless you knew the special trick. That would be an innovation. And that would ruin driving for most people.
My day job is to recap/review Korean TV shows, a niche market indeed. I second James’ notion that the reason that entertainment writers don’t write about NCIS and other kinds of procedural shows which are so silently popular, lies with the difficulty of the proposition. Procedurals are very static unless you have a serialized plot arc or a dynamic character arc.
How about a bike, instead?
I’d be happy to see an enduring variety of production and marketing models.
It works in the game industry, for now. Major publishers annually churn out a few mega-budget sequels to established IPs sold at high prices, and use those profits to test the waters with smaller projects. Smaller companies make smaller games with smaller teams to sell at lower prices, often to reliable niche markets. Some even offer games “free to play” and then make huge profits by getting just 3% of their millions of users to buy a little add-on here, a virtual status symbol there. Some developers even crowdsource their funding through sites like Kickstarter.
There’s room in the TV and movie industries for multiple models to profit simultaneously. Bulk subscriptions can work. Limited subscriptions can work. On-demand libraries like Amazon and Netflix can work. Theaters can work. There’s room for huge blockbusters and shoe-string budget indie films. Even the barest works can be reach a wide audience if well produced and well marketed.
As long as they keep the fees low they’ll probably succeed in transitioning. I hope they learned from the music industry fiasco that continuing to bilk your customer AND your content creators will only lead to ruin. Congress was sorta willing to protect the music industry when streaming was in its infancy – I doubt they’ll do that again given the ubiquity of Netflix.