Page 1 of 12 From Wasteland to Wonderland: TV’s Altered Landscape By Jeff Greenfield October 3, 2015 Storage precursor: A photo from 1956 shows a home television tape player developed by RCA. Credit RCA Page 2 of 12 “The boob tube.” “The idiot box.” “The plug-in drug.” “A vast wasteland.” When I began writing about the television industry in the mid-1970s, these were some of the kinder terms of endearment. To imagine back then a television universe where creativity is unbound; where Hollywood’s most revered writers, directors, producers and actors clamor for the chance to “do TV”; where talk of a new “Golden Age” abounds, would have required a serious exercise in delusion, or the ingestion of controlled substances. But it has happened. Why? For me, the answer lies in one essential fact: When technology replaced scarcity with abundance, every core assumption about TV began to crumble. Everything about the medium — how we receive it, how we consume it, how we pay for it, how we interact with it — has been altered, and TV is infinitely better for it. In the mid-1970s, all TV was divided into three parts, at least as far as almost every American viewer was concerned. Every evening, the three broadcast networks, CBS, NBC and ABC, drew more than 9 out of 10 viewers. The only revenue came from advertisers, which led countless chroniclers of the industry to the same surprising conclusion about the nature of the business. “Remember,” the NBC executive Don Carswell told me, “we’re not selling the program. We’re selling the audience for the program.” The bigger the audience — and the more desirable in terms of buying power — the more the networks could charge. What this meant was that every hour, every half-hour, every moment of prime time had to be devoted to gathering the biggest possible audience. And that meant trying to shape the program to attract as many as possible and, perhaps more important, to avoid offending as many as possible. One prominent programmer of the day, Paul Klein of NBC, had a theory about this. He called it the “Least Objectionable Program” concept. Viewers, he said, didn’t watch a program, they watched TV. They clicked on the set and browsed until they found something reasonably acceptable. This theory drove many in the creative community to distraction. For every All in the Family or M*A*S*H* or Mary Tyler Moore, the overwhelming consensus, as expressed by Stan Kallis of Columbia TV, was that “We’re basically bound, our hands are tied, by the fact that we’re a medicine show. We’re here to deliver the audience to the next commercial.” Page 3 of 12 Further, any unsettling or disturbing fare would taint the mood of the audience — the audience the networks were promising to deliver to advertisers. Set a comedy in a prison? O.K., but as the noted programming wizard Fred Silverman warned, “Stay away from the hard stuff. Don’t scare people away.” Forty years ago, I wrote in these pages that “The enormous pressures which force commercial television into its relatively narrow boundaries are not likely to widen in the foreseeable future.” I could not have been more wrong; in fact, the boundaries began to widen that very year. The key to the old TV world was scarcity. Only so many channels could beam through the air without running into each other. Only three networks had a nationwide distribution system of microwave relays and AT&T “long lines.” Anyone trying to start another network found the logistics and the cost prohibitive. But in 1975, RCA introduced the first of two “Satcom” communications satellites, and the threenetwork monopoly was dead. Now competitors could deliver their fare to stations and cable systems coast to coast. That year, a fledgling pay service, Home Box Office, put its signal up on the satellite. An all-news network? An all-sports network? Networks aimed at women, children, shoppers, movie buffs? Sure, via wire or satellite. Unlike over-the-air TV, there was room for everybody. And for these new providers, a whole new economic model arose. Cable operators paid monthly fees to these networks based on the cable company’s overall number of subscribers, not just the ones who watched that particular network. Cable operators pay CNN a fee of about 60 cents a month for each of the hundred million homes they reach, even if only one household in a hundred actually watches CNN. Even in the face of flagging ratings, the network earned more than $440 million in profits last year, and the laggard MSNBC earned about half that much. (Fox earned a billion dollars in profits). ESPN banks about $7 billion a year in fees before the first ad is broadcast. A more revolutionary impact of abundance came with the arrival of pay cable and in recent years streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime. Since there are no advertisers, the popularity of specific programs is in a sense irrelevant — as long as subscribers send their $15 a month to HBO or Showtime, or their $8 a month to Netflix. Do you need to create a reasonably placid environment in which the audience will be receptive to a commercial? The only ads that would make any sense appearing during Ray Donovan would be pitches for antidepressants or membership in the Hemlock Society. But in this universe, contrary to the TV world of the 1970s, the audience is not the product — it’s the customer. There is no better example of what has changed than the experience of David Chase. The veteran writer had gotten a deal from Fox to write a pilot script about a family headed by a gangster. As he recounted in a public discussion with me after the series ended, the Fox executives had just one small problem with the script: Did Tony Soprano really have to be seeing a psychiatrist? Didn’t this make him seem vulnerable, a bit weak? Page 4 of 12 A generation ago, that would have been the end of the story. In today’s universe, there was a place for Tony Soprano, his panic attacks, his mother from hell, his language and sexual promiscuity, his casual resort to violence — to be shown with no threat of a network researcher telling Mr. Chase that Tony was turning off working mothers in the suburbs. HBO’s programmers could let the Chase vision of the story emerge full blown. In the last decade or so, this has become the working premise across much of the medium, particularly since basic cable networks like AMC and FX followed the lead of their pay-cable brethren. A chemistry teacher turned meth supplier; Soviet spies as the protagonists of a weekly drama? A drug-addicted nurse? A firefighter fighting his own demons? Yes, because the unofficial rules are different. “One thing I truly believe,” says Dick Wolf, the creator of Law and Order, “is that broadcasting is different from cable. And one of the things you can get away with on smaller cable networks is antiheroes. Sorry, they don’t work on broadcast. You can’t have a Walter White. You’re dealing with a different mind-set.” There’s another old belief about TV that has to be seriously rethought: the idea that it isolates us from each other. In 1971, the historian Daniel Boorstein wrote in Life magazine that the age of television created “a new sense of isolation and confinement.” The viewer could see, he wrote, “but nobody (except the family in the living room) could know for sure how he reacted to what he saw.” Today, a viewer can use a second screen — a phone, a tablet, a computer — to connect with friends, strangers and even creators of the shows to dissect a plotline, deride a piece of dialogue and question a twist in the story line, even as the show is being broadcast. When a compelling program like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, or The Sopranos approaches the end of its run, the digital cloud is filled with arguments about what should happen; a line of dialogue, a hair style or a piece of clothing will be analyzed intensely about its possible hints. You can call all this a 21st-century way to waste time, but even if it is, these interactions with television are anything but “isolating.” Is there still a mountain of junk on TV? More than ever. The same cable abundance that brings us Mad Men and Justified brings us the Real Liposuctioned Housewives of Springfield. Still, anyone looking to create a new set of insults to aim at TV is going to find it hard going. That vast wasteland has turned into a dazzling landscape. Page 5 of 12 Social Media Takes Television Back in Time By Farhad Manjoo October 3, 2015 Illustration by Cristiana Couceiro; photograph by Steve Bonini/Getty Images Page 6 of 12 The actor Joshua Malina is one of those guys you know from TV. You may not recognize his name, but his boyish face would ring a bell. Mr. Malina has worked in television for more than two decades, with recurring roles on a handful of hit shows, including The West Wing and The Big Bang Theory. Still, by his own unembarrassed estimation, Mr. Malina is hardly a star. “You know, I don’t have fans,” he said in a recent interview. “I’m a working man’s actor guy. I’m not one of those people who have fans.” Well, not until recently. In 2012, Mr. Malina became a regular on Scandal, the high-drama ABC thriller that stars Kerry Washington as a political fixer. Scandal, whose fifth season began Sept. 24, is one of the most watched dramas on TV, but among observers of the industry it is best known as an exemplar of the power of social media to catch and hook an audience. Every Thursday since the show’s premiere, most of the Scandal cast and crew have used Twitter to add live commentary that runs during the broadcast. The cast’s social media presence — which, according to the ratings firm Nielsen, inspires hundreds of thousands of tweets from viewers during every broadcast — has been credited with deepening the program’s relationship with its audience. Television used to be a supremely solitary experience, for its creators and for its viewers. The writer David Foster Wallace called it “an absolute godsend for a human subspecies that loves to watch people but hates to be watched itself.” For a time, digital technology seemed to be deepening the rift. TV has always been spatially isolating, with each of us cut off from everyone else who was watching. Then DVDs and DVRs and, later, on-demand services like Netflix added a temporal disconnection, too, making it increasingly unlikely that everyone else everywhere else was watching the same schlock at the same time. But that’s beginning to change. The emergence of social TV hits like Scandal suggests how, over the next few years, technology could transform television into something more than a one-way, disconnected, time-shifted experience. It’s not just that today’s shows are better, that we are in a “golden age” — or what some critics have upgraded to a “platinum age” — of TV. Instead, largely because of social media, TV is becoming an interactive, communal experience. And in an unexpected throwback to the earliest days of television, the best stuff, rather than playing out whenever we like, is best experienced live, because that’s when everyone else is watching, too. Mr. Malina, 49, is in some ways the unlikely embodiment of a new kind of TV star in a new age of television. “I’m 25-plus years into my career, and it’s only with Scandal and Twitter that the concept of my having fans with a last name other than Malina has even entered into my consciousness,” he said. He doesn’t just tweet. He’s on Vine. He’s on Periscope. As social media experts say, Mr. Malina “engages,” and in talking about his newly altered relationship with those who know him from TV, he can sometimes slip into describing his online presence as his “brand,” though he quickly apologizes for “sounding mercenary.” “I like the back-and-forth,” Mr. Malina added. “I miss doing live theater, where you actually can hear someone chuckle at something you just said, or a gasp because something suspenseful has Page 7 of 12 happened. On TV, you didn’t get that — but now there is a sense of immediacy to the reaction. It’s like, ‘Oh, there are people watching the show and responding to it.’” The community of viewers will probably become more important as technology continues to alter TV. Twitter has been the leading platform for such reactions. In a coming feature that has been code-named Project Lightning, the short-messaging network plans to add several improvements for following along with live television. But Twitter’s current influence may be just a peek at the communal future of TV. Several emerging digital experiences fit snugly into what might be considered the TV of tomorrow. Last year, Snapchat, the picture-messaging app favored by teenagers and college students, began creating Live Stories, a series of daily video vignettes stitched from multiples users’ perspectives and covering a range of topics, including life in the West Bank and the celebrations of the marriage equality movement. What’s unusual about Live Stories is that they aren’t personalized across Snapchat’s audience. Every day, Snapchat presents the same handful of new stories to most of the app’s user base of more than a hundred million viewers. After a day, you get a slate of new videos, and the old ones disappear. For viewers, the experience of watching Snapchat’s stories is thus communal — everyone is watching pretty much the same thing at the same time. Periscope, an app purchased by Twitter last year that lets users film and broadcast videos of their surroundings, also puts a premium on live, group experiences. You can watch a Periscope video of a concert or a party long after it was shot, but that’s a diminished experience. The app superimposes audience comments on the video, so if you watch live, you’re seeing not just the performance on-screen, but also how the audience is experiencing the performance. This happens in a more complex way on Vine, a popular short-video service also owned by Twitter that is also mining a rich new vein in television’s possible future. Jason Mante, Vine’s head of user experience, said the biggest stars on Vine were engaged in a constant creative conversation with the audience and their fellow videographers. Vine’s videos are just six seconds long, and each one plays in a never-ending loop. The format sounds constricted, but over the last couple of years Vine videographers have made wild leaps of creative possibilities — and each time someone crosses a new frontier, the visual breakthrough bounces across the service. “There’s an aesthetic language on Vine, an authenticity that focuses on creating stuff that is only for Vine,” Mr. Mante said. “The people that are most successful are the ones that can be part of the community. They can speak in that language and that aesthetic.” At the moment, that aesthetic is awash in visual gags, like people performing superhuman feats or editing clips to make it look as if they are talking to themselves. But, in a way common on these networks, the avant-garde on Vine is always changing. In different ways, these apps present an experience even more multilayered than that of watching performers in a theater. When you’re watching TV with Twitter, or you log on to Vine, Periscope, Snapchat or some other service, you don’t just hear others in the audience gasp. Now people react to one another’s gasps — and because the writers and producers of these shows are also looking at the audience reaction, the gasps can alter the show itself. For instance, the Page 8 of 12 creators of the ABC Family teen thriller Pretty Little Liars regularly tweet and post on Instagram from the writers’ room — apparently in reaction to fans’ theories about the show — often stoking interest during the off-season. As a result, the collective experience may be more entertaining than the solitary one. Indeed, that’s happening now: For some Scandal devotees, Twitter has become a vital part of the show; watching Scandal without following tweets about Scandal is a lesser experience, like watching it in black-and-white, or on mute. The increasing importance of live, communal experiences seems certain to affect the business of television. The largest TV companies have lately been rocked by the fear that the dominant mode of enjoying television, through a cable subscription on a big screen in a living room, may be on the wane. Cable subscriptions are down, while on-demand services like Netflix are experiencing extraordinary growth. Even cable stalwarts like HBO have set themselves free of the cable guy; you can now subscribe to the network over the Internet, without first paying for basic cable. A growing preference for cord cutting would suggest the inevitable dominance of time-shifting. If we all start to get our TV in different ways, if we’re no longer chained to a set in the living room, it might follow that in the future we’ll all watch different things at different times. That expectation explains why Netflix releases original programs like House of Cards in full-season bursts. The future, if Netflix has its way, looks to belong to binge watchers. But it’s possible that bingeing isn’t for everyone — that the shared, week-upon-week thrill of experiencing a show over time, with a community, is preferable to housebound overindulgence. After all, even though we can all watch in different ways, most of us still prefer to watch big TV hits live. Nielsen’s data shows that over the course of last season’s Game of Thrones, on HBO, most people watched each episode the day it came out. Three-quarters of the people who watched the season finale watched it on the Sunday it was broadcast. “We’re still wired for that week-to-week cultural conversation,” said Fred Graver, a longtime television comedy writer and producer who is Twitter’s creative lead for TV. “It’s rewarding for the community, and it’s even rewarding for the creators.” And for many there’s a reason to watch when it’s on. If you miss it, people will talk about it on Twitter and Facebook, and even if you manage to escape the spoilers, you’ll still find yourself left out of the cultural discussion. Miss something live and you’re racked with that pressing sensation of our wired times: FOMO, “fear of missing out.” “I remember it happened with me for Game of Thrones,” Mr. Graver said. “This is a show with dragons. I don’t like dragons. Why would I watch this? But then the famous ‘Red Wedding’ episode hit, and everyone was talking about it on Twitter. And you go, ‘Oh, my God, everybody’s talking about it. I have to go see what this thing is about.’ And I became a fan.” Page 9 of 12 Mr. Graver notes that not all shows make for great communal viewing. He says that slower, more contemplative dramas — think Mad Men rather than the more high-stakes Scandal— often fail to garner much notice on Twitter, possibly because it’s more difficult to take your eyes off the screen to tweet. Comedies also don’t inspire much communal viewing. On the other hand, high-emotion dramas like Scandal can earn a substantial audience online. According to Twitter, the Scandal season premiere inspired about 423,000 tweets. And the second-season premiere of Fox’s smash hit Empire, about the passions surrounding a familyowned record label, generated a record 1.3 million tweets when it aired on Sept. 23. The large Twitter audience coincided with a huge live TV audience. About 16 million people saw the premiere, according to Nielsen, making it Fox’s highest-rated premiere for a scripted drama since 2009. Indeed, Twitter and Nielsen have found that there is a connection between the volume of tweets and a show’s total audience size. In a study Twitter conducted with Fox, the network found that people who noticed tweets about Empire said they were far more likely than people who had seen no tweets to say they were interested in next watching the show in real time. Tweets about Empire also lifted interest in time-shifted viewing — a common reaction, according to another study by Nielsen. Perhaps because of FOMO, people who notice a conversation about a show decide to catch up by watching previous episodes online. For HBO, which makes its money from subscription fees, the week-to-week online chatter feeds interest for new users. For networks that are funded by advertising, the case for live communal viewing is even stronger. Advertisers covet collective engagement; they want people to watch their ads at an appointed time, and they pay a premium for large masses of communal viewers. (That’s why sporting events like the Super Bowl do so well.) Marketers are even more pleased when they can serve ads that span a viewer’s screens — a TV ad that’s coupled with a Twitter ad, for example — and when they can participate in the discussion over the course of a show. More than that, using neural imaging, Nielsen has found that activity on Twitter might also indicate how engaged, and thus receptive to ads, even non-tweeting viewers might be. The numbers show a deep, perhaps unbreakable connection between viewing and reacting — between watching and sharing entertainment together. “It’s surprising, but it really adds as much to the experience for us who are on the show as it does for those who are watching,” Mr. Malina said. “There’s this groupthink. People are arguing, there are great factions. It’s just a lot of fun.” Which shouldn’t come as a surprise. Though television has long been vilified for the way it supposedly transforms us into passive, shiftless voyeurs, it has just as easily been among the most powerful media forces pushing cultural unity. At big events, from the Kennedy assassination to 9/11 to every Super Bowl and awards show, and cliffhangers like “Who shot J.R.?,” TV is the cultural baseline — the thing in the background that commands attention, that sets the conversation. Now, on our phones and our computers, the conversation continues. Page 10 of 12 New Twists for the TV Plot, as Viewer Habits Change By Terrence Rafferty October 3, 2015 1. Among the myriad complaints about the second season of HBO’s “True Detective,” perhaps the most common — and surely the most vehemently expressed on social media — was that the plot was impossible to follow. Considering the genre, this objection seems a little beside the point: What passes for plot in a Southern California noir like “True Detective” is really just an atmosphere — something smoglike, miasmal, to wrap characters in (as anyone who’s ever tried to disentangle a Raymond Chandler mystery knows). 2. What’s fascinating about the anger in viewers’ responses is that “True Detective” has everything TV audiences used to want in their televisual entertainment: big stars, some action and a mystery. That formula worked fine in the show’s first season, and, of course, it’s still popular on network series like “Elementary,” in which we see characters we like doing things we want to see them do — like solving murders. 3. But as technology evolves, the concept of plot in television series has been evolving, too, and there have been growing pains. In this era, when the audience (particularly the younger audience) watches TV in many different ways — weekly, time-shifted or binged, and on a variety of platforms — viewers’ expectations have changed, and the medium has done all it can trying to keep up. 4. Just a few decades ago, viewers used to settle in front of their sets once a week for a pleasant hour with, say, James Garner — not much caring about whatever little crime Jim Rockford, Mr. Garner’s character, was leisurely investigating. For most of TV’s history, the appeal of a series was largely determined by the personalities of the actors. But now the glamorous sight of Colin Farrell and Rachel McAdams in a series like “True Detective” isn’t nearly enough. 5. In May, the critic Matt Zoller Seitz mused in Vulture about the plot-heaviness of 21stcentury TV, explaining the phenomenon in part as “a reaction to increased viewer sophistication — and impatience.” He wrote: “TV writers live in constant low-level fear of being outguessed by fans, with reason. In the age of recaps and Facebook instant reactions and live-tweeting, everyone is a student of storytelling. They know the tropes and tricks because they’re a constant, often humorous topic of online chatter.” Page 11 of 12 6. And, as Mr. Seitz points out, the experience of watching becomes a kind of guessing game: “It’s no longer about what happens, or how, or why, but when. You predict what’s coming and at which moment, you discover whether you called it right or wrong, and you go online to crow or eat crow.” 7. Ever since “Twin Peaks” incorporated soap-opera elements into prime-time mystery drama 25 years ago, viewers have played that game to some extent, but it is no longer the relaxing activity it once was. The byzantine plots of shows like “True Detective,” “Humans,” “Mr. Robot” and “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” make the experience of following a narrative a test of sorts, and when viewers feel as if they’re failing — as they clearly did during Season 2 of “True Detective” — they get frustrated and, inevitably, angry. 8. But is this any way to watch TV? There’s more to drama than plot, after all, and while it’s nice to see television writers and directors trying to tell complex, ambitious stories in their once-humble medium, a certain level of narrative fatigue may be setting in, especially now that “Breaking Bad,” “Mad Men” and “Justified” have ended their long, satisfying runs. 9. Series with several-season story arcs can’t be as plot-dependent as a show like “True Detective,” each season of which is essentially a self-contained eight-episode mini-series. 10. If the plot of a long-running series is a mystery, there’s a limit on how many episodes viewers can enjoy before solving the case, as “Twin Peaks” discovered to its sorrow. After a while, viewers get impatient and need closure. The American version of “The Killing” frustrated viewers a few seasons ago by seemingly solving the show’s seasonlong mystery and then, perversely, undoing it and spending another season solving the murder all over again. (The author Dashiell Hammett did something similar in his novel “The Dain Curse,” but it’s not recommended for artists less deft in the genre.) 11. When Netflix, in 2013, decided to dump the entire first season of its original series “House of Cards” onto its streaming site at once, it offered a clever way around the discontents of long-form TV narrative. The series could have plenty of plot, because the audience was able to watch one episode immediately after another, without an intervening week in which to forget all the pesky details. And the story could be constructed with the beginning, middle and end of a traditional novel, rather than with the short-story techniques of old-fashioned episodic television — or the one-thing-afteranother desperation of a series that’s determined to keep running, by any means necessary. 12. Binge-watchable series like “House of Cards,” “Bloodline” and “Daredevil” allow for dense plotting but discourage the tiresome guessing-game aspect of weekly TV viewing: The answers are there from the start, so nobody gets a gold star for calling them right. Page 12 of 12 13. In the semi-old days, viewers could achieve this effect only by skipping an entire season of, say, “Friday Night Lights,” waiting for the DVD box set, and then devouring the whole thing in one giant, Texas-size smorgasbord of viewing. That’s harder to do now. To avoid spoilers, you’d have to stay off Facebook and Twitter, stop reading all newspapers and websites, and avoid cable news shows. (Unless, of course, you don’t really care about the plot.) 14. It’s worth noting that not all TV programs benefit from being binge-watched. Comedies, for example, remain stubbornly episodic. Though Netflix released all 13 episodes of “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” at once, there was no compelling reason to watch it all at once. One or two at a time seems about the optimum dosage. 15. And there are weekly cable shows that fans might wish had been released Netflix-style. Both seasons of Showtime’s “Penny Dreadful,” for example, are eminently bingeable — and it’s possible that if that last season of “True Detective” had been released in one big chunk of corrupt complication, it might have gone down a little more easily with the audience. 16. Maybe the bingeable series will become television’s preferred mode of storytelling, and maybe it will simply get stranger and stranger until it goes away: The sheer berserkness of “Sense8,” the Wachowski siblings’ globe-trotting Netflix soap opera, suggests that a certain fin de siècle decadence may already be setting in. 17. Whatever is going to happen with TV storytelling, it’s probably going to be hard to follow. All we can do — as usual — is keep guessing. Terrence Rafferty is a film critic who has written for The New Yorker, Slate, The Atlantic Monthly, The Village Voice, The Nation, and The New York Times, and GQ.
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