Is There Too Much New Programming On TV? 307
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."
Why not stop making new shows (Score:3, Insightful)
Until people start asking for new ones?
Re:Why not stop making new shows (Score:5, Insightful)
Because capitalism.
Company X does what you suggest, company Y carries on. Pretty soon company Y has more viewers, just because they are putting out more stuff.
Reminds me about the last stages at the fall of communism. Or the shoe event horizon on Frogstar B.
Re:Why not stop making new shows (Score:5, Interesting)
There are shows that rolls on because they attract stupid people that are too lazy to skip the commercials and there are smart shows that gets cancelled because the ad providers considers the audience impossible to target.
Re: Why not stop making new shows (Score:2, Insightful)
True enough in broadcast, but paid services like netflix, etc. are reversing that trend.
Also, now i need to go pull out my jarre records.
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I'd be willing to pay for Netflix or even Evilzone Prime membership if they continued shows like Stargate Universe, Terra Nova, Star Trek, etc.. There is too much cheap and stupid scifi but everything that's worth watching (for me) stops after a season or two.
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oops, forgot about firefly
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Wake me when Netflix et al start making big-budget sci-fi shows.
Until then, I'll just watch reruns of Star Trek, if anything. The last thing I want to watch is a show about how horrible prison life is. I already know it sucks; I don't need to spend my entertainment time seeing it. I want to see something optimistic.
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You must not know about the Wachowski/Straczynski "Sense8". Unless by big-budget you mean SFX-laden? But it's beautifully shot on location around the world.
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Am I the only one to notice that this story disproves Betteridge's law of headlines?
Re: Why not stop making new shows (Score:5, Interesting)
No, it really doesn't. There aren't too many new shows. There are simply too few shows getting renewed. Every episode that has aired before is "new programming". There's certainly not too much of that. If anything, there's too little. If you watch whatever is on Netflix, you'll run out of new content before you watch TV every evening for two years. After that, you'll be sitting there looking for new content and not finding any that looks interesting to you. Yet the shows that you aren't interested in are probably interesting to other people, so those shows should still continue to exist.
The real problem, unfortunately, is what it has always been: ratings-driven executives who are not content to pay for shows unless they find their audience instantly and are broadly popular. This leads over time to progressively lower-quality programming that dumbs down everything to be "good enough" for the largest possible audience, while being seen as "good" by none of them.
What we need is what we have always needed: executives who have the courage to allow a show the time to find its audience, even if that takes three or four seasons, who are willing to guarantee more than a half season at a time, giving people a reason to think long-term about a show's future. Without that, most TV will continue to be what it has become: crap.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not just do it right? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why not just do it right? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
In the immortal words of Pink Floyd's "Nobody Home", "Got thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from"
Except its no longer 13, more like several hundred....
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Just see Futurama reference - 4000 (or something) channels and nothing to watch, channel inflation...
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I don't see it that way. There are lots of interesting shows to watch. I don't have time to watch everything but that is okay as long as I can enjoy something when I feel like it. My wife is retired and spends a lot more time watching TV now and she and I have 5 shows we regularly watch together that she DVR's. I can see why he's complaining but why in hell viewers would be complaining? He hates competition but I seriously doubt any viewers are complaining in this day and age of too much to watch. Bac
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Bruce had 57. https://youtu.be/YAlDbP4tdqc [youtu.be]
Here is my solution: Shorten copyright to three years and decriminalize torrenting. According to the studios this will cause immediate collapse in programming.
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Cable TV essentially meant that you now have to spend ten times the time to find out that there's only crap on TV.
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Kill Your Television.
Re:Why not just do it right? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or for that matter Max Headroom [maxheadroom.com] - the problem with that show was that it was too critical of viewer ratings and ads to get finance from people placing ads.
Like the Blipverts [youtube.com] episode.
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Thus making it perfect for a HBO or a netflix to do. Quality programing that pisses off advertisers.
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For me 'Firefly' hits on the answer. There is a complete lack of competition in the scifi genre. You have the comic book series and you have whatever mediocre "scifi" that SyFy/Space put out. Growing up there was a massive amount of scifi to choose from, from Star Trek to Lex and everything in between. There was an analysis done on imdb data, I can't find the link, however, it showed something like 7 times the historic average during the 90s. These shows have massive followings to this day and they cre
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> For me 'Firefly' hits on the answer. There is a complete lack of competition in the scifi genre.
Completely agree! There is a complete dearth of *good* Sci-Fi.
Here's my list sorted alphabetically:
(Note: You'll have to forgive me for including "scifi-y" stuff. Some of these clearly aren't SciFi but I've lumped them together since they had an interest in Science.)
= Sci-Fi TV Shows =
* Battlestar Galactica (2004) [imdb.com] - Holy shit, this was freaking AWESOME! Excellent writing and acting.
* Caprica (2009) [imdb.com] - OK, had
Re:Why not just do it right? (Score:4, Informative)
SciFi that's out right now
Falling Skies (just ended after 5 seasons - decent)
Dark Matter (boring as all fuck)
Killjoys (not bad)
Defiance (Awesome first episode and then straight downhill... stopped watching after 8 episodes)
Continuum (Couldn't get through season 1, need to check it out again)
Under the Dome (Season 1 was decent but they didn't know what to do with it after that)
Extant (Couldn't get through a single episode... just painful)
Zoo (likes to think it's scifi but it's absolutely moronic)
Minority Report (omg one of the worst leaked pilots of recent memory)
Fantasy/Fantastical Fiction or Horrorish is looking a little better
Dominion (really enjoying)
Lost Girl (love it)
Game of Thrones (last season sucked)
Forever (really enjoyed it, so of course it's cancelled)
The Whisperers (interesting concept)
Strain (not bad if you can get into the editing/shooting style)
All the teen crap (Beauty and the Beast, Teen Wolf, Vampire Diaries, and so on)
Once Upon a Time & spin off (Enjoyed but got played out)
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Continuum's cancelled, Under the Dome is based off a book so they know exactly what to do with it, Lost Girl is cancelled...
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BSG(2004) *was* awesome, in the beginning. Unfortunately they managed to completely screw it up and jump the shark by season 3. That whole "final 5" thing was idiotic. Like "Lost", it became clear they were just making shit up as they went along, instead of having an actual plan, and a good reason why the Cylons had it out for the humans, so the longer they drew it out, the more convoluted and ridiculous it had to become.
Extant wasn't *that* bad, and did have a lot of potential. I liked how it showed se
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Warehouse 13. Not Xfiles, but passes time
Good show, but also cancelled. :( Now my favourite character is on one of the more idiotic shows of the past decade... "Stitchers"... ugh.
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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 d
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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.
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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. Th
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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?"
You really gotta wonder if these show producers make this stuff because it's popular and most Americans are down with that, or because the government/powers-that-be are trying to condition the population for a future with fewer civil liberties.
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Keeping existing shows running means they run out of plots and ideas, and keep jumping sharks as to try to prevent repeating the same plot over and over.
Also there is the creative aspect towards making a new show. Why do we make new software vs. just maintaining the existing branch, there is argument about architecture and other stuff. But it really comes down to the fact that we as humans like to create Just keeping a show running gets dull, starting a new show is much more interesting.
Also it comes dow
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The problem as I see it isn't that there are "too many new shows". It's that there are too many new shows that target the masses, to attract advertising to said masses. That means that fringe shows rarely get the attention they might deserve on their merits, because the bean counters don't see large number of eye-balls.
tl;dr: it's a business model issue.
Unfortunately, the other parts of Hollywood, the movie studios, have been bitten by the number-of-eyeballs silliness, because they want large returns on
As Stalin said... (Score:3, Insightful)
Quantity has a quality all of its own.
Literally (Score:5, Funny)
"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".
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Where did he say that he was insane? Learn to parse a sentence already.
P.S. ITYM sanatorium, unless you're suggesting he has tuberculosis.
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With the way literally is being used, quite literally it will soon have a new meaning added to high profile dictionaries.
Too late:
Donate some new scripts the Hollywood industries (Score:3)
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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 ser
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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.
You like a new show... (Score:5, Informative)
... 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.
Re:You like a new show... (Score:4, Insightful)
Forgot the name, the one that's a cross between 2001 and an interplanetary treasure hunt. That had potential.
Oh, you mean the one with thingy in it, the guy from that other show. And the girl with the hair. And giant robots. I loved that show. It should never have been taken off the air.
Too many of them aren't worth following (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Too many of them aren't worth following (Score:5, Interesting)
Too many seem to have the following structure:
90% of the time is dedicated to an episode specific narrative following a formula. Whether it's the detectives getting a case, the scientific guy chasing a new phenomenon, etc. For the most part the, the events in this portion are episode specific although usually there's some new morsel that exposes information the grand conspiracy and larger story arc when that episode's events are resolved.
10% of the time is dedicated to following/expositing the serial aspect of the story, usually some kind of conspiracy or larger story. Very little information is exposed, mostly just enough to let you remember there's this bigger (and often much more interesting) narrative arc taking place.
Mostly this just feels as if the series has been turned on its head. It should be about the 10% part that is the actual "meat" of the story. If (and only if) the dumb series runs enough seasons, the larger story arc might get resolved in some semi-satisfying way. Mostly it seems like the writer had a pretty cool idea but didn't know what to do with it, and fell back on the "case of the week" to fill it in because the bigger idea really didn't have much behind it.
In some cases, this can be tolerable but most of the time you just feel strung along, like there's this really cool story that's going to get broken wide open...and then nothing, or something entirely lame like Lost happens.
In contrast, really good series (like the Wire) manage to make the entire series about the story arc and the individual episodes expand and bring it out. Part of the Wire's specific genius was that it did this well and also had a seasonal anthology feel to it as the action shifted from the corner, to the port, to the dealers again without losing the larger momentum but giving us different characters and settings, too.
When I start a new series if I feel like I'm being strung along by episode 4 or 5, chances are I won't ever get resolution and I just drop it.
Re:Too many of them aren't worth following (Score:5)
So few shows can have a story arc interesting and complicated enough to justify 16hrs or so a season worth of content. So you get that 2 min flashback scene every episode to drag it out over many seasons. Also, a lot of shows do have a larger story arc but (IMO) lack the ability to develop the characters and so instead get viewers by making every episode a "must see" by killing someone off (Game of Thrones Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy).
Cop shows: there are so many plot devices that are just insulting too and at least to me actively repulse me: needing to keep a guy on the line to trace a call, infinite zoom on a crappy photo, every police station having that guy that can miraculously hack any computer in seconds etc. I think the variety of real life would be more interesting. The cop bitching about a bum knee might stop him from getting his 20 years in, the secretary blowing the boss. Dirty cops, racist cops, cops that actually try to help people, cops that give a damn but are incompetent etc.
Some shows can be interesting mainly because their main character is interesting even without always having much of a story arc example House, Macgyver, Burn Notice, or occasionally having interesting moral dilemas: Star Trek, some old westerns.
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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 ca
from the red site (Score:5, Insightful)
already discussed this on the red site [soylentnews.org]
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.
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Viewers have become good at spotting shows that will be cancelled early. That stops them watching those shows, making them even more likely to be killed off.
Perversely the better the show is the more likely it is to be cancelled. This is especially true of generas like sci fi.
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Re:Makes it hard to decide what to watch (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
These are called "white people problems."
I am failing to understand how any of this is an actual problem. So making a popular show doesn't mean you earn 200 lifetimes of income for you and yours because there is so much competition. How tragic. Excuse me while I spend 0.00035 microseconds feeling sorry for content owners and superstars.
We have been told, most often by IP owners, that without their staggering profits new content would no longer be made. I guess that's a "problem" we can stop worrying about.
Lame excuse (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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But, but they are books! And if you read a book you're a better person than if you read the same words on a tablet. Oh, and I don't want watch TV (except for the things I do watch that don't "count" as TV).
Oh, and we should talk about food sometime.
I would love some proper new shows (Score:2, Informative)
Around here (Australia) there is bugger all new "real TV" coming out now days.
Too bad all the good stuff gets canceled (Score:2, Troll)
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)
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Hey, I actually happen to like CSI in all its forms (although Miami is definitely the weakest of the lot)
In terms of GOOD geek programming though, the best I have found is Halt & Catch Fire from AMC. Second season of that wrapped up not too long ago and I hope it comes back for a third.
AMC knows how to do good TV (Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, Halt & Catch Fire, Mad Men).
And yes I am very much interested in "The man in the high castle" although I haven't found a way to see it in Australia yet since we
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Its still better than Survivor, X Factor, Biggest Looser or any of the other so-called "reality" TV that seems to dominate the screens these days...
Right (Score:3)
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?
A niche of one (Score:2)
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.
Too much crap (Score:2)
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 denominato
TV s dead! (Score:4, Insightful)
TV has a diversity issue? (Score:2)
"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.
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>> "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.
There is no obvious bad grammar in the quoted sentence. The missing period appears to be a cut-and-paste error. The use of that instead of who is an unconventional, but correct, usage that dates back to at least Chaucer's time.
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Ahh, never mind. Now I see the problem with the quoted sentence. The lesson here is probably that one should comment on other people's grammar before having their morning coffee.
I don't know... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Remember we are a small minority (Score:2)
Falling Behind (Score:4, Interesting)
lowest common denominator (Score:2)
It's just economics (Score:3)
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.
Part of the social media bubble? (Score:2)
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?
Re:Part of the social media bubble? (Score:4, Informative)
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You're missing something. What you need to do is buy your kids an Amazon(TM) tablet, park them in from of your Samsung TV and spend the rest of your life working enough hours to pay for the hardware and subscriptions.
That, my friend, is the New American Dream.
And don't forget that new iPhone for the Missus.
Women left out of the conversation ? (Score:3)
That's insane.
http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/i... [nielsen.com]
They are the number 1 Demographic after general population. Almost all daytime television is aimed at them and most evening television.
A Root Cause (Score:2)
Not Just TV (Score:2)
There's a glut of all art. Why? I think:
Absolutely not! (Score:2)
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, tho
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The BBC produced Micro Live [wikipedia.org] which was responsible amongst other things, for the first live hack on TV. [youtube.com]
Looking under the streetlamp (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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because the light is better there.
Lessee, we have shows about insane hairdressers in LA.
Never heard of it.
We have weird shows about making people run around in the woods without clothing - but in a twist, blur out the tittilating bits.
Actually a good show, the nudity premise is dumb and tacky, but it's the first decent Survival show I've seen since Survivorman.
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
Remember ninety percent of everything is crap [wikipedia.org].
You only remember the great shows of the past, the really crappy sitcoms, dramas, and documentaries of the past were just as unwatchable as the bad reality TV today. Sometimes things work and you have True Detective Season 1, and sometimes it just doesn't click and you get True Detective Season 2.
Yes there's more crap
That's horsecrap. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Our 4-part tale:
The kids are gone from TV, probably forever. It is YouTube or nothing. Their stars are YouTube stars. This despite them being hooked on watching every new kids movie as soon as it came out. But now, in their teen years, TV simply doesn't exist.
My wife is almost gone as well. Once she got a laptop in the kitchen, the TV started gathering dust. She will still watch the odd thing "on TV", but actually on demand, and often with skippable commercials. Recently she decided to watch a show w
Never overestimate the stupidity of most people (Score:2)
Two thoughts on this. (Score:3)
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.
What is he talking about? (Score:2)
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....
What a difference a decade makes! (Score:3)
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.
400 shows, but with shorter seasons (Score:3)
Less is more (Score:2)
Programming? On tv? (Score:3)
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.
It's a market (Score:2)
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.
Betteridge says (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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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.
Re:So glad I don't watch TV (Score:5, Insightful)
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People who watch TV are stupid. Avoid them.
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This kind of humblebragging is more annoying than a SJW whine. Why are you posting here?
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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 produ
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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.
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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.
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