Below you'll find two articles. The first is from MonkeySee, the pop-culture news and analysis blog from NPR, and the second is from The Hollywood Reporter. The former (first article) deals with where television might be heading, and the latter (second) deals with early lessons learned from the Fall 2015 TV season.
Your task is to read the articles and write a 1-2-page reaction to them, drawing from both. What do you think of the future of TV? Are the questions on the right path? Why or why not? What about the lessons learned thus far? Will broadcast networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, CW) be able to sustain themselves in the long run if viewers quit watching live? Why or why not? Think of your own television viewing habits as you prepare your reactions.
Please post your reactions to Reaction #3 on Sakai, under Assignments.
Per usual, they are due Sunday, by midnight PDT.
Television 2015: The Future In Questions
iStockphoto
So now that we've taken a look at some of what's going on in television now, it raises the natural question: what's next?
How do viewers find what's good?
Whether or not you think there's a quantity problem with great television or good television, there's certainly a large enough shift in the sheer quantity of all television that people really do need strategies to find both the very best stuff and the stuff that's suited to them.
The traditional ways of organizing recommendations are things like "What's On Tonight" columns in newspapers and now on general-interest web sites, which certainly have a place in surfacing what people might have missed. But they've only got a handful of slots a day, and they have a funny reliance on airdates that feels out of step with the direction that on-demand viewing is going.
Recommendation engines like the one at Netflix – a part of their functioning in which they take enormous pride – can help inside of a particular service, as can "Recommended For You"-style functions on a cable box or an Amazon account. But as long as the record of what you've watched lives in separate places (streaming accounts, cable box, YouTube), no one source is even getting the right raw data to apply an algorithm to determine your taste, no matter how good that algorithm gets. And relying on this kind of data assumes you even want there to be some central location that knows about everything you've ever watched on TV. There's a whole tricky relationship between personalization and privacy that would gum up the most blue-sky version of what an automatically generated list of recommendations would look like.
There remains a need for good matchmaking between willing eyes and good content, beyond best-ofs and reviews of pilots. Where will it come from?
What kinds of viewing numbers are meaningful?
As we've talked about, measuring who's watching what is really difficult when you consider the sheer number of ways people can choose to watch things and how long it can take them to get around to it. But it's not even clear which of those numbers we should be trying to get. It's not clear which ones journalists who are interested in tracking "success" from a commercial standpoint should be willing to report on, or what they should expect in the way of evidence before they call something a hit.
In a sense, Nielsen ratings have always been two things at once: a cultural measure of what's striking a nerve and a business measure of what's making money. Without one number that combines everybody who's watching, it's harder to get to that cultural measure than it's ever been. Without carefully broken-out numbers and a more detailed understanding of different outlets' business models than it required to roughly translate broadcast eyeballs into advertising, it's harder to get to the business measure than it's ever been. Whether you're into the horse race or the capacity of TV to stand for What We're Into Right Now, numbers are slippery and complicated.
What's the best version of fan engagement?
Shows that are successful on social media are sometimes really successful. At the same time, everyone has watched as stars of struggling shows lifelessly live-tweet episodes as if there's a network publicist standing over them, glowering menacingly. While there are exceptions like Scandal where the social-media plan seems to have worked out perfectly, efforts to force hashtags into use by flashing them in the corner of the screen are often embarrassing and pointless. How ordinary shows without social-media superpowers should try to incorporate Twitter, for instance, can seem like a head-scratcher, because there's no way to fake or force the kind of enthusiasm that bubbles up naturally, but they sure keep trying.
Similarly, Twitter in particular allows fans to interact with creators and actors in a way that can be a lot of fun, and for the right creator or the right actor, can be key to building the kind of passionate base that little shows need. But there's ugliness, too, around the way the need to react at all costs can beat down nuance. We haven't had direct fan engagement at the level that Twitter allows it for long enough to really know whether it takes a toll on creative people in a broad sense, but there are certainly individual creative people who have either made it clear that it does or acted out in a way that tells you it does.
What about the never-pay problem?
Cable companies have long suffered from (1) bad reputations for customer service, (2) resentment over lack of choice of providers, (3) discontent about bundling that requires people to pay for more service than they use, and (4) the sheer frustration of bills that go up and up. In some cases, cord-cutting is a matter of shifting who you're paying – if you're still paying the same company you were paying for cable, only now you're paying it for broadband and a variety of subscription services and a la carte episode purchases, that's more a redistribution of your money than anything.
But there's a whole separate problem of people who are checked out of a lot of these systems entirely, where part of what they watch is just downloaded from torrent sites. When people are currently paying zero and they're happy with what they're getting, how do you persuade them to pay something, even if you put in place the kinds of a la carte systems they've been asking for? Why pay anything when you can pay nothing and you've had time to get used to paying nothing?
What's the right role of a network?
There was a great piece from Maureen Ryan the other day in which she expressed some skepticism about the claims from Netflix in particular that they never interfere with the work of their creators. What, she wondered, about quality control? I can't say it better than Mo did, so I'll leave it there.
What is success?
Maybe the most interesting question as we head into the 2015-16 season is this: what constitutes success on television?
Americans have a habit that people in many other countries do not have at all, which is to define a successful show as one that runs for years (or at least for absolutely as long as anyone wants to do it), is hugely popular, remains great forever, and then leaves at the very top of its game. In other words: we define the enormous majority of shows as unsuccessful, creatively or commercially or both. For a while, it seemed like the "limited series" might be an answer to some of this – take Under The Dome, for instance, which appeared to have an undeniably limited appropriate life, since there's only so long you can keep people under a dome. Networks are too hard-up for successes to deny themselves more of just about anything that works, and that means the open-ended model is very hard to walk away from.
But to step back a little in time, what about a show like Arrested Development? It ran for three seasons on Fox and walked away beloved, as something that people spoke about in largely glowing terms, despite the fact that it was never massively popular. It launched or boosted careers. That seems like a successful project to me. It then came back for a fourth season on Netflix that got, it's fair to say, more of a mixed reaction, and they're talking about doing more. Is the show really becoming more successful merely by finding a way, any way, to continue? We can get excited about a show likeThe X-Files or Twin Peaks returning, but are all endings automatically undesirable?
Look at something like Bunheads, a show on ABC Family that did remarkable work in 2012 and 2013 for 18 episodes and then was canceled. As someone who loved it, I'd have loved to see it continue. I'd have loved to watch more. But casting the show as somehow a failure feels bizarre to me; it succeeded in just about every task it set for itself: it was weird and fun and moving and different. It failed only in the one sense that the person making a show has absolutely has no control over, which is that not very many people watched it. That's a shame (mostly for them), but ... so what? That show isn't a sad story – it's a great story. People got together and made a thing that was wonderful. People who loved it can (and do) shake fists over not having gotten to see more of it, but particularly now, with shows available more easily for longer than ever, that work isn't wasted. You can still show your kid or your best friend Bunheads– I recommend it! And Trophy Wife, which I would have watched more of. AndHappy Endings, which is manic and strange and not everybody liked it, but boy, I did, and they made a bunch of it. And maybe the only way to make it something everybody would have watched would have been to make it something the people who did watch it wouldn't have liked. So aren't there times when small audiences are expected, normal, functional and correct for shows that are creatively successful?
A creative work gets made, it connects with people who get something from it, and it ends. Not everything becomes a franchise, and not everything becomes a hit. We (and here, I mean critics and fans both) can be very outcome-oriented and do too much scorekeeping about TV in a way that serves it poorly. A seven-season series becomes all about "sticking the landing" at the end. A one-season series full of great work somehow becomes something to be sad about. In reality, everything that makes it onto anybody's television that's interesting, thoughtful, artful, funny, inventive – everything like that is a win. You get your weird little show on TV for 10 or 13 or 22 episodes, that's a win, and it can still be a win even if not every decision you make is one your audience would have made. (If it were, they might as well write and make it themselves.) You somehow put your passion project in front of people in anything like the form you imagined, that's a win. And it's easier than ever for it to be a win that lasts, at least somewhere.
iStockphoto
So now that we've taken a look at some of what's going on in television now, it raises the natural question: what's next?
How do viewers find what's good?
Whether or not you think there's a quantity problem with great television or good television, there's certainly a large enough shift in the sheer quantity of all television that people really do need strategies to find both the very best stuff and the stuff that's suited to them.
The traditional ways of organizing recommendations are things like "What's On Tonight" columns in newspapers and now on general-interest web sites, which certainly have a place in surfacing what people might have missed. But they've only got a handful of slots a day, and they have a funny reliance on airdates that feels out of step with the direction that on-demand viewing is going.
Recommendation engines like the one at Netflix – a part of their functioning in which they take enormous pride – can help inside of a particular service, as can "Recommended For You"-style functions on a cable box or an Amazon account. But as long as the record of what you've watched lives in separate places (streaming accounts, cable box, YouTube), no one source is even getting the right raw data to apply an algorithm to determine your taste, no matter how good that algorithm gets. And relying on this kind of data assumes you even want there to be some central location that knows about everything you've ever watched on TV. There's a whole tricky relationship between personalization and privacy that would gum up the most blue-sky version of what an automatically generated list of recommendations would look like.
There remains a need for good matchmaking between willing eyes and good content, beyond best-ofs and reviews of pilots. Where will it come from?
What kinds of viewing numbers are meaningful?
As we've talked about, measuring who's watching what is really difficult when you consider the sheer number of ways people can choose to watch things and how long it can take them to get around to it. But it's not even clear which of those numbers we should be trying to get. It's not clear which ones journalists who are interested in tracking "success" from a commercial standpoint should be willing to report on, or what they should expect in the way of evidence before they call something a hit.
In a sense, Nielsen ratings have always been two things at once: a cultural measure of what's striking a nerve and a business measure of what's making money. Without one number that combines everybody who's watching, it's harder to get to that cultural measure than it's ever been. Without carefully broken-out numbers and a more detailed understanding of different outlets' business models than it required to roughly translate broadcast eyeballs into advertising, it's harder to get to the business measure than it's ever been. Whether you're into the horse race or the capacity of TV to stand for What We're Into Right Now, numbers are slippery and complicated.
What's the best version of fan engagement?
Shows that are successful on social media are sometimes really successful. At the same time, everyone has watched as stars of struggling shows lifelessly live-tweet episodes as if there's a network publicist standing over them, glowering menacingly. While there are exceptions like Scandal where the social-media plan seems to have worked out perfectly, efforts to force hashtags into use by flashing them in the corner of the screen are often embarrassing and pointless. How ordinary shows without social-media superpowers should try to incorporate Twitter, for instance, can seem like a head-scratcher, because there's no way to fake or force the kind of enthusiasm that bubbles up naturally, but they sure keep trying.
Similarly, Twitter in particular allows fans to interact with creators and actors in a way that can be a lot of fun, and for the right creator or the right actor, can be key to building the kind of passionate base that little shows need. But there's ugliness, too, around the way the need to react at all costs can beat down nuance. We haven't had direct fan engagement at the level that Twitter allows it for long enough to really know whether it takes a toll on creative people in a broad sense, but there are certainly individual creative people who have either made it clear that it does or acted out in a way that tells you it does.
What about the never-pay problem?
Cable companies have long suffered from (1) bad reputations for customer service, (2) resentment over lack of choice of providers, (3) discontent about bundling that requires people to pay for more service than they use, and (4) the sheer frustration of bills that go up and up. In some cases, cord-cutting is a matter of shifting who you're paying – if you're still paying the same company you were paying for cable, only now you're paying it for broadband and a variety of subscription services and a la carte episode purchases, that's more a redistribution of your money than anything.
But there's a whole separate problem of people who are checked out of a lot of these systems entirely, where part of what they watch is just downloaded from torrent sites. When people are currently paying zero and they're happy with what they're getting, how do you persuade them to pay something, even if you put in place the kinds of a la carte systems they've been asking for? Why pay anything when you can pay nothing and you've had time to get used to paying nothing?
What's the right role of a network?
There was a great piece from Maureen Ryan the other day in which she expressed some skepticism about the claims from Netflix in particular that they never interfere with the work of their creators. What, she wondered, about quality control? I can't say it better than Mo did, so I'll leave it there.
What is success?
Maybe the most interesting question as we head into the 2015-16 season is this: what constitutes success on television?
Americans have a habit that people in many other countries do not have at all, which is to define a successful show as one that runs for years (or at least for absolutely as long as anyone wants to do it), is hugely popular, remains great forever, and then leaves at the very top of its game. In other words: we define the enormous majority of shows as unsuccessful, creatively or commercially or both. For a while, it seemed like the "limited series" might be an answer to some of this – take Under The Dome, for instance, which appeared to have an undeniably limited appropriate life, since there's only so long you can keep people under a dome. Networks are too hard-up for successes to deny themselves more of just about anything that works, and that means the open-ended model is very hard to walk away from.
But to step back a little in time, what about a show like Arrested Development? It ran for three seasons on Fox and walked away beloved, as something that people spoke about in largely glowing terms, despite the fact that it was never massively popular. It launched or boosted careers. That seems like a successful project to me. It then came back for a fourth season on Netflix that got, it's fair to say, more of a mixed reaction, and they're talking about doing more. Is the show really becoming more successful merely by finding a way, any way, to continue? We can get excited about a show likeThe X-Files or Twin Peaks returning, but are all endings automatically undesirable?
Look at something like Bunheads, a show on ABC Family that did remarkable work in 2012 and 2013 for 18 episodes and then was canceled. As someone who loved it, I'd have loved to see it continue. I'd have loved to watch more. But casting the show as somehow a failure feels bizarre to me; it succeeded in just about every task it set for itself: it was weird and fun and moving and different. It failed only in the one sense that the person making a show has absolutely has no control over, which is that not very many people watched it. That's a shame (mostly for them), but ... so what? That show isn't a sad story – it's a great story. People got together and made a thing that was wonderful. People who loved it can (and do) shake fists over not having gotten to see more of it, but particularly now, with shows available more easily for longer than ever, that work isn't wasted. You can still show your kid or your best friend Bunheads– I recommend it! And Trophy Wife, which I would have watched more of. AndHappy Endings, which is manic and strange and not everybody liked it, but boy, I did, and they made a bunch of it. And maybe the only way to make it something everybody would have watched would have been to make it something the people who did watch it wouldn't have liked. So aren't there times when small audiences are expected, normal, functional and correct for shows that are creatively successful?
A creative work gets made, it connects with people who get something from it, and it ends. Not everything becomes a franchise, and not everything becomes a hit. We (and here, I mean critics and fans both) can be very outcome-oriented and do too much scorekeeping about TV in a way that serves it poorly. A seven-season series becomes all about "sticking the landing" at the end. A one-season series full of great work somehow becomes something to be sad about. In reality, everything that makes it onto anybody's television that's interesting, thoughtful, artful, funny, inventive – everything like that is a win. You get your weird little show on TV for 10 or 13 or 22 episodes, that's a win, and it can still be a win even if not every decision you make is one your audience would have made. (If it were, they might as well write and make it themselves.) You somehow put your passion project in front of people in anything like the form you imagined, that's a win. And it's easier than ever for it to be a win that lasts, at least somewhere.
Schedule Significance, Tweet Trouble: 5 Lessons Learned From Premiere Week
'Heroes Reborn'
Christos Kalohoridis/NBC
Patience matters (but social doesn't) as the networks put the best face on ratings: "There are vestiges of programming strategies from years ago that still work."
A version of this story first appeared in the Oct. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
Each network boasts at least one win, but TV's annual fall premiere week brought a reminder that the days of counting on same-day viewers are over. The Big Four's primetime ratings among adults 18-to-49 dropped 13 percent, year to year. As they downplay those numbers, and trumpet the first round of time-shifting, here are other trends that quickly are emerging.
1. Schedules Still Matter
While live audiences are declining, plenty still watch the old-fashioned way — so scheduling is important. Fox's Rosewood, with dismal reviews, benefitted from its Empire adjacency to earn a 2.8 rating in the key demo over three days. Shonda Rhimes' three-hour Thursday lineup remains lucrative for ABC, as does the net's four-pack of sitcoms the night before."That comedy block on Wednesday has done remarkably well," says analyst Brad Adgate: "There are vestiges of these programming strategies from years ago that still work."
2. Blaming Doesn’t Work
Talking points ran the gamut. Fox's Minority Report supposedly fell victim to like-minded Scorpionon CBS; Scream Queens courted a young demo that doesn't own TVs; and ABC's Blood & Oil was ineffective against football. Another excuse gathering steam: two-hour premieres feel like work.Scream Queens and NBC's soft Heroes Reborn followed FX's low debut for Kurt Sutter's The Bastard Executioner (also a 120-minute bow).
3. Awareness Won’t Always Help Reboots
Familiar titles topped the list of shows viewers knew about going into the fall, but that did not translate to an audience — unless, of course, Ms. Piggy is involved. (The Muppets premiere delivered a 3.8 three-day rating with adults 18-to-49 for ABC.) CBS' Limitless, based on the 2011 sci-fi thriller starring Bradley Cooper, got off to a promising start, but Heroes Reborn, even with a solid 3.1 rating in its first live-plus-3 showing, hemorrhaged viewers in each half-hour of its two-hour opener. And Minority Report, executive produced by Steven Spielberg, already slid to a 0.9 same-day showing in its second episode. "I think having familiar IP is an advantage, and yet you’re held to the same standards as with everything else you do," says Fox Television Group chairman and CEO Gary Newman. "Even if none of those shows ends up working, you won’t see us shy away from rebooting what we think is great IP."
4. Social Media Cachet Is a Crapshoot
A correlation between tweets and ratings remains tenuous. Empire performed insanely well on both social (1.3 million tweets) and TV (a bonkers 8.7 in the key demo rating and 22.5 million multiplatform viewers). Scream Queens trended Sept. 22, yet registered only 4 million night-of viewers (it nearly doubled after three days of streaming, DVR and VOD). "It's a great indicator for the level of passion in our viewer," insists Newman, who, with counterpart Dana Walden, has touted Queens' social stats and robust multiplatform plays. "When we go to the next markets with these shows, be it SVOD, consumer products or syndication, it's a great measure of a likely success."
5. Patience Remains a Virtue (and a Luxury)
Even the most fervent ratings-watchers now find premiere week a bore — it provides little insight into the decisions programmers are going to make. The fate of most scripted series isn’t decided without at least 30 days of multiplatform data. "We no longer look at same-day numbers (or even live-plus-3-days)," Fox's David Madden recently told THR, with NBC's Jennifer Salke adding, "We need to look for growth potential more than anything else." Another exec calls out good same-day ratings as irrelevant "ego gratification."
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