Our new media universe: The creative triumph of television
Saturday, June 26th, 2010
I’ve recently been having a lot of conversations with people about how we consume media. The transition from three broadcast networks to an era of seeing anything you want on any screen is utterly profound, and incredibly interesting to anyone who has watched TV or gone to the movies in their lifetimes.
I’m going to be blogging more about this new world that we’re all hurtling towards, but we’ll start with part one, which is the creative lead that television took over movies in the mid-2000s.
Traditionally, movies told the great stories. In the 1970s, the silver screen flashed The Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, Star Wars, Chinatown, Annie Hall, Nashville (my favorite). Hollywood could make movies for niches, while the three-channel universe of TV tried to attain the broadest possible audience. As a result, none of the shows were really that great. The classic movies from that era are still brilliant. The classic TV shows are unwatchable for anything but nostalgia or camp. Unlike the movies of their era, few of these shows have found new audiences.
By the mid-2000s, the script flipped. With each cable network angling to air a must-see show in order to maintain their affiliate fees, the creativity on cable exploded. Meanwhile, the movies have become devoid of stories as compelling as those of Breaking Bad or The Wire.
As Mark Harris writes on EW.com (“What’s wrong with this summer’s movies?“):
Four or five years ago, it was a jaunty provocation to claim that ”TV is better than the movies” (a phrase that headed articles in TIME, Newsweek, and EW). Today, it’s just a fact. TV can be programmed for niche audiences; these days, studios only know how to spend too much money in order to lunge after too many eyeballs. TV actually tests its ideas before they air with pilots; studios just try to imagine what the poster will look like. Most significantly, TV can react quickly to a changing zeitgeist, whereas movies now take ridiculously long to respond to anything, if they even try…
As TV has surged, the risk-averse souls atop the movie studios have stopped pretending that their job is anything other than to find and greenlight renewable, easily marketed franchises for undemanding audiences on big weekends.
Is it any wonder Hollywood is charging hard into formats like 3D and IMAX? Unable to compete creatively with niche-seeking shows, movies have to compete on the screen and images.
But TV didn’t achieve its golden age via its legacy channels. The great shows are almost exclusively on cable networks. Legacy broadcast networks have gone the way of movies, weighed down with replica cop franchises and formula sitcoms. Tina Fey said upon accepting her first Emmy for 30 Rock that network television today is like vaudeville in the ’60s. The times, they have already changed.
Indeed, the broadcast networks have been forced to dial down their creative edge, as niche audiences have already migrated to cable shows. Or video games. Or the Internet. The top-rated show on TV today can only hope to get half the audience of the top show of 10 years. Put another way, 85% of Americans don’t watch the number one show. We’ve come a long way from I Love Lucy.
So what happens when YouTube, with its 2 billion daily video streams, comes to TV? That’s the next game-changer. And that’s the next blog post…