Originally published on: 2/12/2006 10:31:34 AM
I'm again catching up on Boston Legal and other shows that I don't get a chance to watch during the week and a phrase kept coming into my head as I laughed at several of these shows: humor without training wheels.
Boston Legal, My Name is Earl, Bones, Firefly and Monk are all shows that I enjoy and find humor throughout. Yet, none of them use a laugh track and I love them for it. Much of this comes from their forms (not sitcoms). However, Arrested Development also avoids the humor training wheels as well, as do several of the M*A*S*H box sets.
The net result is programming on 2 wheels. I'm free to get jokes that are going on at a higher level than the laugh track and I'm free to fall over and completely miss some of the obvious ones. On the shows that *do* have the canned ho-ho's, there *are* jokes that are present in the writing that there is no cued laughter for. They often seem to me like the easter eggs in software: something put in for the creator to relish, but hidden from most.
I don't need to hear the audience sobbing to know when I should feel profound sadness. Why do I need to hear other people laughing to find the jokes funny? As I know that TV (as a distribution medium more than a creative medium) is all about least common denominator decision-making, I know that the chances of taking the training wheels off for broadcast TV any time soon is about as good as me winning the figure skating competition at the Hades Winter Carnival.
However, we are in the midst of a serious decoupling of media. For instance, "radio" has long been used as an interchangable term for all audio programming not bought on recorded medium and TV similarly. If it isn't an LP, cassette, VHS tape, CD or DVD, but is audio, it's "radio" and if video, it's "TV". That has meant that the creative medium and the distribution medium were bundled together. That bundle is opening up.
It's happening with audio first (as do many things on the internet because of bandwidth differences), but other distribution media are showing up. The idea that a 1 hour episode of a long-form video program must be put into a synchronous timeslot and succeed, not in terms of making more money for its creators than it cost, but must "beat" out the competition in that timeslot is starting to die.
Just take a look at the Netflix Top 100 rentals and you'll see that the idea of a 1 time shot at seeing a video program in the proper sequence is a great way to exclude most of your potential audience. Most of the people who might be interested in a show are not going to watch your premiere. Nor are they even likely to watch the first half of your season. They aren't seeing your promo spots, your magazine ads or hearing your placements on the radio morning zoo. They only become interested in your show because someone they trust recommends it. An, for many shows that puts them behind.
If, instead, shows just were produced and made available, it wouldn't matter what their "lead-in" was. It wouldn't matter that you only have one "Thursday, 8pm" slot. It wouldn't matter who distributed it. What would matter is the content itself.
Can you honestly name the distributor of your favorite movie? Your favorite author's book publisher? Your favorite musician's label? Yet, why am I expected to associate a TV show with a given network that distributes it?
I CAN name my favorite author's currently available books, when my favorite musician's new albums are coming out and the list of their existing albums, and am otherwise engaged in the content. In other words, I am paying attention to the producers of quality content that I like. Create a movie studio that consistently cranks out good content and it will get recognized (Pixar anyone?). However, if you expect that your presence as the middleman is somehow more relevant by distributing said creations than the creation of it, you're sorely mistaken (Disney anyone?).
We're starting to see baby steps in this direction with both music and TV via Apple's iTunes setup. However, the pricing bothers me deeply. I can pay $100 a month to get EVERY available television channel and 3 Tivo's. If I plan well, I can pluck from that gigantic stream every bit of content I might want to see and watch it on my own time. Yet, if I want to catch up on something I didn't know I should have been recording, I'm out of luck. So, *use* iTunes, you might say. However, suddenly the cost goes to $2 an episode. That means that even just catching 10 prime time shows (2 a night), is going to run me $80 a month. $80 for 10 shows or $100 for thousands of potential shows INCLUDING the 10.
Maybe I just need more tea, because I just don't get it.