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Posted on 8/27/24 at 10:36 am to ThoseGuys
Is this the Adam Ruins Everything guy? I can't take him seriously after the absolute abortion he put out on the Joe Rogan Podcast.
Posted on 8/27/24 at 8:19 pm to BabyTac
Cable TV would be $500 a month without us. You're welcome dumb arse.
This post was edited on 8/27/24 at 8:19 pm
Posted on 8/27/24 at 10:25 pm to ThoseGuys
I think 2 things killed TV
1) Shorter seasons- Friends, West Wing, Modern Family, etc were all 20-24 episodes per season. Now you’re lucky to get half that much, then you have to wait a year or longer for the next season
ETA: Premier week used to be right after Labor Day. This year on ABC, Premier Week is October 21- that’s 6 weeks later!
2) Binge watching so that the season is done in days. Takes away the drama and the cliffhangers between episodes, and it allows the viewer to more easily notice the flaws in the bad characters.
Maybe Netflix started the trend, but not bever streaming service had to continue with it.
1) Shorter seasons- Friends, West Wing, Modern Family, etc were all 20-24 episodes per season. Now you’re lucky to get half that much, then you have to wait a year or longer for the next season
ETA: Premier week used to be right after Labor Day. This year on ABC, Premier Week is October 21- that’s 6 weeks later!
2) Binge watching so that the season is done in days. Takes away the drama and the cliffhangers between episodes, and it allows the viewer to more easily notice the flaws in the bad characters.
Maybe Netflix started the trend, but not bever streaming service had to continue with it.
This post was edited on 8/27/24 at 10:31 pm
Posted on 8/27/24 at 10:47 pm to ThoseGuys
Streaming didn't kill tv. TV killed itself, and streaming was just what was left behind.
In my opinion, several issues really plagued tv contributing to its demise:
1. Reality TV: Reality TV shows were cheap to produce and would often allow a network to get a quick jolt of ratings if the show started to take off. However, over time, reality tv shows had a habit of audiences quickly losing interest and moving on to the next trainwreck and displacing the original core audiences of those networks. TV executives would be blinded by the initial ratings spikes and the lower overhead and would cause entire networks to switch to reality tv content en-masse displacing all of their committed viewers, then realizing that the viewers they had relied on (along with the reality tv viewers who now had a new car crash obsession) had left permenently. Rather than revert back to their old programming, they would just double and triple down on the lowest cost content option. This is how you end up with The Learning Channel showing nothing but "My 500 lb life" and MTV just giving up and running marathons of "Rediculousness".
So many networks did this that it's impossible to count them all, but even tentpole tv series succumbed to "virality". Sports shows stopped being about highlights and switched to a debate format. The shows that weren't a debate format started talking about gambling, human interest stories (tear-jerking), or twitter beefs rather than breaking down matchups or showing highlights, assuming audiences would rather just watch the highlights on Youtube. Singing competitions became all about the human interest stories rather than about finding the best singer. Shows about restaurants or businesses became all about yelling and insults rather than food or solving problems.
2. Cable priced itself out of the competition. The reality is that millennials and zoomers are significantly poorer and have less disposable income than did boomers or gen xers at the same point in their lives. They work longer hours for less pay and face higher costs relative to inflation. The cost of cable tv went up dramatically during the 2000's. By the 2010's, it went from a minor comfort that most middle class households could afford, to a luxury that only the rich had (sorta the reverse of fridges with "water in the door"). Gen Z and Millennials simply can't afford it, so they devised strategies to get around that. Millennials started out with piracy with services like limeware and napster, but eventually opted for the legal-ish method of password sharing streaming accounts. This wasn't done because they wanted to, but because it was the only method they could afford.
3. The writers strike changed network tv forever. Network tv used to be a content machine, putting out 27 episode seasons and piloting dozens of new shows every season. They took risks, and allowed shows to find their footing creatively and find an audience. Cable had started killing it by doing shorter seasons during the summer, when network shows were out of season, and by using more adult forms that weren't suitable for highly censored networks. These cable networks would do a few shows every summer, but most of the year would just show movies, so they could be choosy and experimental. Post-writers strike, networks shortened the lengths of their seasons, massively cut the number of new shows they would launch per year, and held their existing shows on much shorter leashes. No longer would shows that didn't immediately perform be given time to find a voice or an audience. This mentality has persisted and flourished in the binge-watch streaming reality.
4. Political correctness killed comedy, and comedy is what drives routine viewing. While people love a good soap opera and will tune in to "see what happens next", comedies were the real breadwinner for networks. A successful sitcom would be relatively inexpensive to produce (outside of actor salaries which could grow exhorbitant if a show was successful), and would bring in great consistent ratings. Cancel culture basically made making decent comedies impossible. TV writers started launching fewer and fewer pilots in the mid 2010's, and by 2020, was actively canceling or trying to pivot the formats of its own shows to fit the current narrative. Comedy is a completely dead genre in Hollywood and on network tv. Many people moved to streaming services just to be able to watch the old comedy shows which had gone off the air.
5. Trump (or better, the media's reaction to Trump) killed late night. Late Night Talk Shows were a pretty important cultural force up until the 2010's. They helped to promote up and coming talent in music and movies, promote the new projects coming out on the networks or hollywood, and introduce comedians and politicians to the masses. Late night comedy was typically light-hearted, a little irreverent, topical, but always positive. Late night started to struggle in the early 2010's with the shenanigans around Leno's replacement on the Tonight Show with Conan, especially with strong competition coming from Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert on CC. Cable could be a little more edgy than network latenight, which had an older audience, but the important thing was that late night still did its job of cross-promoting the different entertainment properties owned by the network. In 2015, however, Donald Trump ran for president. He was funny, crazy, and weird. Late Night initially saw huge ratings boosts when they made fun of him, causing even non-political late night hosts to go full tilt on talking about Trump. When Trump won in 2016, the entire media was weaponized against him, and ALL TRADITIONAL MEDIA BECAME ANTI-TRUMP 24/7. Most audiences were bored of it by 2017 and the late night shows started bleeding ratings, but they doubled and tripled down. It wasn't until late 2021 that many shows began to get less political again. By then, the damage was done. Audiences were sick of politics, and Trump especially, and dumped the shows entirely. This was bad because late night shows are temporal. They rely very much on being viewed in a specific time in order to be relevant. Once people were no longer tuning in to them as appointment tv, they were no longer useful for cross-promoting content, they weren't getting streamed much after the fact, and it eliminated just one more of the ever dwindling reasons anyone would pay to watch live tv.
6. Covid. This was a huge disruption to production schedules resulting in almost two years of limited new content being debuted. It was simply easier to dump content, especially movies meant for theater releases when theaters were closed, on streaming services. The various networks decided to all compete with streaming services by making them indistinguishable from their regular offerings or even by making them "BETTER". Thus, people no longer had any reason to watch live tv outside of sports. People had to stay in doors and couldn't engage in nearly as many outside the house hobbies, so many turned to streaming services and haven't gone back. Streaming was in the right place at the right time to pick the bones off of tv's corpse.
In my opinion, several issues really plagued tv contributing to its demise:
1. Reality TV: Reality TV shows were cheap to produce and would often allow a network to get a quick jolt of ratings if the show started to take off. However, over time, reality tv shows had a habit of audiences quickly losing interest and moving on to the next trainwreck and displacing the original core audiences of those networks. TV executives would be blinded by the initial ratings spikes and the lower overhead and would cause entire networks to switch to reality tv content en-masse displacing all of their committed viewers, then realizing that the viewers they had relied on (along with the reality tv viewers who now had a new car crash obsession) had left permenently. Rather than revert back to their old programming, they would just double and triple down on the lowest cost content option. This is how you end up with The Learning Channel showing nothing but "My 500 lb life" and MTV just giving up and running marathons of "Rediculousness".
So many networks did this that it's impossible to count them all, but even tentpole tv series succumbed to "virality". Sports shows stopped being about highlights and switched to a debate format. The shows that weren't a debate format started talking about gambling, human interest stories (tear-jerking), or twitter beefs rather than breaking down matchups or showing highlights, assuming audiences would rather just watch the highlights on Youtube. Singing competitions became all about the human interest stories rather than about finding the best singer. Shows about restaurants or businesses became all about yelling and insults rather than food or solving problems.
2. Cable priced itself out of the competition. The reality is that millennials and zoomers are significantly poorer and have less disposable income than did boomers or gen xers at the same point in their lives. They work longer hours for less pay and face higher costs relative to inflation. The cost of cable tv went up dramatically during the 2000's. By the 2010's, it went from a minor comfort that most middle class households could afford, to a luxury that only the rich had (sorta the reverse of fridges with "water in the door"). Gen Z and Millennials simply can't afford it, so they devised strategies to get around that. Millennials started out with piracy with services like limeware and napster, but eventually opted for the legal-ish method of password sharing streaming accounts. This wasn't done because they wanted to, but because it was the only method they could afford.
3. The writers strike changed network tv forever. Network tv used to be a content machine, putting out 27 episode seasons and piloting dozens of new shows every season. They took risks, and allowed shows to find their footing creatively and find an audience. Cable had started killing it by doing shorter seasons during the summer, when network shows were out of season, and by using more adult forms that weren't suitable for highly censored networks. These cable networks would do a few shows every summer, but most of the year would just show movies, so they could be choosy and experimental. Post-writers strike, networks shortened the lengths of their seasons, massively cut the number of new shows they would launch per year, and held their existing shows on much shorter leashes. No longer would shows that didn't immediately perform be given time to find a voice or an audience. This mentality has persisted and flourished in the binge-watch streaming reality.
4. Political correctness killed comedy, and comedy is what drives routine viewing. While people love a good soap opera and will tune in to "see what happens next", comedies were the real breadwinner for networks. A successful sitcom would be relatively inexpensive to produce (outside of actor salaries which could grow exhorbitant if a show was successful), and would bring in great consistent ratings. Cancel culture basically made making decent comedies impossible. TV writers started launching fewer and fewer pilots in the mid 2010's, and by 2020, was actively canceling or trying to pivot the formats of its own shows to fit the current narrative. Comedy is a completely dead genre in Hollywood and on network tv. Many people moved to streaming services just to be able to watch the old comedy shows which had gone off the air.
5. Trump (or better, the media's reaction to Trump) killed late night. Late Night Talk Shows were a pretty important cultural force up until the 2010's. They helped to promote up and coming talent in music and movies, promote the new projects coming out on the networks or hollywood, and introduce comedians and politicians to the masses. Late night comedy was typically light-hearted, a little irreverent, topical, but always positive. Late night started to struggle in the early 2010's with the shenanigans around Leno's replacement on the Tonight Show with Conan, especially with strong competition coming from Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert on CC. Cable could be a little more edgy than network latenight, which had an older audience, but the important thing was that late night still did its job of cross-promoting the different entertainment properties owned by the network. In 2015, however, Donald Trump ran for president. He was funny, crazy, and weird. Late Night initially saw huge ratings boosts when they made fun of him, causing even non-political late night hosts to go full tilt on talking about Trump. When Trump won in 2016, the entire media was weaponized against him, and ALL TRADITIONAL MEDIA BECAME ANTI-TRUMP 24/7. Most audiences were bored of it by 2017 and the late night shows started bleeding ratings, but they doubled and tripled down. It wasn't until late 2021 that many shows began to get less political again. By then, the damage was done. Audiences were sick of politics, and Trump especially, and dumped the shows entirely. This was bad because late night shows are temporal. They rely very much on being viewed in a specific time in order to be relevant. Once people were no longer tuning in to them as appointment tv, they were no longer useful for cross-promoting content, they weren't getting streamed much after the fact, and it eliminated just one more of the ever dwindling reasons anyone would pay to watch live tv.
6. Covid. This was a huge disruption to production schedules resulting in almost two years of limited new content being debuted. It was simply easier to dump content, especially movies meant for theater releases when theaters were closed, on streaming services. The various networks decided to all compete with streaming services by making them indistinguishable from their regular offerings or even by making them "BETTER". Thus, people no longer had any reason to watch live tv outside of sports. People had to stay in doors and couldn't engage in nearly as many outside the house hobbies, so many turned to streaming services and haven't gone back. Streaming was in the right place at the right time to pick the bones off of tv's corpse.
Posted on 8/28/24 at 1:46 am to kingbob
quote:+1
Streaming didn't kill tv. TV killed itself, and streaming was just what was left behind.
In my opinion, several issues really plagued tv contributing to its demise:
1. Reality TV: Reality TV shows were cheap to produce and would often allow a network to get a quick jolt of ratings if the show started to take off. However, over time, reality tv shows had a habit of audiences quickly losing interest and moving on to the next trainwreck and displacing the original core audiences of those networks. TV executives would be blinded by the initial ratings spikes and the lower overhead and would cause entire networks to switch to reality tv content en-masse displacing all of their committed viewers, then realizing that the viewers they had relied on (along with the reality tv viewers who now had a new car crash obsession) had left permenently. Rather than revert back to their old programming, they would just double and triple down on the lowest cost content option. This is how you end up with The Learning Channel showing nothing but "My 500 lb life" and MTV just giving up and running marathons of "Rediculousness".
So many networks did this that it's impossible to count them all, but even tentpole tv series succumbed to "virality". Sports shows stopped being about highlights and switched to a debate format. The shows that weren't a debate format started talking about gambling, human interest stories (tear-jerking), or twitter beefs rather than breaking down matchups or showing highlights, assuming audiences would rather just watch the highlights on Youtube. Singing competitions became all about the human interest stories rather than about finding the best singer. Shows about restaurants or businesses became all about yelling and insults rather than food or solving problems.
2. Cable priced itself out of the competition. The reality is that millennials and zoomers are significantly poorer and have less disposable income than did boomers or gen xers at the same point in their lives. They work longer hours for less pay and face higher costs relative to inflation. The cost of cable tv went up dramatically during the 2000's. By the 2010's, it went from a minor comfort that most middle class households could afford, to a luxury that only the rich had (sorta the reverse of fridges with "water in the door"). Gen Z and Millennials simply can't afford it, so they devised strategies to get around that. Millennials started out with piracy with services like limeware and napster, but eventually opted for the legal-ish method of password sharing streaming accounts. This wasn't done because they wanted to, but because it was the only method they could afford.
3. The writers strike changed network tv forever. Network tv used to be a content machine, putting out 27 episode seasons and piloting dozens of new shows every season. They took risks, and allowed shows to find their footing creatively and find an audience. Cable had started killing it by doing shorter seasons during the summer, when network shows were out of season, and by using more adult forms that weren't suitable for highly censored networks. These cable networks would do a few shows every summer, but most of the year would just show movies, so they could be choosy and experimental. Post-writers strike, networks shortened the lengths of their seasons, massively cut the number of new shows they would launch per year, and held their existing shows on much shorter leashes. No longer would shows that didn't immediately perform be given time to find a voice or an audience. This mentality has persisted and flourished in the binge-watch streaming reality.
4. Political correctness killed comedy, and comedy is what drives routine viewing. While people love a good soap opera and will tune in to "see what happens next", comedies were the real breadwinner for networks. A successful sitcom would be relatively inexpensive to produce (outside of actor salaries which could grow exhorbitant if a show was successful), and would bring in great consistent ratings. Cancel culture basically made making decent comedies impossible. TV writers started launching fewer and fewer pilots in the mid 2010's, and by 2020, was actively canceling or trying to pivot the formats of its own shows to fit the current narrative. Comedy is a completely dead genre in Hollywood and on network tv. Many people moved to streaming services just to be able to watch the old comedy shows which had gone off the air.
5. Trump (or better, the media's reaction to Trump) killed late night. Late Night Talk Shows were a pretty important cultural force up until the 2010's. They helped to promote up and coming talent in music and movies, promote the new projects coming out on the networks or hollywood, and introduce comedians and politicians to the masses. Late night comedy was typically light-hearted, a little irreverent, topical, but always positive. Late night started to struggle in the early 2010's with the shenanigans around Leno's replacement on the Tonight Show with Conan, especially with strong competition coming from Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert on CC. Cable could be a little more edgy than network latenight, which had an older audience, but the important thing was that late night still did its job of cross-promoting the different entertainment properties owned by the network. In 2015, however, Donald Trump ran for president. He was funny, crazy, and weird. Late Night initially saw huge ratings boosts when they made fun of him, causing even non-political late night hosts to go full tilt on talking about Trump. When Trump won in 2016, the entire media was weaponized against him, and ALL TRADITIONAL MEDIA BECAME ANTI-TRUMP 24/7. Most audiences were bored of it by 2017 and the late night shows started bleeding ratings, but they doubled and tripled down. It wasn't until late 2021 that many shows began to get less political again. By then, the damage was done. Audiences were sick of politics, and Trump especially, and dumped the shows entirely. This was bad because late night shows are temporal. They rely very much on being viewed in a specific time in order to be relevant. Once people were no longer tuning in to them as appointment tv, they were no longer useful for cross-promoting content, they weren't getting streamed much after the fact, and it eliminated just one more of the ever dwindling reasons anyone would pay to watch live tv.
6. Covid. This was a huge disruption to production schedules resulting in almost two years of limited new content being debuted. It was simply easier to dump content, especially movies meant for theater releases when theaters were closed, on streaming services. The various networks decided to all compete with streaming services by making them indistinguishable from their regular offerings or even by making them "BETTER". Thus, people no longer had any reason to watch live tv outside of sports. People had to stay in doors and couldn't engage in nearly as many outside the house hobbies, so many turned to streaming services and haven't gone back. Streaming was in the right place at the right time to pick the bones off of tv's corpse.
Posted on 8/28/24 at 10:10 am to Kafka
+2
What's the last new Comedy Central show? These networks have learned that they make more money running reruns of Seinfeld and The Office than they can by making a new show that could tank. So no chances are taken any more. I wonder if Dave Chappelle was coming up now if he'd be given a chance to do his show.
quote:
These cable networks would do a few shows every summer, but most of the year would just show movies, so they could be choosy and experimental. Post-writers strike, networks shortened the lengths of their seasons, massively cut the number of new shows they would launch per year, and held their existing shows on much shorter leashes. No longer would shows that didn't immediately perform be given time to find a voice or an audience. This mentality has persisted and flourished in the binge-watch streaming reality.
What's the last new Comedy Central show? These networks have learned that they make more money running reruns of Seinfeld and The Office than they can by making a new show that could tank. So no chances are taken any more. I wonder if Dave Chappelle was coming up now if he'd be given a chance to do his show.
Posted on 8/28/24 at 10:36 am to Dairy Sanders
quote:
‘cut the cord’
quote:
Boomers and Gen X started that in the late 00s
Posted on 8/28/24 at 12:03 pm to AlxTgr
quote:This is pretty funny. Gen X definitely was part of the cord cutting.
Boomers and Gen X started that in the late 00s
Boomers are still asking "what cord am I supposed to cut?" while locked into $300/mo, 36/mo contracts to watch Matlock reruns.
Posted on 8/28/24 at 8:24 pm to Gusoline
quote:
10 minutes of commercials for every 5 minutes of tv, turning 1 hour shows into 23 minutes of screen time killed TV
That’s not how it’s ever been. 1 hour shows have always been about 42 or 43 minutes. 30 minute shows are 21-22.
Posted on 8/28/24 at 9:41 pm to ThoseGuys
I watched an old movie the other day. One supporting actress was fantastic. I'd never seen her before and she has been in the business for over 30 years. Turns out she's been in a bunch of cable or network TV shows I've never seen. So in a way for me cable news first and then streaming platforms killed TV.
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