Mike Gold: Must We, TV?
I was a little slow when it came to adopting television as a part of my lifestyle. I only cared about cartoons as a small child, and no wonder: teevee was mostly local and cheaply produced and all those public domain Fleischer and Warner Bros. cartoons were a delight. They still are. I didn’t get sucked into the mainstream until pre-adolescence.
When that happened, TV Guide was my bible. A digest-sized magazine that contained detailed descriptions of every local and network show to be aired in the following week, I, like my peers, pretty much planned our lives around the boob tube. The annual Fall Preview issue was a genuine event.
When it comes to broadcast entertainment today, TV Guide has become less than irrelevant – it’s useless. Cable has brought us so many channels if the magazine stuck to its original concept it would take a half hour to read the next 30 minutes of descriptions. The printed grid tells us nothing we can’t get from our cable grid. And the vaunted Fall Preview issue presumes the “new fall season” is unique. It is not. With the exponential growth of choice, “new seasons” come with each new season.
more important. I take the recommendations of my friends quite seriously – daughter Adriane is a constant source of advice, and I take heed at the recommendations of Martha Thomases and the other ComicMix crew (Martha makes one such nod this Friday; I’d link to it but it’s not Friday yet).
But if my jaded, tube-weary brainpan is capable of generating any excitement similar to that of the old new fall season, it happens right now, in January. Some of my favorites return this month: Justified, Community, Young Justice, Bill Maher. There are a number of promising-sounding shows such as Ripper Street, and before long we’ll have Louie, Hell On Wheels and Doctor Who back.
None of these (save Bill Maher) are what we used to think of as full-length series. We get maybe a dozen episodes of each annually. Even though each episode is played many times, teevee-watching isn’t quite the passive experience it once was.
All of this cable stuff already is being eclipsed by streaming media: Netflix and others have competitive original content, Apple has a box for sending stuff from a great many services (including, of course, its own) to the teevees in your house, and Intel is going to be rolling out an interesting new media box on a market-by-market basis starting soon. The larger cable companies have apps that allow you to pick up their service at home on your smartphones and tablets, and content suppliers such as HBO and the various networks allow you to steam their material to these same devices.
We’re probably just a heartbeat away from fulfilling the prediction made back in 1967 in the brilliant social satire, The President’s Analyst. Pretty soon we’ll just have a chip installed in our heads, and the fees will be debited to our bank accounts.
We don’t need drugs, alcohol or virtual reality. We have television.
THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil
Cable has largely accepted the BBC’s definition of “season”, more specifically, “Series”, that meaning “a block of episodes”. There’s a small impetus to get them started in a tradition “new season” period, but not as much, as they realize that quality takes time.
Similarly, cable is willing to let a show end when it should, as opposed to broadcast TV which would much rather have the same exact stuff for as long as it can. So we get far too many seasons of shows, some so different that specific seasons have their own fandoms.
Right now we’re already in the part of the year where the networks are burning off the episodes of shows they’ve already canceled, so The Wife is happily grabbing the remaining episodes of Made in Jersey, which she feels got too early a canning.
What Cable and the BBC call “series” are more what broadcast TV used to call mini-series. Six to ten episodes, one coherent story, with a proper ending. Maybe a loose thread or two for a second series, but not so much that it may as well say “To be continued” at the last episode. What they call a miniseries now is an embarrassment. TWO episodes is not a miniseries, it’s a two-part movie.
24 is about the only recent example I can think of, Heroes to a lesser degree. And even there, once it was announced it was renewed for a next season,
Twin Peaks was a proper mini-series. It ended. The second season was a mistake. I’d be very curious to see if a proper mini-series, shown weekly, not five nights in a row, could succeed on broadcast TV anymore. One that would end, and that’s it.
Vinnie, I’m not sure what your complaint is with the time frame in which a mini-series airs. Two of the greatest full-fledged mini-series in American TV history aired on consecutive nights (Roots and Shogun) and no one seemed to have a problem with it; in fact, it made the shows real events. You are correct in the slipshod way that current “mini-series” are nothing like what they used to be (although, it should be noted that the two-part movie “mini-series” aren’t exactly new–the 1979 adaptation of “Salem’s Lot” and the 1990 adaptation of “Stephen King’s It” were done as two-part “movie mini-series”).
As to “cable is willing to let a show end when it should,” not really. Might I offer up “Damages” as an example? It aired for 3 seasons on FX before pulling the plug due to low ratings (with DirecTV picking it up for 2 more seasons). Or how about FX’s “Over There?” It only ran 1 season with the formal cancellation announcement coming a few days after the last episode had aired.
And regarding your opinion of “Twin Peaks?” Sorry, but the first season did NOT “end”; Laura Palmer’s killer–the whole point the series was based on–wasn’t revealed until partway through the 2nd season. If the show had ended at the end of the “first season,” it would be like only reading 2/3 of a mystery novel–getting the crime but not finding out whodunnit. (You may be misremembering the series’ production. The first “season” began in April of 1990 and only ran to the end of May for a total of 8 episodes. The second season began that September and after the December break, the show aired somewhat sporadically until the end of June 1991. Additionally, the show’s pilot episode was filmed with additional scenes that didn’t make it into the TV airing–most notably, the revelation of Laura Palmer’s killer–as a standalone movie for Europe.)