Is Must See TV, On TV, Dead? - Stanek's Comment

But I know the truth: there's no going back. You've changed things... forever.

Must see TV, as it existed in the latter half of the 20th century, is dead. The reason is simple: that concept was based on boundaries, it was rooted in constraint and a lack of choice. In an age where time and (viewing) space are manipulable, that model is rapidly becoming outmoded. Only in a finite entertainment universe can a particular program be “must see.” Let's consider two factors that have rapidly eroded the supremacy of the immutable timeslot anchored to a traditionally popular channel.

First, the rapidly inflating landscape of the television universe. The explosion of television channels over the past few decades has diluted content and generated a digital New World for viewers to explore. In 1985, the average number of TV channels receivable was 18.8. In 1990, it was 33.2 By 2000 it was 74.6 and in 2007 the average home in the U.S. received 118.6 channels. Of course, most people watch only a fraction of the available channels—the average viewer in 2007 tuned to only 16 channels for at least 10 minutes per week. But the key point of interest isn't how many channels a person watches, it's the fact that they can choose now to watch different channels than their neighbor.

Part of the reason for that is that there are channels now for everyone's tastes. We have channels on history, weather, science, nature, news, sports, travel, food, science fiction, and comedy. We have channels aimed at men, channels aimed at women, channels for game show fanatics, channels airing classic movies, channels airing contemporary movies, on-demand television and movie options, you name it and they've probably got it. Of course, many of these channels stray a bit from their ostensible mission. SyFy plays a disproportionate amount of wrestling and low-budget horror films, news channels rely on a crude parody of analysis in the evenings, and the history channel plays a lot of weird shit about wormholes and truck drivers. But the fact remains that even when a channel's name sometimes borders on being a misnomer, they're catering to some particular audience.

I was recently introduced to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, thanks to Comedy Central’s 2-hour IASIP happy hour on Monday nights. I was aware of the show before reruns came to Comedy Central but, since I don’t generally watch FX, it escaped my craving for misanthropic comedy until now. The lesson there is that for some of us, our channels of choice are oases in a desert of uninteresting or, at the very last unfamiliar, programming. It's frightening to wander in search of a new watering hole, particularly when you suspect the promos greenery in the distance is just a mirage. So we don't bother summoning the energy to try something new; the price of our laziness is missing some solid shows. Of course, then they go into syndication and end up on a network we do watch and everything's fine.

Second, the near-total mastery of time. Yes, it's always been possible to tape programs to watch them later. But that required physically having and storing VHS tapes, fumbling with labels, rewinding. Taping programs was an occasional indulgence, used mostly to record a single episode of a TV show you couldn't avoid missing or, by jury-rigging two TVs together, illegally copying rented videos. It was impractical to use as your primary mechanism for watching television.

Today it doesn't matter when you watch most television shows. We have seen the rise of "time-shifted viewing," as DVRs have made it possible to effortlessly record, store, and watch (sans commercial breaks) any program you want. The result has been that a significant chunk of televisions actually viewed on televisions aren't watched at the time they originally air. In addition, as Teshale pointed out, the internet--particularly in the era of Hulu--is a viable option for watching shows. And I'm sure that soon enough we'll be able to watch television shows from the future, years before they're ever produced. Take that, causality.

There are still exceptions, of course. We've only mastered TV time, not actual time. News events--inaugurations, celebrity deaths, disasters, and the like--continue to dominate ratings because those television events still compel people to tune in live (if you record it to watch it a week later, it ain't news). Similarly, major sporting events (e.g. the Superbowl) and other results-oriented, spoiler-based or otherwise time-sensitive forms of programming also invite live watching. But these exceptions aren't regular or common enough to undo the influence of time and space factors.

Together these two factors make it unlikely that astonishing numbers of eyes (at least on a percentage basis) will be trained on the same channel at the same time anymore. Even if huge numbers of people do choose to watch the same program, they will do it at different times and through different mediums. The (viewing) space issues mean less viewers for a given show, as potential program-watchers spread out, however unevenly, through the TV landscape. The time issues give viewers the option of watching at their own pace, which often--at least in my case--means skipping the advertisements that bring in revenue to the network. I suspect that down the line this trend is going to become increasingly important. Will revenues from internet ads start picking up the slack? Will networks switch to a greater reliance on subscription-based business models for both television and internet programming? I can't say.

What I can say is, we won't be going back to the way things were. Television is becoming increasingly granular and, in some cases, individualized. The more it caters to your particular viewing desires, the harder it becomes to make it into a mass commercial gimmick. Of course, all this will be moot once you can download customizable entertainment right into your head. Or someone invents a holodeck. We're all just marching toward a future in which we each live inside our own minds, anyway.

RIP, Urkel.

Is Must See TV, On TV, Dead?-Teshale

Good news, everyone! To start off the STB's third and most glorious resurrection, and to honor the return of Futurama to our TV screens (well those of us with Comedy Central), I thought I would discuss a topic dear to both mine and Stanek's hearts: science fiction television. You see, we here at the STB are right on the cutting edge, which is why I have chosen to discuss the season finale of a TV show a mere six weeks after it aired. Nothing gets by me!

You might know that I enjoy a little show called Lost. You probably know about it already, so I won't describe it. What I will say is that Lost was unlike any show currently on TV-- but it wasn't the first of its kind. Anyone who calls Lost groundbreaking hasn't seen The Prisoner, or Twin Peaks, The X-Files, or heck, even Roots. Lost, while admirable because of what it attempted to do, was exceptional because it seems to have been the last of its kind, not the first-- one of the last heavily serialized genre television shows that people watched. Or, more broadly, the last gasp of must-see serialized drama.

The most popular shows watched on actual television sets nowadays are procedurals, reality TV, and sitcoms: NCIS, The Big Bang Theory, Dancing With the Stars. (Summer is a different prospect since there isn't that much new stuff on, but bear with me.) A procedural is popular because it is easy, not because it is necessarily good. You know going into it what you're going to get, and you can just dip in whenever you have time. You don't have to have seen seasons 1-3 of SVU to know what's happening in season 4, for instance. But starting to watch season 4 of, say, Mad Men without having seen any of it will not be as fruitful an experience.

Serialized television-- a show where you need to watch every week or you get lost (SEE WHAT I DID THERE)-- is a much bigger ask. Especially now that so much entertainment competes for your eyeballs, including this very blog! In 2004, streaming television shows was essentially pie in the sky-- Crazy Talk, to networks and studios. They'd just gotten the hang of putting trailers online, and now you want to put in entire 40-minute shows? Netflix didn't exist. Youtube didn't exist. Hulu certainly did not exist.

This meant that if you wanted to see a cool show everyone was talking about, you had three choices: sit down Wednesdays at 8/7c (or whatever) and watch it, set your VCR to record it and get annoyed when people spoil it for you the next day, or just not watch it and wait until the end of the season to get the box set. (Or, if you were a little more technologically minded, you could torrent it, but let's discuss legal ways of watching TV for now.) If that great show was on HBO, either you found someone with HBO, paid for the service, or you waited for the box set. (In fact, the dilemma basic cable channels like AMC, USA and so on are beginning to face now, with trying to make money from their own original programming vs buying syndication rights to network shows, all while dealing with the smaller audience of basic cable, is actually interesting in its own right, but irrelevant, so I'll shut up about it.)

Nowadays, power is in the viewers' hands. But networks can't seem to accept this, and adhere to outdated standards. Networks are used to the golden days of tv, where a season finale of NYPD Blue or something could draw 20+ million live viewers. This is not happening anymore. It is really not happening anymore. Example: In 2006 at its height, House M.D could pull in around 18 or 19 million viewers (airing directly after American Idol helped, let's be honest). Even my parents watched House, and my parents never watch anything but PBS usually. The season finale drew about 22 million viewers, and those ratings were considered absolutely excellent at the time. In 2010 it is literally, literally unheard of for a drama to get more than 20 million viewers The shows that come closest nowadays are comedies-- for instance, this season Two and a Half Men topped out around 17 million viewers with an average of about 15 million-- and procedurals (see NCIS, below). Glee's 14 million for its return episode was seen as a ratings smash, and it averages around 7 million. Five or six years ago 14 million probably would have been seen as a well- performing show, but could be better, and 8 million viewers considered something to worry about.

This is why so many good shows have been cancelled in the past few years; Firefly, Pushing Daisies, Life, Terminator (yes, Terminator), etc. It's because the format networks created to force ads upon a viewing public once upon a time no longer works, and since the format compliments networks, they're loath to change it. The problem for you, the viewer, is not that there are no good shows on network TV anymore-- it is that these good shows are hard to find, because networks have refused to adapt for so long.

There are a lot of claims in the media that people just aren't interested in serialized TV anymore. I don't think this is true at all, as can be seen by the success of a show like Glee, or even by the ultimate in serialized TV, 24. (You can't miss one episode or everything gets thrown off! Plus you'll have missed Jack Bauer ripping a man's throat out with his bare hands!) (Ok, maybe not his bare hands.) (No, his bare hands.) 24's ratings have stayed pretty steady for eight years-- that's not nearly as easy as you might think.

People are certainly interested in well-told stories; they are just no longer interested in being held ransom in order to see them, especially if they don't have to be held ransom. For a show you can dip in and out of, like SVU, or a reality program that has a shelf life, like American Idol or a sports game, the old format works perfectly. NCIS, for instance, regularly draws 15 million-plus viewers and drew 19 million this past season. How, I don't really know, but one of my guilty pleasures is Cold Case so I can't talk. You don't need me to tell you how many people watch American Idol, or the Super Bowl. But really, are you planning to buy a box set of a courtroom drama? Do you plan to buy the results show of American Idol on DVD, unless you are somehow personally connected to whoever is in the top 10? Does anyone besides a fan of the winners care about rewatching the Super Bowl? Nope. But do people want to rewatch well-told stories? Course they do, people buy movies on DVD, don't they? They get box sets of miniseries or whatever. Consider time-shifted viewings (i.e., not live) for my personal favorite show of the last two years, Damages. (Watch Damages. Seriously. Just do it. Right now. Go get the first season on DVD and watch it. It's super good.) In that article, John Landgraf (FX's president) says that viewership counts went up by 80 percent when factoring in DVRs. That is a huge audience, that is being lost using the Nielsen system.


So what can be done to keep good shows on the air? It's something that's already being done: put more shows online. But more importantly, the shows should be online for free. Why? Well, for one there needs to be some reason to go online-- I might as well just tape or DVR a show if I'm going to have to pay for the "privilege" of looking at it on a computer screen. For another, never underestimate the power of word of mouth. You want as many eyeballs as possible looking at your show, because it doesn't matter if it's the best show of the past two years, if nobody knows it exists nobody's going to watch it. Yes, I am still bitter. This seems like a nobrainer, I know, but networks only have so much budget for so many shows, and are understandably loath to do a huge ad push for a show they don't think will make back that budget.

This is all well and good, putting shows on the internet. Networks already do this. But what about getting those lost viewers back? (Look, I'm bringing it back round.) Is "must see TV" possible on television for a serialized show? Is it possible to get viewers back watching a TV, and all those sexy ads networks love, rather than a stream?

My hunch is that it is very possible. You need to make the programs worth watching, of course, but you also need to raise awareness about the show. My guess would be that if you had a show which was well written, well acted, just a great piece of work that really connects with people-- and (this is important) you give people opportunities to watch it-- people will come. I think the previously mentioned Glee is a good example. The show connected with people (that whole misfit in high school thing), it was different from anything else currently on TV (a musical number every week?!? everyone knows musicals don't work on TV). But just as importantly, the pilot episode was shown in the spring of 2009, and the show itself premiered in fall 2009. FOX got the show out in people's minds, got people talking about it, built up buzz, and that buzz helped carry the show three months later to a pretty decent opening. The two work in unison. The sooner networks realize that the best way to increase viewership is to increase awareness of a program, i.e. TELL PEOPLE THE SHOW EXISTS, the more viewers they'll have and the happier they'll be. And if people grow to love a show, they'll do whatever they can to keep that show around. It's everyday people who got a cancelled show a movie deal, who got a third season of their favorite show through sheer bloodymindedness. In fact, as Stanek probably knows, a little science fiction television program that struggled for ratings on 10 years ago is now experiencing its own glorious resurrection on Comedy Central-- Futurama.

Recall: networks are old, and still coming to grips with all these changes, with figuring out how to use this complicated series of tubes. So next time you power up the ol' puter and think about heading over to NBC.com to watch the latest episode of Heroes, or whatever, consider doing something that will actually get a network's attention: buy it on DVD if you like it. Or rent it. Maybe even send a letter, I hear people still do that. Just let networks know that you like it somehow, or don't be too down when the show cancelled.

And remember, you can always go outside, too.