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Is There Too Much New Programming On TV?
HughPickens.com writes: John Koblin writes in the NY Times that there's a crisis in television programming felt among executives, viewers and critics, and it's the result of one thing: There is simply too much on television. John Landgraf, chief executive of FX Networks, reported at the Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour that the total number of original scripted series on TV in 2014 was 371. The total will surpass 400 in 2015. The glut, according to Landgraf, has presented "a huge challenge in finding compelling original stories and the level of talent needed to sustain those stories."
Michael Lombardo, president of programming at HBO, says it is harder than ever to build an audience for a show when viewers are confronted with so many choices and might click away at any moment. "I hear it all the time," says Lombardo. "People going, 'I can't commit to another show, and I don't have the time to emotionally commit to another show.' I hear that, and I'm aware of it, and I get it." Another complication is that shows not only compete against one another, but also against old series that live on in the archives of Amazon, Hulu or Netflix. So a new season of "Scandal," for example, is also competing against old series like "The Wire." "The amount of competition is just literally insane," says Landgraf.
Others point out that the explosion in programming has created more opportunity for shows with diverse casts and topics, such as "Jane the Virgin," "Transparent" and "Orange Is the New Black." Marti Noxon, the showrunner for Lifetime's "UnREAL" and Bravo's "Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce," says there has been a "sea change" in the last five years. "I couldn't have gotten those two shows on TV five years ago," says Noxon. "There was not enough opportunity for voices that speak to a smaller audience. Now many of these places are looking to reach some people — not all the people. That's opened up a tremendous opportunity for women and other people that have been left out of the conversation."
Michael Lombardo, president of programming at HBO, says it is harder than ever to build an audience for a show when viewers are confronted with so many choices and might click away at any moment. "I hear it all the time," says Lombardo. "People going, 'I can't commit to another show, and I don't have the time to emotionally commit to another show.' I hear that, and I'm aware of it, and I get it." Another complication is that shows not only compete against one another, but also against old series that live on in the archives of Amazon, Hulu or Netflix. So a new season of "Scandal," for example, is also competing against old series like "The Wire." "The amount of competition is just literally insane," says Landgraf.
Others point out that the explosion in programming has created more opportunity for shows with diverse casts and topics, such as "Jane the Virgin," "Transparent" and "Orange Is the New Black." Marti Noxon, the showrunner for Lifetime's "UnREAL" and Bravo's "Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce," says there has been a "sea change" in the last five years. "I couldn't have gotten those two shows on TV five years ago," says Noxon. "There was not enough opportunity for voices that speak to a smaller audience. Now many of these places are looking to reach some people — not all the people. That's opened up a tremendous opportunity for women and other people that have been left out of the conversation."
Until people start asking for new ones?
Quantity has a quality all of its own.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"The amount of competition is just literally insane," says Landgraf.
Then you should commit yourself to a sanitorium, mr. Landgraf.
"Literally" does not mean "very much like".
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Just donate some new scripts the Hollywood industries, they're plagued with sequels, reboots and lame, reworked, versions of anything that came out before 1986.
... and then it's dropped after 1st or 2nd season. Yet piece of shit shows like 'lost' go on for a decade. Fuck this shit. Fuck you executives.
Remember Lost? The show where they would start with some interesting subplot, only to never revisit it in subsequent episodes? They just went on to some newer subplot.
That's what I feel about new TV shows. If I give in to the show and start watching regularly, I must know that they're going to treat me well. But doing that kind of crap is boring as fuck for writers (evidently) because they hate it and only want to start with a blank slate every episode. I've been burned too many times. Now, they have THE NERVE to complain that viewers won't engage? God damn, it's your own fucking fault, people.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Of course, when I read the title of your post, I thought of Bash, Perl and Python scripts. Maybe somebody can write a Python script, that writes better TV scripts than TV script writers?
The most amusing TV show that I ever watched, was a cable "local access" program in Austin, Texas. It was titled "Guns of the Trailer Parks". It featured such things as bayonets for tactical shotguns. One quote was "Lots of folks like to have a bayonet on their shotguns!" In case this whooshed you, it was in no way serious.
I guess if you run out of ammunition while hunting a bear . . . you can engage in "hand-to-paw combat" with it.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
"That's opened up a tremendous opportunity for women and other people that have been left out of the conversation."
Oh bullshit. Scripted TV is almost entirely for women. Shows are built around relationships and families, with men almost always a negative in some way (dumb, lazy, fat...) And it's hilarious when a man gets kicked in the balls, but if a woman gets hit in any way, shit hits the fan.
Minus sports and some action programmes, most of TV is female orientated.
Marti Noxon, the showrunner for Lifetime's "UnREAL" and Bravo's "Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce," says there has been a "sea change" in the last five years. "I couldn't have gotten those two shows on TV five years ago," says Noxon.
Jane the Virgin is an entirely different show than what he's working on according to the summary.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
already discussed this on the red site
Hilarious
Network producers think there's "too much on television" and people think "there's nothing to watch on television". Who is right? Well, how about we look at the rising trend of people cancelling their cable subscriptions.
Bullshit, there's another, more serious issue
There's not enough reason to commit to shows on american television because they're highly prone to cancellation. Why should I commit to a show if the network won't? I've seen too many shows run on for a long time (gotta milk that cash cow until it dies, apparently) and then get cancelled before concluding.
This damages the viewers' trust in future shows. Nobody wants to commit to anything because it's almost guaranteed to die instead of finish. What percentage of american television shows reach their conclusion? 1%? 3%? There's no reason to take the risk.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world...
Interpretation
Here's the interpretation you should take away from this: ...and it's HARD!"
"We have lost all negotiating power since all these show creators can take their show so many other places. We can't resurrect old crap anymore for guaranteed income, but we're not risky enough to bet on new material. We even tried to lock as much content behind paywalls, but people just stop watching our stuff instead of paying us again to watch it any other way than when it airs. We actually have to do the job we've been claiming to do since cable was conceived.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
With so many new shows each year, I have trouble deciding what to watch. My time is limited so I can't watch even a few minutes of every one of them. I have to go by the previews, reviews, and advice of friends. By the time I find one I want to watch, they've cancelled it or keep moving it around on the schedule making it hard to find. The premium channels seem to do a better job of promoting and scheduling, and most of the better shows lately have been on them.
My solution is to just wait and catch a whole series on Netflix or Amazon Prime. It may be a year or more after the series has ended, but if it's good, I don't care.
Oh, and while there may be a ton of new shows, there are only a few good one. Most are pure crap.
I'm pretty sure there are a lot more books published each year than TV shows, and yet it seems this does not pose a problem for writers.
Around here (Australia) there is bugger all new "real TV" coming out now days.
Ever stop to think
No, you are not alone, there are plenty of people like you, constantly mentioning to others that you don't watch TV. It is especially evident when the topic is watching TV, you'd think this is the one time when you'd decline to comment as you have no idea what's been going on, but no there are already several comments just like yours, already moderated up to +5 Insightful.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
So is he saying there are 400 scripted SERIES, i.e. about 4800 *shows* at 20 shows a series??
Compare that to movies:
IMDB 2014 there are 9080 Movies made in 2014....
http://www.imdb.com/search/title?year=2014,2014&title_type=feature&sort=moviemeter,asc
Twice as many movies made each year as TV shows. So there is a long way to go.
In terms of Android apps there were probably another half million app added last year. Just as the 3000th fart app is ignored, so is the 3000th clone of Friends or the 3000th movie about zombies.
Too bad most of the good stuff gets canceled just as its getting interesting while garbage like Survivor gets 31 seasons of the same boring unwatchable crap.
At least the new season of Scorpion starts in a few weeks and the new seasons of Madam Secretary and CSI: Cyber in a few weeks after that. So there ARE still good TV shows out there but they are few and far between (and mostly on expensive-to-purchase cable channels e.g. Halt & Catch Fire on AMC)
This kind of statement reminds me of Catholic church every Sunday as a child. You don't really believe it, you don't think about it, but you know you're just supposed to mumble these words when you get to this point in the ceremony. How in the world could anyone believe women have been "left out of the conversation"? Does this man actually own a television?
I'm hoping that in this ocean of excrement a few decent shows might sneak by and float to the top, and some do, but not enough for me to have one to watch every day of the week.
Netflix and HBO certainly manage to do it consistently.
Maybe the execs should stop greenlighting the same trope-ridden bullshit stuck together with minimal effort writing they think is sufficient to hold a semi-coherent narrative.
If all you're producing is the entertainment equivalent of white noise, even the lowest common denominator you're targeting is not going to stick with it because it's interchangeable with the white noise everyone else is producing.
Firefly: loved. Dropped at ep. 13 or so. Zero closure (from the network. Kudos on cast and others for the attempt with the movie, but... 2 hours of movie cannot replace many hours of series.) Poster child for network insanity, lack of foresight driven by must-profit-this-quarter-or-shareholders-will-riot.
Homeland: the season "finale"? Nothing. Not a damn thing worth airing. And the drivel-infested baby-angst... omg, switch it off. Bad enough its basically cop-porn, federal-style, unlimited excuses for "What constitution? Constitution? Isn't that something to do with whether I catch cold or not?" but I have to have baby angst inflicted on me? It's no wonder these series die on the vine when the shows grievously lose focus like that.
Speaking of baby angst, Sons of Anarchy: An entire inane SEASON of baby-angst. Hollywood: When I want "soul searching humanity" in my drug-dealing, weapons-smuggling, murdering, underhanded, principle-free smorgasbord of evil gangland bottom-feeders, I'll let you know, mkay? Don't hold your breath on that one, either. They would have lost me over that baby-kidnap nonsense if it wasn't for Crazy-Pants McGillicuddy, AKA Tig Trager. He was constantly saving episodes. Best-written character on the series by leaps and bounds.
Mostly-consistent entertainment: Deadwood, Game of Thrones, Vikings, Ray Donovan, House of Cards, and (surprisingly) Daredevil.
There may be a lot of new shows, but there sure aren't a lot of good new shows. I'm not having any trouble at all trying to choose what to watch. I'm having trouble finding anything worth watching, and if I do find such a thing, they'll probably cancel it anyway.
Then there's the abject cop porn. Talk about appealing to the lowest common denominator. Total bottom-feeder trash. But at least there's a huge audience for it. We can't all manage to keep the drool off our faces. That's exactly what keeps Fox News on the air and Trump in the running — the huge number of utter idiots in the general population. I can't think of a single cop show where a major theme wasn't the show trying to make excuses for absolutely inexcusable behavior by the cops. I mean, okay, if the show is *about* inexcusable behavior, alright then. But when the "hero" is off the reservation and they play that up as a good thing, that's just destructive to every reasonable and sane point of view there is. Awful stuff. I''m not talking about antiheroes either. When a show about a cop is clearly holding cops up as "the good guys", and they can't be bothered with little things like people's actual rights, as if their correct role was legislator, judge and jury all rolled into one, I just turn the show off.
My only real problem with TV is finding anything worth watching. I get that stranger in a strange land feeling more often than not, and sadly, it doesn't come staffed with a libertarian, open-minded genius, super mental powers, and telepathic aliens. Just a vague urge to go do the hermit thing in a cave.
Whatever rocks your boat. Near as I can tell, almost nobody actually cares to be productive all the time. Most of us have hobbies or interests which ultimately don't have any point at all except that we like it. That's usually the case for social interaction too, some people want more or less of it but a night of beers with my buddies rarely produces more than a hangover. I'm usually on the computer because TV is usually too dull and passive for me, it doesn't mean blabbing off a comment on /. is more productive. And it doesn't mean I need to go skydiving to get my adrenaline pumping. If you got too many ants in your trouser to sit down and watch TV, good for you. But I'm guessing you're ultimately wasting your time on something else. In fact, what you do when it's not to produce something usually reflects what you really want, the rest is usually work, chores, maintenance and repair that you "have to" do.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You can tell because there is so much of it.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
"That's opened up a tremendous opportunity for women and other people that have been left out of the conversation"
Bad grammar aside, I'm surprised someone thinks there's a diversity problem on TV. It overcompensated back in the 70's and never returned.
The reason TV watching is on the decline is because the programming sucks and there are too many commercials. Playing a laugh track between every spoken line does not make stupid dialog funny.
Copyright inflates the apparent demand for goods, Thus people enter into the supply side too much and the correct demand is lower, resulting in oversupply.
I don't know... I barely watch regular tv anymore, but I've never once said 'I can't commit to another show, and I don't have the time to emotionally commit to another show.'. What I usually say is 'There is to much crap I have no interest in on tv', which includes lots of shows with interesting premises that never go anywhere. When I do find a show I like I'm lucky to get 13 episodes before they go on hiatus and run the risk of never being seen again because the metrics say it's not 'popular enough'. As has already been mentioned Firefly falls on this list, but plenty of others do as well. Networks are inherently fickle and wouldn't recognize good tv if it was used to hit them over the head. Thank god they are becoming less and less needed to handle entertainment.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
I was watching several series for a few years, and new ones kept coming up, and I got bogged down. Missed a few episodes, then decided to wait until I could just watch the entire season at once, to catch up, but then fell behind in several more series. Then you would have some series take several breaks, and I wouldn't know when to start watching again. Then you get filler episodes that don't matter, and don't interest me enough to catch up on them. Then add to that the aforementioned fact that a lot of shows I enjoyed got cancelled after I invested time into them (Sarah Connor Chronicles was a huge blow to my enjoyment of TV), and I just stopped caring. I mostly game, exercise, or watch movies or the Marvel shows, on Netflix. I'll watch some occasional cartoons (Family Guy, Simpsons, Archer, etc), that doesn't require too much knowledge of previous shows, but I can't invest time in like 10 different series, that require me to watch each and every week.
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
Maybe somebody can write a Python script, that writes better TV scripts than TV script writers?
Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin did that already in the late 1960s.
I'm cord and battery free. Now have a slave girl playing a lute.
But this is a factor of what 'competitive' media is. As we lower friction and make it so a mass audience of largely idiots can flow effortlessly to whatever they like (yay tech industry optimism! Boo gatekeepers!) this is not only what happens but the ONLY thing that can happen.
I also think of it as Ramseyfication. You know how on 'Hell's Kitchen' in almost every challenge and certainly every big final challenge, the score always goes back and forth and ends in a big dramatic tie? That's because the show can't possibly risk seeing events go less than the most calculatedly high-stakes thing imaginable. You can watch that stuff as a carefully crafted rivalry/competition play, orchestrated down to the smallest detail. Super effective, because it has to be.
So you have to like seeing that story echo again and again, and enjoy the minor variations (like mastering 12-bar blues or something). It's not about being surprised on any level, even the outcomes will be telegraphed because you have to: if the outcome's surprising and apparently unjust, viewers will be lost.
EVERYTHING MUST BE LIKE THIS in the totally fluid media of the future because only successful things survive, and the fluidity/openness makes it so nobody has to sit through temporary dissatisfaction or learning or anything like that. This is the world you, the tech industry, have created by wresting it from gatekeepers.
Same rules, ALL THE CHOICES, and this is what you get.
The answer isn't more choices or better ways of finding out what's the most popular thing while allowing more crap to be flung at the wall.
The answer is figuring out how to celebrate weird little failure things that don't make it to mass media. Until we get better at that, we'll have this: everything becomes 'Upworthy' and calculated to the Nth degree.
One of the major problems with TV programs, is that they are made for people who buy "As Seen On TV" crap. I wonder if TV executives use a algorithm that matches the script to viewers + ability to purchase + likely to watch + likely to purchase?
Passionately Indifferent
Go see what it took in the old days to produce a TV show. The capital investment in cameras, editing equipment, lights, sound systems, etc was HUGE. You needed a large audience to make the economics work.
Today you can produce a decent quality show with a couple thousand dollars in equipment. So you can make money with a very small audience and you can have much more diverse subjects where as before when you had a huge audience you needed to appeal to everyone. There is nothing wrong with so many shows. The market is great at figuring out how many shows are needed.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
One of the things I've noticed is that there's a huge glut of "original content" from Netflix, Amazon, Yahoo and other unlikely sources. As far as I can tell, this is a direct consequence of the latest tech bubble. Companies promoting tablet ecosystems or subscription services are increasingly in the TV production business as well. I kind of understand Netflix producing its own content, but Amazon?? Other than promoting Prime subscriptions, what possible economic sense does that make outside of bubble-land? I guess these companies see everyone else doing it and feel they need to be doing it also.
I guess my feeling on this is that it's not just other TV content competing for people's attention. I have a job and 2 little kids -- these things, plus maintaining the household take up pretty much any time I would spend watching new TV shows. Because of this, something has to be really good for me to invest the time to watch it. Even people who watch "normal" amounts of TV are too distracted by a billion other things to commit to a new show. The landscape has shifted -- it's not the 1970s anymore where the entire population was watching hours of prime time TV every night of the week from three content providers. Now it's Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, YouTube, the Internet at large, and other things competing for attention.
"Life begins when you can spend your spare time programming instead of watching television." -- Cal Keegan
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That's insane.
http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/i...
They are the number 1 Demographic after general population. Almost all daytime television is aimed at them and most evening television.
At the root of this is the notion that television is entertainment that is separate from life. It has always been an empty paradigm, and for decades thoughtful and ambitious people have avoided that kind of television. But while we were stuck with a broadcast model, it was the only option that could attract a large enough audience at a specific time to work economically. Now, with content on demand, it is possible for television content to be selected so that it is much more useful and relevant to people's lives. So that Kids programming can be chosen to match the developmental stage and educational goals for a child at a specific time. And dramas can be chosen to match the interests and psychology of a viewer. What we haven't yet figured out how to do is how to produce quality programming at the high volumes this model requires and we also haven't yet figured out how to index the content to allow new content to connect effectively with viewers. We are still stuck with a ratings system that is based on the old broadcast model rather than rewarding shows that effectively connect with a niche audience over many years.
There's a glut of all art. Why? I think:
Now a days those in charge are only interested in making a quick buck. Building an audience takes time. Being a science fiction fan I find most SciFi shows last one season and disappear. I look at the videos I have in my collection of SciFi and most are one season: Almost Human, Terra Nova, Etc. You have to let people know about the show. Do you think Dr. Who would have the audience it has now if the powers in charge today were in charge. Dr. Who became a hit only after many years and this started with PBS showing them. PBS started to show them in the 70's and it wasn't until 2005 when it returned that it started to get a largte following. Other shows outside of the SciFi arena that are great show don't last either. Take the recent show Forever. It was good and had potential to be good but disappeared quick without really solving the show. Thank goodness someone had the brains to see s show like Firefly as something good and have a movie made to tie up the loose ends. Of course the fan base forced it but it still shows the big shots running the networks have no clue on how to do anything. They believe on doing shows for the audience that demand very little brains.
Ignoring the last sentence of the excerpt because it's utter twaddle, the rest sort of makes sense.
Except for one thing - creeping nichification[1]. If you make a series about a mute muslim lesbian who wants to be an NFL quarterback the list of people interested in watching it will be shorter than the end credits.
[1] It totally is a word, now.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That's like saying there are too many books to read just because there is no longer time for one person to read them all before they die. The sooner the studios open their content to the world at large and stop their silly region blocking games they might find their audiences are actually much larger and willing to pay regionally appropriate rates if you let them seamlessly stream things on demand. Piracy is a response to the crappy implementation of getting content to consumers, and it will go away once the studios allow it to go away by making it more of a hassle to steal than pay. $1000 is the same weather you get it from 100 people paying ten dollars or 10000 people paying ten cents, minimal costs of bandwidth excluded obviously. China and India have a lot more than 10000 people last I checked. Netflix exists, and is kicking the other studios collective assess because they are doing exactly this, I wonder how long it will take them to stare a working model implementation in the face and still fail to grasp the concept. Sad part is, it still might not work, because who wants logins to each site? They should just hire the popcorn time developers and let all media companies from books to music have their content available on one portal and let each view, listen, or read go straight to the content creators and let it all compete fairly, globally.
I haven't watched TV since the 90s but I often watch TV series over streaming -- and I'm pretty sure I have not come across any series about programming. Not a single one. :( The closest to it was IT crowd, which was admittedly great but only entertainment.
Anyway, perhaps I'd start watching TV again if there were more series about programming. I'd also like to see good TV tutorials on combinatorics, but that might just be my personal preference. I suppose I'd need to purchase some sort of antenna first, though.
That's always been true. It's about the medium, literally.
But if you are in the business of channeling folks into sitting idle while programming floods across their brains, I suppose it helps to have a variety of specific messages tuned to every basic personality type. Helps keep everybody hypnotized and separated from each other.
Back in the days of just a few channels and just a few programs, we had common stories everybody had seen, and from this drew our modern mythology. A good mythology makes for a healthy culture.
Now there are one of two basic conditions in effect; no culture, because the message is so fragmented, resulting in personal isolationism, OR the effort to tune into everything drains people so much that they are useless to the world.
Bread and circuses.
Both are toxic, it seems.
What are we, a bunch of soap opera addicts?
Lessee, we have shows about insane hairdressers in LA. We have weird shows about making people run around in the woods without clothing - but in a twist, blur out the tittilating bits. We have shows about the contents of storage units and parking meter attendants, we have shows about idiots who live in teh Alaskan bush, yet seem to know as much about survival in the bush as someone from New York city. We have shows about how people are stupid, and every human advance is because of ancient aliens. We have shows about peole who think that a woman's vagina is a clown car. I gotta stop - but there are hundreds more examples.
The fact is, Television today is simply bottom of the barrel bad!
And the channels that were good at one time have been taken over. The learning channel was once about learning, The history channel once had history, not swamp logging midgets who run a pawn shop in Alaska's north slope.
So no - it isn't too much programming. It's that none of it is worth watchning
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It follows the formula of Soap from 1977. Take an absurd idea and just push the boundaries in a semi-plausible way for some effect. Soap operas have been doing that since the early days of radio. The TV show Soap used that formula and in place of the absurd romantic ideas, tried comedy and pushing the edges of social issues that could be shown at the time.
You are missing out. There is some really good stuff on TV. Obviously don't get cable or watch it when the network wants you to. Enjoy it on your own terms.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
And so what ? I also sometimes mention that I quit TV 30 years ago as it was quite literally sucking all my time (and brain cells). I mention it because, as stupid as it seems, many people have no idea that it's possible to live without a TV. I'm not exaggerating. It's a bit similar to some discussion with religious people where they go: "It's impossible to live without believing in some kind of god..."
Non-Linux Penguins ?
The problem with TV is that the amount of advertising is increasing to the point where watching in real time is too frustrating.
Of course people are turning to other sources where they can watch without the constant interruption of yet more and more and more commercials. The channels are starting to run certain ads more than once during a single ad break: Why would anyone want to watch that?
Without a PVR, TV is simply unwatchable.
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
First, they could always use blipverts.
Second, 400+ new shows is somewhere between half to a third of a new show per channel per season, on average. That suggests that if there's too much new material, there are far, far too many channels. In fact, that might be the best solution. Shut down nine in every ten channels. Then you can have exactly the same amount of new material with less channel surfing. People will stay on channel because they'll like the next program as well.
The British did perfectly well on four channels. In fact, they mostly did perfectly well on three channels. America is, of course, bigger. They might need fifteen to cater to all the various needs. You don't need several thousand (including local). All it does is dilute the good stuff with a lot of crap.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Whenever somebody wants to sell me TV service, I ask: Hey, what's my cut on watching those ads - how much do I get paid for that effort?
I never received an offer, so....
People who watch TV are stupid. Avoid them.
It was not so long ago that writers complained about the closed Hollywood shop that kept most of them out of work most of the time. Viewers complained about interesting new TV series being canceled after two weeks of low ratings. Directors had to concentrate their efforts on a few cookie-cutter surefire hits because the costs of production were too high to allow for any mistakes. Even after cable proliferated, the complaint we all had was, "500 channels and nothing on."
Now, because technology has lowered the cost of program production and distribution, we live in the golden age of TV. All we have to do now to end the "glut" is fix the legal problem: make it easier to stream prior episodes of shows over long periods of time. Because we get some episodes soon after air and not others, and those for perhaps three weeks region-limited, and limited to some artificial number of "Verify your cable provider" carriers much smaller than the number that actually air the show, there is a tendency to stop watching a new series after one or two missed episodes so you can wait a year and then binge-watch the season on Netflix. Fixing the distribution problem would increase the current-season viewership of new shows, pleasing the advertisers because they would enjoy a larger, happier audience.
Many of the new series are only ten to thirteen episodes a season. That's a far cry from the traditional TV season where a series had ~23 episodes. Some still do, but not many. Most of them are quote good. But, with shorter seasons it's hard to believe that there are too many series now. They're spread out over many more networks than in the past.
Kill your tv?
Get up!
You can't be serious. Reality took over and it will never go away. Why? Probably costs 100k to put on one episode of a reality show. And it cost 100k+ to pay ONE actor in a real series. Kind of a no brainer for the creators.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
Our impression of a good and proper supply depends greatly on whether we're buying or selling.
Not "enough" supply of tech workers? Oil too expensive? Housing market "collapses"?
An increased supply of content is good for viewers. It doesn't need to be fixed.
-Dave
This kind of humblebragging is more annoying than a SJW whine. Why are you posting here?
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
The answer is obviously no. I can't find any half decent programming show on Java or C, let alone some new fangled language like Go and Swift.
Firefly was pretty damn good but it was more of a Western in space.
That's why it was so genius. Out in space, you're not going to have police nearby, or any kind of structured society, it'd be just like the Wild West (which actually wasn't that "wild", contrary to popular opinion). Of course, the show had to make a severe assumption for the sake of plot, which was that humans had moved to a different star system with hundreds of planets and moons most of which they were somehow able to terraform to some degree, creating a huge amount of "land" for humans to expand into; it's just like the frontier days where people settled far beyond the reaches of the law and government. But this isn't any more unrealistic than other sci-fi which assumes the existence of FTL travel, "subspace" radio, teleporters, etc., and in some ways is more realistic since it sticks to conventional physics mostly (it's just unlikely they'd find a star system with so many terraformable worlds which wouldn't be either way too hot or way too cold).
Farscape, Firefly, Babylon 5, Stargate, Space: Above and Beyond, Star Treks, Battlestar Galactica, the list just keeps going of awesome scifi that ran from the late 1980s until the mid-2000s.
Almost by definition if you are a slashdot reader, you are likely to be of significantly above average intelligence AND a geek. It's not therefore a great surprise if there's not a lot that appeals to us. Add in the fact that we're more like to be playing games than watching TV, and it's not a surprise that there's very little out there that works for us. Which means that the audience figures for the shows that we like will be in the pits, and so they will get cancelled. Which means we don't bother to check for new shows etc...
Whilst for the average slashdotter knows how to play the PVR game, most people do. Also a lot of people have TV on as wallpaper rather than actually engaging with it. Given these premises, it's hardly a surprise if the quality of TV is and remains awful.
What a time waster. I know I am not alone either
Honestly, TV is more interesting and compelling than Slashdot. I'm re-watching the 2005-now Dr. Who with my girlfriend and it's awesome. Slashdot is just a bad habit I developed in the 90s that I can't seem to break.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
You're projecting. Where did I say I don't own a TV? Did you even read the linked article?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Monster: Living off the Big Screen, by John Gregory Dunne.
You'll think twice about believing anything a movie or TV executive ever says.
I've been forecasting exactly the thing mentioned in the blurb for years. There are only so many hours in the day for people to seek to be entertained. Entertainment comes in many forms television being one of them. So lets say that the hours people watch TV (or other media) per day is capped at 8hrs eg, every waking moment that isn't work or sleep. That means that television viewership can ONLY grow at the expense of other television viewership OR at the population growth rate. I would wager good money that the number of hours of media produced per year is going up at a rate substantially above the population growth rate.
Added to the fact that the old media content is still accessible the figure of "new content produced per year" should probably be adjusted up by some scaling factor of content produced in previous years (probably a belle curve since the older the show/movie gets the less likely it is to be seen).
A race to the bottom is ensuing.... the problem is its a race to the bottom in terms of quality.... not price. If they cannot get the viewership, they cannot get the money to support the show. Advertising revenue is more or less fixed at # of eyeballs on screen. This yields designing shows for the lowest common denominator.
Wouldn't it be nice if a tv show when its announced would tell you how long it was scheduled to run. Say if networks were forced to buy the show as a package and not piecemeal episode by episode or season by season? It would kinda force network execs to commit to shows or face legal recourse. Say if they cancel it after 2 seasons and it was budgeted for 5, they have to pay a big penalty to the show creator for breach of contract.
It might also have a beneficial effect on the show creators whereby they know how long the show is going to run for before starting and they can pace themselves. It could also help prevent "jumping the shark" where shows just go on endlessly because its still profitable but long ago lost all purpose.
The problem is that a lot of studios are trying to produce cash cows, and audiences aren't buying it.
These shows establish a basic over arching story that people are actually interested in. But spend 90% of the show with monster of the week crap that no one is interested in. With the goal being of milking the show for as long as possible. With two predictable results: Most shows are just garbage that never pick up a fan base and die after a season or two. While a handful shows get lucky and they milk it for years until the audience gets pissed off.
Studios need to start producing shows that are designed to end. Stop producing comic-book style never ending stories, and start producing long movies. Shows like Dexter and Battlestar Galactica had amazing ideas in them, but the writers just lurched from season to season trying to keep the things afloat. There needs to be a story with a fixed end point, and once the show gets there it ends and that talent moves on to something else. I'd much rather watch a bunch of long-miniseries type shows like Rome, Band of Brothers, Sherlock, Jekyll, Babylon 5, etc. That are designed to end. Than all these shows that just milk a good idea to death.
I started getting fed up with TV back in the 90s when they cancelled multiple shows I really loved after a single season. My So-Called Life and Space: Above and Beyond were 2 examples. In the mid 2000s, I dropped cable and went to disc only viewing.
Now I make it a point to not even look at a series until it has gone for three seasons. No more wasting my time on one-season wonders. I will occasionally violate the rule for a good reason. For example, I got into Veronica Mars after only 2 seasons because Joss Whedon said it was the best show he'd ever seen. That was good enough for me.
Anyway, I'm relying on the rest of you folks to watch the current series and keep them going long enough to reach the point where I might become interested and check them out.
I don't watch TV. ;)
> The British did perfectly well on four channels.
Yes, they did, but with the advent of cable and satellite in the late 80's (and Net-streamed channels in recent years), the number of UK channels exploded and are now probably approaching 1,000. Of course, 950 of those 1,000 channels are completely hopeless and probably have viewers in the hundreds or thousands.
The quality of British TV has nosedived in inverse proportion to the number of channels available - the "big 5" UK channels are now so bad, that I'm down to recording maybe 5-6 shows a week (it used to 40-50 about 20 years ago). BBC and ITV compete for the lowest of the low-brow now - endless quizzes, soaps, reality shows and "talent" shows dominate prime-time viewing and it's been many years since I've liked any UK TV comedy (Have I Got News For You remains the only regular UK comedy show I'll bother recording).
I'm finding that the best US shows are just so much higher quality now than their UK equivalents, so a decent broadband connection is all I need to satisfy my viewing needs...
That's why I used to like some of those house-flipping shows. Sometimes they'd make big money, sometimes they wouldn't. Sometimes at the end they'd end up losing money. There was one where the flipper couple ended up divorced and the guy ended up bankrupt and living in an tiny RV that belonged to one of his relatives. Still, there's only a limited number of variations of the formula, and they played them all out.
Honestly I don't watch any series any more. There far too many dumb reality TV programs out there that are just as mind numbing as sitting and smoking weed the entire evening. Maybe if I did smoke weed I would find TV more entertaining - they should look into this and see whether ratings are higher in Colorado and other states that have legalized.
The only thing I do watch is the evening news, and *some* science programs. My wife watches sports, but even there the economics are all screwed up with the networks overpaying for mediocre stuff, which results in overpaid coaches and overpaid athletes, and the inevitable scandals which result from this. Even here, more sports are going to a streaming model, and once that transition is complete, a whole bunch more people will cut the cord.
Doctor Who is getting preachy. When Capelli's Doctor tells that woman that it's too bad she's a soldier and the blatant disgust with PE, I get little turned off
Doctor Who has been preachy since color (early on it was written more as a kids show, but oddly wasn't preachy). Thing was, the shows were (almost) always solidly, competently written. Some were uninspired, but the plots made sense, the characters were understandable, the scenes hung together, and so on. As social issues we care about change, the preachy-ness becomes hard to spot, because it was never central to the plot.
The problem with the most recent doctor is that the episodes are a chaotic mess. They seem thrown together at random - scenes that are individually well shot and acted, but don't tell a coherent story. Attention-grabbing story elements that never pay off, and afterwards you wonder why they weren't just cut. The writing has become dreck. Too bad, too, I really like the cast.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Lillehammer (unless you hate sub-titles, its English and Norwegian). We watch around 2-4 Episodes per week.
There is more high quality entertainment on than I can watch. And I've been retired 3 years.
So I filter on price.
The current prices of entertainment and talent are unreasonably high given the glut.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
There is no single credible new Sci Fi show, let alone anything of the caliber of Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica. If there is audience saturation, is because every network is trying to copy plot lines that made money a few years ago, but people are looking for variety. Imagine a VR-based series which is also a game, and top players get to interact with professional actors on national TV. Think there will be a few folks who are interested to watch the show and play the game?
I think the axe should be taken to all of these 'reality' shows. Sure it's cheap for the networks because they don't have to pay professional actors or writers. But is society really served by watching a bunch of housewives sitting around debating what shade of polish to paint their toenails when they get their next pedi?
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Who watches shows on a schedule anymore? It might take me a year or two before I start watching a series. By then I know which have multiple seasons and might be worth watching. But I eventually do get around to every series that I would have watched on a schedule. In fact I have more time now to watch shows and I watch more shows. No more 2am mornings with nothing to watch. We need to get shows to stop all this fall/spring premiere schedule stuff and instead have new shows every month. And no more pilot episodes but rather half season pilot series. In fact it would be better for the shows if they just did away with seasons all together and instead focused on shows more as mini series. And maybe a series takes two years to get renewed... so what.
In my recent, and ongoing, bad movie kick I watched a Uwe Boll movie called Tunnel Rats. It's actually pretty good and on Hulu though you may need a paid account in order to view it though I'm sure you can find it if you wanted it bad enough. It had far fewer explosions than I expected. It ended just as I expected but it went to the ending in a very unexpected way. I was hoping for a worse movie but ended up with a good one. It was surprisingly well done. I was expecting more explosions given the theme.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You call "reality tv" shows 'documentaries?"
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Today you can produce a decent quality show with a couple thousand dollars in equipment.
We return now to the real world of digital media.
TV literary agent Peter Micelli was forthcoming about how Netflix --- and other digital media upstarts --- do business with Hollywood during a panel discussion Friday at the UCLA Entertainment Symposium. He went so far as to specify how much was spent to produce some of the series CAA has sold to Netflix.
''The cheapest show is $3.8 million an episode,'' Micelli told a crowd of more than 500 lawyers in the entertainment business. '' 'House of Cards' started at $4.5 million and (executive producer David) Fincher took it way above that.''
''The next series is 'Hemlock Grove' and they're doing that for about $4 million an episode,'' he said. '' 'Orange is the New Black' is just under $4 million as well. They're huge budgets shows, theyâ(TM)re doing things in a huge way.''
{"Netflix will] pay a large percentage of the budget . They control it for four years exclusively and then can turn around to re-sell to a cable channel.''
''Amazon is looking at it on a smaller scale, with comedies, but spending a million dollars per episode.''
Netflix Series Spending Revealed [March 8 2013]
The geek thinks consumer grade video tech and maybe some OS solutions for F/X, audio and editing.
The pro thinks about the time, material resources, talent, imagination and experience that he will need across the board.
Just donate some new scripts the Hollywood industries, they're plagued with sequels, reboots and lame, reworked, versions of anything that came out before 1986.
The nerd and the geek have been obsessively crafting replicas of the ST:TOS Enterprise bridge, costumes, make-up and props for their fan-fiction productions since the seventies. I don't expect to see anything new coming from that direction.
Apparently "Jane the virgin" is actually a remake of a 2002 tv show, so it looks like somebody _did_ manage to get that show on TV more than five years ago.
Somebody got a show on non-US TV, and it was a success. And that's what got it on US TV. That neither proves somebody could have gotten it on US TV 5 years ago, nor that somebody in the US could have come up with the idea on their own.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
People normally complain that there are too many REPEATS, and not ENOUGH original stuff! This post is back to front.
Gutenberg created a world where there are just too many books published in a year to be read in a year.
Something must be done!
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
...to replace our 25 year old CRT (with converter box), but it doesn't work. There's nothing Smart on TV.
stop watching BECAUSE EVERY EPISODE WILL BE THE SAME.
Yep, this is the problem. Ice Road Truckers, Most Dangerous Catch, etc etc etc. they're all the same formulaic nonsense. Every Damn. Time.
1) Guy/gal has a job.
-- commercials --
2) Guy/gal encounters a problem on the job (OH NOES!)
-- commercials --
3) Guy/gal finds a way to solve the problem (YIPPEES!)
-- commercials --
4) Roll credits & more commercials.
And this is why, despite having a giant TV, we have no cable and almost never turn the fucking thing on. Even Netflix has become 90 minutes of searching to find a program or show that doesn't old our interest for more than ~15 minutes. (Some people say it's always been that way, but those people also claim that once upon a time MTV didn't have commercials.)
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I get you. See "Extreme Couponing" for a wild example.
Oh my goodness, "Extreme Couponing"....that does sound exciting. I'm not sure my heart could take that level of action and drama, not to mention the plot twists.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Same here. We have a huge TV and never turn it on. No cable, but we have free Netflix, and even that can't get us interested enough to slog through all the shit in their listings in a vain attempt to find something, anything, worth watching.
Breaking Bad was the last thing we actually watched, and it'll probably be the last thing we ever watch.
Is there "good stuff" on TV? Probably, but it's buried by the mountain of shit-shows that are standard fare these days. And so we just don't watch TV anymore.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
You can't compete with "The Wire".
If you really want to see an example of the US TV industry screwing a program try watching the British series Coupling. It is one of the funniest shows I have watched in years. The US version is just awful, awful, awful. I know we are talking about sci-fi here but I have read stuff you have posted before and I strongly recommend this show for you.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
First episode on YT --. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Thank goodness I have a DVR. When I'm stuck at home during the week, there's nothing to watch. It's all crap. Mostly chick stuff. I'm seeing more stuff where there's one or two dumbasses that have a camera - and they have a show! Bad as rap is to music. As if rap is music.
Here's my satellite TV - over 500 channels. Still nothing to watch.
"Quality" is the concern :-)
I'll just keep watching reruns of Bar Rescue, Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, and Airplane Repo until there's a new season of Firefly.
To roughly borrow a phrase from Pournelle's Empire of Man series which had the same Wild West science fiction vibe:
"Horses breed more horses. Vehicles breed refineries and air pollution."
A frontier world will lack the infrastructure to support ubiquitous high technology.
What's your point? The frontier worlds in Firefly weren't shown to be technological leaders at all, they were shown to be backwaters with low tech, but a lot more freedom than the Alliance worlds (though this came at a price--a lot of crime and anarchy). But they still had technology, but of course it was likely all manufactured on the inner Alliance worlds, and a lot of it was old (like the Firefly ship itself).
This isn't much different from how things were in the American frontier; they had technology, but it had to be shipped from the eastern states where it was manufactured, and of course they couldn't generally afford the latest and greatest and went without a lot of the time.
The only thing more predictable than someone saying "I don't watch TV" is that someone will then reply by dragging out that Onion article. Again. It's old, it's tired, and no, I don't need to read it again.
I was reinforcing your point; I was not disagreeing.
Pournelle's Empire of Man series stressed this aspect of frontier worlds where you have solders travel via FTL starship, use weapon which are chemical slug throwers instead of energy weapons, and travel locally using steamboats and horses. The local infrastructure could not support anything more complex. The only high technology you would have is what you can carry that does not require maintenance.
Incidentally, I am not sure I would categorize the Wild West as having more crime or anarchy. Chicago and other major cities were wretched hives of scum and villainy even then.
I think the "Wild West" got a bad rap. It was lawless in many places due to too little policing and too much open land, but in towns it wasn't that bad. Lots of towns didn't even allow guns; you had to check them with the sheriff's office.
For soldiers traveling via FTL starships and then riding horses, that really doesn't make sense to me. You don't need infrastructure to get around when you have that kind of technology and access to energy. We have lots of off-road vehicles even today; if you switch the diesel engine for electric motors, then you just need a source of energy to power them. If you have the technology for FTL, likely you've come up with some very potent energy sources or storage devices, so the whole "battery problem" shouldn't be a problem for you; it should be trivial to use off-road wheeled vehicles as well as aircraft. And that's being generous; if you figure out how to travel FTL, then I think it's also likely you'll know how to create anti-gravity fields so you'll have flying/hovering ships.