Movies can be eccentric as hell and don't
have to come back and follow that up necessarily. Two hours to
alienate you as much as they want and be done with it. No return
audiences, continuity, or follow-up storylines. It's a one-off. Plus,
if the studio isn't gonna fund you, there's a chance to raise the
money yourself, go independent.
There's
no auteur directors with a blank check and carte blanche in TV.
You're constantly being assessed and reassessed week to week,
possibly taken off the air with no warning or recourse long before
the story is finished. The commercial, corporate nature of the medium feels rife with red tape and blockades at every turn. Therefore it's all the more impressive when something out of the ordinary somehow worms its way onto the small screen. You're at the whims of censors, ratings,
dealing with complaint letters, and more than likely having to fill
advertising quota, unless you're lucky enough to be on an ad-free
channel or streaming service, neither of which even existed until
long into the life of television. (Home Box Office, better known as
HBO, brought with it the concept of premium channels when it launched
in '72.)
The
first surviving film is from 1888. The first TV drama was forty years
later in 1928, The Queen's Messenger. It was limited range,
experimental. You don't get upgraded picture quality or Meet the
Press until after WWII. The first weekly variety show was in '47, the
beginning of the Nielsen ratings in '50, live TV the following year,
color by '54. The year prior, 1953, TV Guide had debuted. By then
over half of Americans now had at least one television in their
house. In 1960 that number was up to nine outta every ten people. And
by mid '94 it was ninety-nine outta one hundred.
The market
was as saturated as it could possibly get. It was time to shift from
focusing on getting the product to consumers to now how to provide
the best content available. This is when you really started to get
networks and shows trying to differentiate themselves. It was also a
time where people were largely aware of what was on, even if they
didn't watch it themselves. People might know about a show or even
have caught an episode whereas a movie they wouldn't. That's the
difference between reruns being broadcast essentially for free
directly into your home on a weekly if not daily basis, possibly for
years on end, versus a movie that's out of the theatres in a matter
of months at most.
TV
rating systems similar to ones the MPAA used didn't come in until
'97, the same year Oz started off original programming for HBO. A
decade later this shift in priorities was seen again by AMC's switching from their initial focus as American Movie
Classics to original programming like Breaking Bad and Mad Men. That
same year, 2007, Netflix began streaming.
Now you could more
easily see foreign language shows become popular, because people
began having access to technology where you were able to choose which
subtitles you wanted, if any. A slow burn may be paid off faster
during a binge watch if all episodes got released at once. And recaps
to previous episodes or seasons could now be referenced with the
click of a button, which allowed for more complexity in the
storytelling.
Conversely,
fans in the days of traditional TV might only catch a third of the
episodes on the night of the original broadcast. So storylines had to
be basic before OnDemand, DVR, and rewinding live TV. You used to
almost never see previously on recaps before an episode of something,
unless it was the second half of a two part episode. Even then they'd
often try to schedule those back to back.
With
TV following four decades behind film, it makes sense that by the
2010s the kind of reverence for peak TV mirrored how lauded the films
of the seventies were. Television started outselling movies in 2012.
Simultaneously, this last decade, going back to 2015, marks the first time that TV has
shrunk rather than grown as a percentage of the public's
entertainment time, bucking a trend that goes back to 1960. So now
you have more shows than ever before, spending more money than ever
before, vying for an ever decreasing portion of viewers.
A
good number of these concepts, facts, and figures are discussed at
length in Matthew Ball's The Streaming Book.
Stay tuned, tomorrow is part four.
Eerie, Indiana was a personal fave. Sucks that the mystery of Dash X was never explained.
ReplyDeleteI had friends who were into that show because their older brothers liked it, but I've still never seen it. It's been on my list for years. I've heard that it was ahead of its time.
DeleteI only recently learned that they made a spinoff in '98 called Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension that lasted for a season as well, though the reception for that was pretty middling from what I understand.