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Tuesday, February 04, 2003
EXACTLY WHAT'S WRONG WITH TELEVISION.
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I just started watching the episode of "TV Out of the Box" that documents the show "Andy Richter Controls the Universe" on the Trio cable channel, and they said this throwaway line in the introduction: "TV Out of the Box tracks the last two months of production on Andy Richter, as the cast and crew make the most of their last chance to establish themselves in a medium that values commercial success above originality and critical acclaim." And it was though I was hit by a bolt of lightning. That's exactly, exactly what's wrong with television. Sure, all media are influenced by commercial success. But for television, commercial success means mass appeal. Something that draws an intense reaction from only a few people may be great art, but it will never succeed on TV. Maybe that's why there's so much great original programming on HBO: at $10 a subscriber, they can afford to make a program that appeals only to, say, a few hundred thousand people. But broadcast television, which sells eyeballs to advertisers for thirty seconds at a time for about a nickel a pair, must appeal to tens of millions of people in order to succeed. And, in the world of commercial television, the only kind of success there is is commercial success. And that's why television sucks so much of the time, and that's why great shows always get cancelled. People say that the proliferation of digital cable and satellite television, with their thousands of channels will change this. Now, there will be a home for most every show, as channels settle for audiences in the tens of thousands. But as long as the only kind of success there is is ratings success, nothing will ever really change. I actually love the ethic of Trio, which often broadcasts (or rebroadcasts) brilliant television that challenges the definition of the medium, such as their "Brilliant but Cancelled" month in December, and their rebroadcasts of the old NBC episodes of Late Night with David Letterman. But in the end, they're the same as everyone else, just banking that their intellectual approach will attract enough viewers for them to make a profit.
link to this item: http://www.creamy.com/blog/2003/02/exactly-whats-wrong-with-television.html
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