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#Post#: 18508--------------------------------------------------
Let’s save network television!
By: Mac Date: April 16, 2013, 8:11 am
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[glow=red,2,300]Let’s save network television! [/glow]
I found this article by Todd interesting. Don’t completely agree
with some of his observations or his recommendations, but for
the most part agree with the core of the discussion. Network
television has definitely declined for me. There is very little
on the networks that grab my attention and I do think because of
the factors pointed out here. Too watered down for a mass
audience. Networks, quit trying to appeal to everyone
Money is the bottom line too in any business so while I do
understand the authors suggestion of ‘more’ reality shows, I
think this is just a horrible idea. I think you provide crap,
you will always have a audience, but eventually people wise up
and get tired with it and with any cyclical event, because
television is cyclical, people move on.
I do like the author’s suggestion of more in a season. It only
makes sense to help retain an audience. I too do not understand
a networks proclivity to make less shows and then spread it so
thin and interrupt the flow so often, how they expect to keep
that audience.
Anyway, a good piece and some thoughts in here the studio’s
should consider.
[quote]by Todd VanDerWerff April 16, 2013
Network television is dying. The past fall was the worst ever
for the networks, and outside of a handful of bright spots—The
Voice, The Big Bang Theory, the fading Modern Family—the shows
that make up the Nielsen top 30 now wouldn’t have been cinches
for renewal even five years ago. Put another way: Community
stands a likely shot at getting a fifth season, even though it
frequently pulls a 1.3 in the “key demo” (the 18-to-49-year-olds
whose eyeballs advertisers covet), simply because it has a
really young audience that’s roughly predictable in size. Even
last season, that number likely would have gotten it laughed out
of town.
Or consider Happy Endings, which returned after several months
away with two episodes that averaged a 0.8 in the demo. It, too,
seems likely to come back, whether on its normal ABC home or on
cable’s USA, both because it has a young, fairly predictable
audience, and because it’s close enough to syndication that
production studio Sony should be able to bribe ABC or USA with
whatever sweet treasures it had locked in its vaults—the
treasures that won Community a run this long, a second and
ill-considered season of Breaking In, and whatever form that
proposed Breaking Bad spinoff takes. Increasingly, network
television is about managing its own decline, about deciding
whether it wants to put the whole business model in a home, or
provide in-house hospice care. Things are falling apart.
Everybody knows this. The networks know it, the people who write
about TV professionally know it, and even the casual viewers of
network TV know it. Would anybody be surprised if five years
from now, only CBS, Univision, and a hybrid collective network,
streaming site, and Internet portal called ABC-Fox remain? (NBC
will be reduced to a newspaper comic strip, while The CW will
become an Internet comments section.) The race among ABC, NBC,
and Fox in the ratings isn’t for the ratings crown; it’s for the
chance to join cash-rich CBS atop the heap after everything goes
down and TV becomes a post-apocalyptic wasteland. We’ve moved
beyond imagining a future where there are only three networks
again (likely CBS, ABC, and Fox); now we’re imagining a future
where there are only two networks. The great paradox that keeps
network heads awake at nights is that more people are watching
TV, but not necessarily watching network TV. And if they are,
they’re watching it on DVR or streaming, platforms that are
notoriously difficult to make money off of.
“So what?” you may say, with a haughty sniff. You are a
sophisticated television viewer, and you probably only watch a
couple of programs on network television. And I agree! While
there are a lot of good-to-great shows on network TV, there are
only one or two whose cancellation would make me despair, and
the cable model generally produces more daring and exciting
television at the moment. When you add in the fact that Netflix,
Amazon, and Hulu are all branching into original scripted
content with exciting new series and overseas acquisitions, it
seems network TV might be a dinosaur struggling to survive
post-meteor, while all around, fidgety little mammals are
thriving in a very different landscape.
If network television is to survive, you might argue, why
doesn’t it take lessons from these new species? Why doesn’t it
program fewer hours, perhaps having several shows share one
timeslot throughout the year, as cable does? Or, failing that,
why doesn’t it expand its online streaming options to allow a
greater audience to access its product? Why can’t network TV
adapt and thrive? Other folks who write about TV—and are far
smarter than I—have made these arguments, and there’s some truth
in them. Television has rapidly become a world of programming
toward niches, from the post-apocalyptic zombie freaks that make
The Walking Dead so huge to the rural folk who’ve embraced Duck
Dynasty. Making money in television now involves aggressively
courting a particular niche within the larger culture. The idea
of chasing the mass audience—the very idea behind network
television—is dying as surely as the mass audience did 15 years
ago. We are a nation of subcultures now, and whatever your
fancy, there’s a TV network for it. So why don’t the networks
ease up and embrace that reality a bit?
To that, I say this: The existence of cable networks like FX and
AMC, and of the aforementioned streaming sites, is directly
attributable to the success of network television. Networks
provide a steady flow of cheap content that allows cable
networks and streaming platforms to embrace their expensive
scripted programming as loss leaders, to say, “Hey, we do
awesome stuff over here in cable, and you TV fans should check
it out!” The dirty little secret of cable TV is that networks
don’t make their profits on that stuff. The really big hits and
the cheap comedies might pull in a minor profit, but the big
money is in sitcom reruns and reality shows. FX uses a program
like Justified to make an argument to cable providers and
advertisers: We are a company you want to be in business with.
Then the network makes much of its money from endless sitcom
reruns that it acquired at low cost and will sell to advertisers
at tremendous profit.
There is tons of money in this, too. Reruns of The Big Bang
Theory routinely pull bigger numbers in the 10 p.m. hour on TBS
than anything the broadcast networks are airing, and USA paid a
huge amount for Modern Family reruns because it knew it would
almost certainly make back that amount, and much more, in ad
dollars. (Having that show on the network will also allow it to
open up a comedy bloc at half the cost, since it will only need
to program one half-hour after an already successful network
hit.) The same goes for Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon, too. Having
oceans of content on those services requires a lot of different
TV content providers, since they’re not yet ready to provide
that much content themselves. (Really, no content provider
could.) And that means having healthy cable and, yes, broadcast
networks to keep shoveling stuff onto these sites, so you keep
paying subscription fees.
(Let’s pause briefly to talk about HBO and Showtime. Though the
collapse of broadcast television would hurt both these
networks—and, to a lesser degree, Starz—neither would entirely
collapse, because they’re on a subscription-based business
model. For this reason, both networks are better poised to
immediately make the shift to a streaming-based universe, though
it will require both to figure some way out of the devil’s
bargain they’ve made with the cable industry. But given HBO’s
strength within the industry, it seems likely this will happen
sooner rather than later.)
Hopefully it’s now clear the conundrum network TV—and by
extension, cable TV—is in, due to the extent the current TV
model is based on somebody providing cheap content to someone
else, no matter how it’s accomplished. The solutions proposed
for network television—Broadcast fewer hours! Have shows share
timeslots!—rarely make much monetary sense, because broadcast TV
has to broadcast for large periods of time to try to reach the
largest numbers of people. It’s a simple question: If network TV
stops broadcasting for two or three hours per night, or simply
calls uncle on some low-rated night of the week, like Friday,
what gets put in those empty time slots? Who’s going to fill
them? If it were a cable network, it would be easy enough to
pick up another bloc of sitcom reruns. But broadcast networks
can’t really do that, not without dipping into their back
catalogs. And shortened runs work on cable, where three dramas
share a time slot throughout the year, because those are often
the only three shows the network has to pay for. On a broadcast
network, this would involve effectively tripling the number of
shows running on the network at any given time, a
far-too-expensive plan.
One solution would be for networks to embrace more and more
reality TV, the cheap content that’s kept the networks alive for
the past decade or so. The problem, however, is that the true
“innovators” (using the word loosely) in the reality format are
all working on cable. For better or worse, broadcast network
reality shows remain basic spins on talent shows and game shows,
and the dominant form of cable reality show—the docusoap—is
hugely unlikely to succeed with the broadcast networks, due to
the stigma attached to the form. So the broadcast networks watch
as their popular reality hits slowly deflate, as Dancing With
The Stars and American Idol have this season (though both are
still highly rated enough to run for years and years). More
reality isn’t going to be the solution, and even if it was, who
would want that?
My solution is fairly simple: Network TV needs to go back to the
way it was in the 1950s. It needs to manage its decline in the
same way it was born—with weird experimentation, show formats
that are cheap to produce, and more product placement (and
in-show ads) than you can shake a stick at. There’s already a
fair amount of this—at times this season, New Girl has seemed
like an elaborate ad for the Ford Escape—but I suspect the only
solution is more of it. And, what’s more, networks don’t need to
produce fewer episodes of their big hit shows; they need to
produce more. When network TV started out, seasons ran up to 39
episodes, meaning three-quarters of the year would have new
episodes of a particular series. These ran from late September
to early June. They didn’t pause for holidays. They ran and ran
and ran, and they usually stayed in the same time slot for a
whole season, simply because the sponsor paid for that time
slot.
Would Happy Endings have become a bigger hit if it had run for
39 straight weeks at 9 p.m. on Tuesdays as General Mills
Presents Happy Endings? Doubtful, but at least it would look
different. And I don’t think 39 episodes are even necessary.
Producing 26 episodes—only four more than the current standard
order—is completely doable. (The aforementioned New Girl is
producing 25.) And that gets a series to a half-year of new
episodes. Producing 30 episodes might even be doable.
The question is how to make that much television as cheaply as
possible. This probably means fewer scripted dramas, but that’s
okay. The broadcast networks, outside of a few scattered shows
here and there, don’t really do a great job at making scripted
dramas anymore. (It’s also the one TV genre that really does
benefit from fewer episodes produced per season.) CBS can
probably stand to inflate a few of its crime procedurals to 26
to 30 episodes per season, while the other networks could take
their hits and make them share a time slot, the way NBC tried to
do with Parenthood and Smash this year. The math there worked
out to 32 weeks with new episodes—or would have if Smash hadn’t
collapsed. Focusing in like this might have the happy side
effect of making broadcast-network drama better, too.
In the modern TV landscape, that leaves three forms: the reality
show, the multi-camera sitcom, and the single-camera sitcom, in
order of expense. All three can be produced cheaply (though it’s
often incredibly apparent when single-camera sitcoms are), but
any time a network overloads on one format or another, it tends
to cause a bit of backlash. Notice how Fox’s overreliance on
singing shows is losing its potency, or think back to how NBC’s
endless array of bland multi-cams killed it back in the late
’90s and early ’00s. So the answer isn’t just these three
formats, or even a mix of all of these formats.
No, the answer is to bring back some of the formats that
provided some of TV’s earliest hits, even if some of them aren’t
exactly classy. Variety shows are cheap to produce, and with
strong personalities at the center, they can be tons of fun.
Game shows were another staple of early TV that could see a
comeback, if the networks don’t overindulge on them. Anthology
dramas—series where each episode tells a single story, usually
revolving around a common genre or theme—are more expensive than
some other forms, but they also avoid the expense of a regular
cast and sometimes even a writing staff, provided they can
employ someone as prolific as Rod Serling. Sketch comedy hasn’t
been in primetime in ages, but some of the very earliest TV hits
fell under this broad umbrella. Who’s to say this cheap format
couldn’t succeed again? Look to the very successful Univision,
which has dusted off many of these formats to great success with
the growing Hispanic market.
Most of all, network television has to stop thinking of itself
as the center of the universe. Even if it’s still the biggest
game in town—though only by very slim margins at this point—its
job is to figure out how to program to niches of people who have
millions of other options. Yes, each network has a rough brand
identity and target audience—ABC likes women and families; NBC
ostensibly aims for the “quality” TV audience; Fox likes edgy
young people; CBS doesn’t mind if old folks leave the TV on
after the news—but even those brands are broad, and could be
approached as a collection of subcultures and niches. Making
distinctive TV on a limited budget—even with corporate
sponsorship—is murderously difficult, but the pioneers of TV in
the ’40s and ’50s did it on a weekly basis and ended up making
some great TV, even though it was occasionally only by accident.
Network TV has to try new things, and it has to find a way to
seem distinctive and fresh based on a business model that’s
anything but. But perhaps the best way to be new and different
these days it to try dipping into the past.[/quote]
#Post#: 20915--------------------------------------------------
Re: Let’s save network television!
By: Mac Date: July 16, 2013, 11:55 am
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'bout freakin' time.... to call this **** out
[quote]Move over, "Deadliest Catch!" The "Clam Kings" are set to
show viewers some fresh shellfish shenanigans.
Or not.
Actually, a new trailer on YouTube, which at first seems to
promote a reality TV show called "Clam Kings," is really just a
spoof on the whole genre -- and a creative fundraising effort
from one PBS station.[/quote]
[glow=red,2,300]Clam Kings[/glow]
HTML http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQRG8YaXDK8
[quote]"When it comes to clams, these two aren't shucking
around," an announcer says after introducing the audience to a
couple of bumbling clam diggers.
But after flashing the date and time for this non-show, a
different message comes on the screen.
"The fact you thought this was a real show says a lot about the
state of TV," it reads. "Support quality programming."
The spoof is just one of three new clips from New York PBS
affiliate WNET (also known as Thirteen), which urges viewers to
make donations to the station to keep the "quality"
coming.[/quote]
HTML http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o3_q_ZWyGw
[quote]Other sendups from the station include "Long Island
Landscapers," an all-too-real-looking reality TV spoof that
focuses on a team of yard guys who "are going over the hedge."
And there's "Meet the Tanners," a laughable took at a sun-loving
family with questionable priorities. ("We have rules in this
house," mom insists. "If you sass me, you go to the
shade.")[/quote]
HTML http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0722x_o84Qs
[quote]The current spots are just the latest from Thirteen's
#TVGONEWRONG campaign. In May, the station ran subway ads for
such fake shows as "Bad Bad Bag Boys" (where there's a "Clean up
on every aisle"), "Knitting Wars," "Bayou Eskimos," "Married to
a Mime," and "The Dillionaire" (because, of course, "Life's a
pickle").[/quote]
#Post#: 20917--------------------------------------------------
Re: Let’s save network television!
By: Chiprocks1 Date: July 16, 2013, 12:14 pm
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How is is that I never saw this thread till now?
#Post#: 20927--------------------------------------------------
Re: Let’s save network television!
By: Mac Date: July 16, 2013, 1:01 pm
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[quote]How is is that I never saw this thread till now?[/quote]
I dunno (shrug shoulders)
#Post#: 20930--------------------------------------------------
Re: Let’s save network television!
By: Chiprocks1 Date: July 16, 2013, 1:11 pm
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It might be because you posted it in TV's Greatest Hits and
Misses sub category. But it doesn't explain why I never got any
kind of notice. Oh well........
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