So I've been a little lax with this blog the past while. That doesn't really matter if nobody is reading, so I'm not too worried. But I have decided to reboot this as a television blog. My live is largely based on television as a means of income but I'm also fiercely passionate about TV and much of what surrounds it. This ranges from TV shows to TV production to television sets to the way that we ingest our moving picture media.
So I'm going to write about these things as often as possible. I'll start with a brief theory of how the way that we view television affects the programming itself.
I have not watched Dallas but it was a tremendously popular series. "Who Shot JR" is still one of the most viewed episodes of all time. Dallas was a primetime soap, what we'll call serials from now on. The problem with these shows is that a viewer can't miss an episode without being out of the loop. This, clearly, is problematic. I would also argue that it takes a certain amount of mental dexterity to keep up with a serial–something might come up that relies on information from three weeks ago.
For these reasons, a lot of serials were targeted at a younger audience who would be more devoted to watching the show every week and be more willing to expend the necessary energy to keep track, especially in the 1990s. Think of 90210, Melrose Place, and Dawson's Creek. You had other shows as well, the aforementioned Dallas or something like Hill Street Blues.
But more of the most popular dramas, shows like Law and Order, ER, or Gunsmoke were episodic. See, people liked having things mostly figured out in the end. Every week you tune in and get a little movie. There's character development, sure, but in general any time any kind of narrative arc is going to happen in multiple episodes you'd get the legendary "to be continued" title at the end.
Then along came The Sopranos. Everyone loved the show. Unhindered by advertisements or any real restraint from the FCC, HBO was able to make a show like nobody had ever made a show before. They poured resources into it. The narrative was compelling, the characters were interesting, the camerawork was beautiful, and–perhaps as part of the show's theme of ambiguity–questions were almost never answered, so we all wanted to know what was going to happen in the next episode. But notice that I don't say next week.
That's because the way we watched TV changed right around here as well. While HBO was revolutionizing what we expected from a TV show (at least making it more mainstream, as OZ was an HBO serial before Tony Soprano's first "How you doin'?"), the viewing public no longer needed to be in front of the glowing box at a specific time. Both The Sopranos and TiVo were introduced in 1999. Online streaming is a relatively recent phenomena of the last few years but it's heightening the effect. On-demand viewing. It changes your life.
Now I don't have to tune in every Thursday at 10 to watch ER. I can watch Breaking Bad hours, days, or weeks after broadcast. I can watch LOST in rapid succession online without having to strain my brain to thing back to what the numbers mean. So now more people can make the effort and fit their television into their own schedules. What we watch is no longer determined by our free night of the week. Yeah, NBC comedies are on Thursdays but maybe there's a rock show to go to or a poker game to play in.
So the advent of the DVR age of programming gives us a wealth of dramatic serials, which have raised the bar for television as art.
Cable TV is notable as well. In direct lineage from HBO's ability to show whatever the hell they want on screen, now the cable networks have much more freedom than the major broadcast networks and less responsibility to address the country as a whole. FX can target its harder-edged audiences, largely the male 18-45 gigantor advertising revenue demographic, with shows like Justified or Sons of Anarchy. AMC can make shows like Breaking Bad or Mad Men which, though alliterative, that have a unique concept that perhaps only HBO can match.
HBO, of course, remains the king. Whether it's a show with a complex palate like The Wire or candy pills like True Blood, they have proven to be the standard against which all others will be measured.
So these two factors of on-demand viewing and
And, with a nod to a recent passing, this DVR revolution has been televised–to be screened on demand.
