What goes around
Irony defined:
When TV was a mass medium, it was tacky. See Beverly Hillbillies.
Then TV became more targeted and it got way better. See Hill St. Blues and successors.
Now that TV is shrinking, it is getting tackier and tackier. See Master of Champions. This isn’t reality. It’s cheap beer.
Tags: Exploding_TV
June 30th, 2006 at 5:59 am
Jeez…Chuck Barris must be rolling in his grave, and he isn’t even dead!
June 30th, 2006 at 8:28 am
One of the first rules about TV Programing that I learned from an industry veteran was the secret to sucessful programing was to make it as dumb as possible. To the point where intectually it made your brain hurt. So your relevation about the current “dumbing” trend is no suprise.
June 30th, 2006 at 8:37 am
Why do TV critics always dump on the Beverly Hillbillies?
I think your comparisons are too cherry-picked here, JJ… you are comparing a broad farce from the 60s to a gritty 80s cop drama to a modern reality/game show. And how is the gritty 80s cop drama an example of TV being “more targeted”, anyway? For a gritty cop drama, it had the same mass appeal as most cop dramas that came before and after — else it would not have been the commercial success it was.
All you’ve done is contrast genres, and the game/reality genre has always been the tackiest.
June 30th, 2006 at 9:23 am
As the number of TV (and other choices) becomes bigger the audience for any given program becomes smaller. Smaller audiences mean less revenue. Less revenue means less money to spend on the show. The result is low budget shows.
It will only get worse, look at radio - talk shows and canned music. There are only a handful of produced shows and they are on NPR.
June 30th, 2006 at 9:34 am
Jeff,
I know you probably blacked it out your memory, but “Battle of the Network Stars” was pretty damned tacky. And nowadays you can swing a cat and find programming on par with Bochco’s best. Dumb may always be a perennial bestseller, but so is smart — cf. Everything Bad is Good for You for the quantitative data if you don’t believe me — and as a result there are abundant choices of both kinds of programming (as well as tons of shows that comfortably reside in between) available to even a basic cable subscriber.
Making broad overgeneralizations like this about the state of television suggests to me that you’re spending too much time in front of your laptop screen and not enough with the idiot box. You know, you can be a visionary and not feel the need to slag everything that has gone before at the same time…
June 30th, 2006 at 9:42 am
Robert,
As the number of TV (and other choices) becomes bigger the audience for any given program becomes smaller. Smaller audiences mean less revenue. Less revenue means less money to spend on the show. The result is low budget shows.
But is there a correlation between amount of money spent on a television show and its quality? And why wouldn’t the fiercer competition for funding over time trend towards better programming? Let’s also not forget that whereas the enterainment industry is experiencing an absolute glut of talent who are more than willing to work for a fraction of the cost of a marquee actor/writer/director just for the chance of having a chance in the biz. Surely that would impact the overall equation as well.
June 30th, 2006 at 12:05 pm
Jeff,
You really **are** cherry picking. Citing three TV shows over the last 30 years is inexcusibly sloppy “evidence” of your thesis. While it is possible that you are right, you have provided no actual evidence to support your conclusion.
At this point, it seems like you are just making s**t up.
June 30th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
“There are only a handful of produced shows and they are on NPR.”
That’s a gigantic load of crap. My market-leading local AM station — in a Top 15 MSA — is nothing BUT locally produced shows between 6 a.m. and midnight. Not a single show syndicated.
Meanwhile, there’s only TWO locally produced shows on my NPR talk station. The rest — Talk of the Nation, All Things Considered, Morning Edition — are syndicated.
Jeffy, your readers are morons. But they seem to reflecting what you are these days. This is surely one of the most inane things you’ve ever posted.
June 30th, 2006 at 1:29 pm
This criticism from the Howard Stern pundit?
June 30th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
Ed Rausch:
First, I’m moving where you are.
Second, I didn’t make a distinction between local and national, but between shows that have some sort of production values and those that are talk shows. On NPR, “Studio 360″, “This American Life” and “Prairie Home Companion” are what I’m referring to. If you have got shows like that in your local area please tell me about them.
Jersey Exile:
Actually the shows with this type of creativity are now appearing as self created podcasts. Of course one can be creative and entertaining on a low budget, but the effect is not the same. Even family dramas like Gilmore Girls or Desperate Housewives require huge staffs, and action or adventure series with special effects cost even more.
I don’t think either remark invalidates my basic point that a more fractured market means less money available for any given program. Spend $1 million on a one hour drama and you still have another 167 hours to fill that week.
June 30th, 2006 at 3:21 pm
Robert, in your comment you SPECIFICALLY mentioned talk radio. Way to back down, oh jelly-boned one. And every radio show is “produced.” How can you compare A Prairie Home Companion to talk radio? Both have producers. Your argument is mush. You can go to any top market and find a ton of locally produced radio.
But I see where your sympathies lie: you’re one of those people who think weak amateur podcasts are the equal to commercial radio. They’re not. I’ve been listening to literally hundreds of hours of podcasts the last month as we evaluate them for ad buys, and I can tell you this: they are a vast, vast wasteland of self-indulgent fools. Now, granted, there’s a lot of commercial talk radio that’s not interesting, especially on the sports side. But bad commercial talk radio is still more entertaining than the “best” podcasts.
June 30th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
Boy, let’s just tear apart this illogic:
“As the number of TV (and other choices) becomes bigger the audience for any given program becomes smaller. ”
Assuming, of course, the audience doesn’t grow. Ever. Which, of course, is a pretty silly argument: more people watch TV than ever before.
“Smaller audiences mean less revenue.”
This is just silly. Being able to attract a smaller but yet more affluent audience could lead to more revenue — NPR vs. local AM, for instance. Plus, it also assumes 0 growth in revenue. This assertion is just silly.
“Less revenue means less money to spend on the show. The result is low budget shows.”
Or fewer shows. Which, as the explosion of programming on cable networks shows us, is a pretty silly assertion.
So none of your assertions have any indications they’re based in reality. Come it and breath the clear air of the real world with the rest of us!
June 30th, 2006 at 4:26 pm
Ed:
Enjoy your trip on the Titanic. I’m not the one in a panic, it’s the networks that are.
As for market growth, I’m sure there is a certain amount (aside from population increase), but people are already doing more than one thing at a time and the number of hours in the day is fixed. So, mostly new options subtract attention from existing ones.
You have addressed everything except my point that with lower revenues producers will spend less on creating a program. The signs are all around us, reality shows, talent shows, talking heads and cheap crime reporting. I’m not talking about “quality” that’s in the eye of the beholder. The fact that a talk radio show has a “producer” and some other staff doesn’t change the fact that it is cheap to produce. How much does “Lost” cost per episode? How many channels could afford to do something like that?
Pointing out the variety of local radio just highlights how fragmented the market is, now you don’t even have a national audience to attract. The big radio chains realized the value of economies of scale that’s why much of radio is the same all over and mostly mechanized.
July 1st, 2006 at 10:17 am
“You have addressed everything except my point that with lower revenues producers will spend less on creating a program. ”
That’s because I don’t accept there are lower revenues across the television industry. Just because a reality show is cheaper to produce doesn’t mean there’s less revenue: you tend to ignore the fact there are now higher profits in the broadcast world.
In fact, there’s been a retreat of reality shows on primetime across the board — Fox has none on its fall schedule, for instance. And you assume — quite incorrectly — that reality shows are necessarily cheaper than dramas: both American Idol and Amazing Race are more expensive to produce than Law and Order. Since Law and Order can be syndicated to the end of time, the economics are actually FAR BETTER for that show than Amazing Race.
In short: I think you’re yet another blowhard blogger that knows nothing about the economics of television and yet manages to have opinions on the matter.