They said that on network television?

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 1:30 PM - 0 Comments

Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Sarah MacKinnon

Rape, multiple simultaneous sexual partners, and penis size: they’re not reality-show or cable topics, they’re the jokes on major network sitcoms. The flop drama The Playboy Club, expected to be the shocking show of the season, turned out to have mild content. But the most popular comedy on TV, Two and a Half Men, is mostly about sex, with references to acts that would make its former star, Charlie Sheen, blush. The biggest new comedy, 2 Broke Girls, includes a character whose only job is to make comments like, “Once you go Ukraine, you will scream with sex pain.” One of the most promising upcoming comedies, about a cool young woman, is trying to go even farther, starting with its title, Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23. Mass-audience TV comedy is no longer the place where people sleep in separate beds.

In the ’00s, after Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl, there was a panicked crackdown in network censorship, with language and nudity closely scrutinized. But recently, networks have given writers more freedom to talk in scripts the way they talk in real life. Twenty years ago this year, Seinfeld was allowed to do an episode about masturbation only if the word was never used. But Two and a Half Men capped its first Sheen-free episode by giving Jon Cryer the line, “I masturbated and cried myself to sleep.” Taboos about words like “vagina” have fallen so completely that Bill Carter of the New York Times wrote a breathless article proclaiming 2011-12 “the season of the vagina.”

It used to be that if a mainstream show had anything remotely naughty, it would be aired in a later time slot, keeping it away from the so-called “family hour” of the early evening. But to compete with the Internet and DVRs, networks are more willing to air a show like 2 Broke Girls at 8:30 p.m. This has stunned some viewers who expected to be free from orgasm jokes for an hour. “Many parents want to unwind,” says Lee Allport, an online commentator who reacted with shock to 2 Broke Girls’ content on her blog Entertainment ExactLee, “and the thought of their child overhearing quotes such as, ‘Did you flash the bat signal on your vagina?’ can be worrisome.”

Continue…

My wish list: Jaime Weinman on TV

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 4:32 PM - 0 Comments

Macleans.ca has asked its leading bloggers, pundits and critics to weigh in with what they’d like to see in 2012—in politics, television, film, books, wherever. The wish lists will run throughout the month of December and will be archived at macleans.ca/wishlist.

There are many things I would like to see in television in 2012. More singing competition reality shows. More jokes about sexual organs. More cable dramas about morally-ambiguous protagonists. These things have become so rare. But here are some other things I might like to see.

(1) More action: Or at least less talk. A lot of shows this year set up premises that seem to call for lots of action and chases, like a bunch of people threatened by dinosaur attacks (Terra Nova), another bunch of people threatened by zombie attacks (The Walking Dead) or a couple of vigilantes fighting crime in a creepy illegal way (Person of Interest). But most of them seem to resolve themselves into a lot of talk and a few token action scenes thrown in when the producers sense that we’re getting bored by all the talking. Even the genuine action-adventure shows sometimes seem a bit light on the chases and stunts compared to the shows they’re homaging. Not that every show needs a car chase or an explosion in every act; this isn’t the ’80s. But sometimes it can be a blessing to take a break from the actors and watch stunt drivers instead. Let us just say that Person of Interest needs some heavy rewriting from the ghost of Stephen J. Cannell, or as I like to call him, TGOSJC.

(2) More hastily-scheduled shows: Continue…

Sharp’s 80 inches of television glory

By Peter Nowak - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 11:39 AM - 0 Comments

It’s true what they say: once you’ve tried 80 inches, you never want to go back.

I’m talking, of course, about televisions (get your mind out of the gutter). I recently spent a few days with Sharp’s new 80-inch Aquos TV and, having fallen in love, I’m sad to say I have screen envy now that I’m back to my measly 50-inch plasma. Continue…

Babies are taking over television

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Colleen Hayes/Colleen Hayes/NBC

Emily Spivey told critics that her new show, Up All Night, with Christina Applegate and Will Arnett as a hip couple trying to adjust to the challenge of raising a newborn, has a premise “straight out of my baby journal.” It sometimes feels like most shows this season are straight out of a baby journal. Television shows used to avoid babies if possible; Dawn Jeffory Nelson, a professional “baby wrangler” on movies like the new Harold & Kumar picture, told Maclean’s that babies are usually “relegated to the background,” or “they go up the stairs as babies, and they come down and they’re five.” But today, babies are taking over TV in a way that we haven’t seen since the Olsen twins were on Full House.

The story possibilities of babies seem to have fired the imaginations of writers like Spivey, who based her show on her own experience as a working mother. Producers are aware that a baby can add a new dimension to a show: Nelson says that on Dexter, a show she recently did some work on, the psychopathic title character’s baby son “is becoming an important aspect of Dexter’s character.” The family drama Parenthood has incorporated an adoption and a pregnancy, and creator Jason Katims told TV Line that “The baby arc is really interesting and will essentially last the whole season.” And Last Man Standing is supposed to be about Tim Allen’s relationship with his wife and daughters, but builds a number of plots around his attempts to impart manly values to his baby grandson.

Some of this baby mania may be due to what the Los Angeles Times has described as “the Modern Family effect.” Lily, the adorable baby adopted by the characters of Cameron (Eric Stonestreet) and Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), had viewers all over the world cooing over her. Another show that has quietly proven the effectiveness of babies is Raising Hope, from My Name Is Earl creator Greg Garcia. The show, where the leads are in charge of raising a serial killer’s baby, has proven that the presence of a little girl can make abrasive characters more family-friendly.

Continue…

Nobody Watches Anything

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 6:00 PM - 4 Comments

Here’s a reason why TV ratings have become more interesting in recent years: paradoxically, it’s because hardly anyone watches broadcast TV any more by comparison with previous eras. Television audiences are still large overall, and a major event (usually sports) can still pull in an old-fashioned mass audience, but cable has been chipping away at broadcast viewership since at least the ’80s, along with all the other things (VCRs, DVRs, the internet, more competitive networks). Whether the smaller audience have improved the quality of broadcast TV is another question (unlike cable programming, which obviously did improve since the early ’90s); probably it’s allowed some shows to survive that would once have been marginal, but it’s more likely that the standard for what constitutes marginal ratings have simply changed, and what was getting 9 million viewers in 1994 would be getting something like a third of that today. But the increasingly competitive world of TV and the famous fragmentation of the audience has made ratings more fun to follow. Instead of every show, even the failures, getting unimaginably huge numbers, we’re down to a point where the failures get amusingly low numbers – and we may soon reach the point where some broadcast shows get overall audiences that would be low by cable standards.

And because the overall numbers are low, that focuses attention more on demographics, analyzing what the ratings really mean when you look at a show’s performance with young viewers. It was supposedly ABC, the perennial third-place network in the ’60s, that really pushed the idea of focusing on the 18-49 demographic, and they did it because they couldn’t yet compete with NBC and CBS in terms of overall viewers. While it can’t be fun for a show’s producers to hear that certain viewers don’t count (and not only older viewers: Glee‘s ratings would probably look better if kids and teens counted in the Demo), it does make it more interesting to analyze: there are more ways for a TV show to succeed than just pulling in some gigantic number of viewers. The focus on the 18-49 demo may not be the best thing for broadcast, as networks have started to notice – though it’s doubtful that advertisers will snap up the network executives’ ideas for commercials aimed at older people. But there’s not much doubt that the list of top shows in the 18-49 bracket is a bit more varied than the list of top shows overall.

So while, like I said before, my own interest in ratings has gone down this season (and it’s not out of the question that DVR and online numbers could eventually be more fully incorporated into overall ratings, thus increasing viewership numbers again), I think the overall interest in these numbers is going to keep going up as the broadcast audiences keep getting smaller. It’s somehow more fun to watch networks fight over a shrinking pie, and argue about which one “really” has the biggest piece.

Of course, last night the real interest on TV, despite the strong ABC lineup (Suburgatory and Revenge are among the few new shows that are showing promise), was baseball: watching it on TV, following it on the internet, wherever. Sports are still the biggest events on television.

Adventures in Afghanistan’s ‘Nothing Land’

By Emma Teitel - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 1 Comment

Ahmad Masood/Reuters

The BBC’s famous mockumentary The Office has inspired numerous copycats since its inception in 2001. America’s NBC adaptation, which is about to start its eighth season, popularized actor Steve Carell’s socially inept character, Michael Scott, a paper company manager with a penchant for political incorrectness, sexual indiscretions and a fascination with Meryl Streep. More recent contemporaries are no different: most versions of comedian Ricky Gervais’s original Office production, from France’s Le Bureau to Quebec’s La Job, come complete with almost interchangeable office antics. Every version, that is, except one: an Afghan TV station, Tolo, aired its own Office-style series this summer called The Ministry, replacing office politics with real ones.

The eight-episode series (season two is set to air in October) takes place in a fictional country mirroring Afghanistan, called “Hechland” (translation from Dari: “Nothing Land”), and follows the shenanigans of Hechland’s Ministry of Garbage and its narcissistic minister, Dawlat—played by Abdul Qadir Farookh of the The Kite Runner. Farookh is one of the only actors with professional experience on the production—a Kabul apartment flat converted to a studio by the show’s producers. “Everyone on set is in training,” says 31-year-old Abazar Khayami, one of the show’s senior producers. “But we took our disadvantage and made it into an advantage.”

There is no official television rating system in Afghanistan, but Khayami says it’s obvious The Ministry is one of the most popular shows in the country, as its actors are frequently recognized on the streets and invited into politicians’ homes for dinner. The series’ plots range from government corruption and nepotism to gender inequality and suicide bombings. In one episode, Dawlat the minister (a former New York cab driver who earned his job through pure nepotism) pays off the wrong warlord, setting off a string of suicide bombings he was supposed to prevent. “Nothing is taboo,” says Khayami, noting that things would probably be very different if the show made fun of the Afghan government in a direct, rather than veiled way. “When they are alone in their homes,” he says of real-life government officials, “I like to think they watch the show and laugh. But if we had gone that extra inch and called it Afghanistan [instead of Hechland] and poked direct fun at the administration, then it might be a different story. We’ll never know.”

Continue…

Let there be television

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, July 14, 2011 at 10:55 AM - 6 Comments

A clip from the first televised Question Period on October 17, 1977, back when desk thumping seemed like a good idea.

Smartphones are killing commercials

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 at 5:36 PM - 6 Comments

The remote control was supposed to kill off TV ads—audiences would just click away during commercial breaks. And we did, but only enough to make ads louder and more abrasive. Later the VCR was feared to be the commercial’s mortal enemy. We would all just tape shows and fast-forward through the ads. And we did…now and then. The same fears (and hopes) emerged when TiVos and DVRs hit the market. Now we wouldn’t need to pre-tape a whole show—just the first five or ten minutes worth, and then zip past those annoying adverts. But still, no dice. Turns out only 2% of ads ultimately get skipped over this way. Seems we like to watch TV as it comes, and “time-shifting” hardware has proven no match for the 30-second spot.

So what will kill the commercial? Phones.

AdAge reports on how spooky eyeball tracking technology was used in a recent study to measure how often TV viewers get distracted from ads, and by what. 60% of disruptions came by way of viewers’ smartphones. As Brian Monohan writes, “the challenge is not moving one’s thumb to push fast-forward, but rather moving one’s head to look at their smartphone.” Laptops, video games and other “companion media” also had an impact, but nothing near so damaging as phone use.

This is not so surprising. Before smartphones, the ad’s biggest competition was in fact the human being—we would wait until a commercial break to interact with the people we watch television with. In that sense, nothing is really changing—we’re just reading emails and checking social media instead of chatting with our friends and families. But whereas it was frustratingly impossible for advertisers to transfer their ad dollars from TV spots to sponsored live human conversations, GMail, Twitter and Facebook will happily sell brands access to our ad-time chatter.

Look for new “smart” ads that know what shows we’re watching and position their messages accordingly.

Down with television repeats

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 3:27 PM - 5 Comments

Here’s one thing I would like to say before the U.S. networks announce their fall schedules: reruns. Avoid them whenever possible. Except in the summer, and maybe not even then. And especially avoid them near the end of the season, in April and May.

Looking at the viewership numbers for a lot of shows this season, there seems to be a clear overall pattern – when a show takes some time off from airing new episodes, and it’s not for an occasion where nobody shows new episodes, then some viewers don’t come back when the new episodes do. Take Glee, which managed to avoid long stretches of repeats last season because of the split-season format it used. This season, it managed to hold steady for most of the season, even surviving a January hiatus with the help of a major launching pad (the post-Super Bowl episode) that gave it heavy promotion. But then it took some more time off in March and April: after the March 15 episode, it didn’t air another new episode until April 19. And since it’s come back, it’s lost 1-2 million viewers. You can find a similar dip in viewership for many shows around the same time – for example, Community got 4.4 million viewers for its March 24 episode, then had some reruns and pre-emptions, and came back a few weeks later (April 14) with a million viewers gone. It was already airing against Idol, which didn’t take that many viewers away from it – but reruns do what Idol cannot. NCIS took a break between April 12 and May 3, and two million viewers didn’t come back when it did.

It’s probably unwise for me to dwell too much on individual examples, since week-to-week or month-to-month declines have other explanations besides the repeats, and sometimes a show can buck the trend and go up if there are other factors working for it. But it’s a pattern, and it’s a pattern that makes sense. We hear all the time that viewers have more options than ever before. We also know that TV viewers are creatures of habit. If a show doesn’t provide a new episode for a couple of weeks, it may not turn us off the show, but it can break the habit – we may discover another show on cable, or we may just start recording it. The danger of finding another show during repeat weeks was less pronounced during the three-channel era because it was less likely that we could find something to give us exactly the same kind of entertainment at exactly the same time. It’s still not the likeliest thing in the world, but it’s more possible.

Networks realized some time ago that serialized shows don’t repeat well and that they needed to find ways to keep a steady flow of episodes: that’s one of the reasons for Fox’s famous trick of not starting 24 until Continue…

Fox Cancels Everything

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 12:46 AM - 9 Comments

Fox tonight was the first network to announce some of its 2010-11 pickups and cancellations – mostly cancellations. I don’t think Fox fully deserves its reputation as the evil cancellation-happy network; they’ve stayed with many shows through mediocre or worse ratings. But they’ve definitely decided to clean house this time, except for Fringe, which has already been renewed.

Simon Cowell is taking over the network with The X-Factor, which I greatly fear will be a crushing hit like it is all over the world, and that makes him the Jay Leno of Fox: everything has to go to make room for him. So in order to clear space for Cowell while still picking up some new scripted stuff, the network has canceled virtually all its “bubble” shows:

- Breaking In, which had decent ratings that were, however, heavily inflated by an American Idol lead-in, is gone. This makes Christian Slater’s third straight failed series.
- The Chicago Code is gone, making Shawn Ryan’s second canceled series in a year. This is the really sad one among the cancellations: a good cast and some good writing, plus the Chicago atmosphere Continue…

Watching TV may narrow blood vessels in childrens’ eyes: study

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 4:16 PM - 1 Comment

Kids who spent more time in front of televisions and computer screens, and less time outside, have narrowed blood vessels in their eyes, according to a new Australian study reported in the New York Times. Scientists looked at 1,492 six-year-olds across Sydney, and had their parents answer questionnaires about how much time they spent doing physical activity, versus sitting in front of a TV or computer. They then examined the kids’ eyes. Children who watched the most TV had blood vessels in their eyes that were slightly smaller in diameter than those who watched the least. Kids who exercised the least had narrowest vessels in their eyes. What it means for these children is still unknown.

New York Times

Direct appeal

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 9:35 AM - 34 Comments

The Liberals will air a half-hour program on Sunday afternoon showcasing Mr. Ignatieff and the Liberal platform. From the official release:

“Michael Ignatieff’s Town Hall for Canada” will feature candid interviews with Mr. Ignatieff, and exclusive footage of him on the campaign trail in this election as he brings his message of hope to Canadians … “Michael Ignatieff’s Town Hall for Canada” will make the case directly to Canadians why the Liberal Party is the only choice in this election that can protect Canada’s universal public health care system and bring a new level of economic stability to Canadian families through the Liberal Family Pack.

Jackie Kennedy meets 'Dawson's Creek'

By Jaime Weinman - Saturday, April 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 6 Comments

Watching History TV’s The Kennedys (airing April 10), you might think it’s just another historical miniseries. It features heavy-handed irony (“My husband,” Jackie Kennedy tells a reporter, is “exactly who he appears to be”) and lots of Mad Men-style ’60s nostalgia, including Katie Holmes struggling to hold up under Jackie’s accent and hairdo. But it’s actually the most controversial miniseries since The Reagans. History TV’s U.S. equivalent, the History Channel, commissioned the show and then decided not to air it, declaring it was not accurate enough. Michael Prupas, head of Muse Entertainment in Montreal and one of the executive producers of the show, told Maclean’s ominously that this decision “came from higher places.”

Those “higher places” are rumoured to contain a bunch of Kennedy family members; the Los Angeles Times reported that Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver were “believed to have lodged private protests against the show.” But a lot of the pressure came from writers who feared a smear job against a key dynasty of the Democratic party. Rick Perlstein, author of such books as Nixonland, was one of several historians who denounced the project after reading a draft of the script where Joe Kennedy broke a crucifix: “Every kind of narrative argument being made was that the Kennedys had no redeeming qualities.” It didn’t help that one of the producers was Joel Surnow, the conservative creator of 24; he’s seen as part of what Perlstein calls “an entire infrastructure devoted to calumniating liberalism and the Democratic party,” and liberals feared the show was an attempt to validate Surnow’s world view.

Continue…

More Mad Men musings

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 4:22 PM - 3 Comments

Something I didn’t say in my previous post on the Matt Weiner vs. AMC fracas: As usual, there’s a lot we don’t know about what’s really going on in these negotiations. Especially since most of the leaks appear to be coming from one side – Weiner’s. And frequently, from Weiner himself. He gave an interview saying that contrary to initial reports, the network wants to cut not just two characters but a total of six, two a year. “A person familiar with the negotiations” gave the same story to another outlet, but the person is clearly on Weiner’s side and for all we know could be Weiner himself. Continue…

Netflix vs. the networks

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, March 28, 2011 at 5:42 PM - 0 Comments

Now that Netflix has driven video rental companies out of business, it’s going after the television networks. The online video-streaming company made a deal last week to produce its first original series, outbidding HBO and AMC for the rights to House of Cards, producer-star Kevin Spacey’s remake of an acclaimed British miniseries. Netflix reportedly won the rights to the show, featuring Spacey as an evil politician, by ordering 26 episodes up front without even making a pilot.

If the show succeeds, it could allow Netflix to displace cable TV: it doesn’t have the operating costs associated with a regular network, and instead of scheduling the show, it will simply release the episodes online, for people to sample whenever they want. Executives at Time-Warner, which owns HBO, were rattled enough that one of them ran to the Los Angeles Times denigrating Netflix’s chances: “It’s hard to see how that kind of economics can fit into a service that charges $8 or $10 a month, because the math doesn’t work.” Even if that’s true, Netflix may have no choice but to press ahead with its efforts; with Amazon and other companies starting their own streaming services, it can’t depend on other people’s movies and shows forever.

Google, Apple, and Netflix: tomorrow's entertainment studios?

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, March 22, 2011 at 1:55 PM - 4 Comments

David Carr has posted some interesting thoughts on Google’s mission drift: though they’ll deny it ’til sundown, the search giant is slowly but surely getting into the content business.  They’re cutting deals with major league sports and with Hollywood studios. They’re investing millions in celebrity content for Youtube. And last month, they rolled out One Pass, an attempt to wrap a universal payment layer around “pro” publishing content.

Meanwhile, Netflix made headlines last week by trumping the cable TV networks and buying a new David Fincher series (sight unseen) for $100 million.  The news gobsmacked the entertainment industry, who considered Netflix merely a conduit for content, not a producer of it.  But the strategy is nothing new. Continue…

Cable Networks Have Hits and Flops Now

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 6:02 PM - 8 Comments

I’m a bit late to this discussion, but I took a slightly different meaning from this piece, where Tim Goodman argues that basic cable’s quality boom is in danger of being choked off by reality TV. The idea being that reality shows are at once the most popular and cheap fare on cable, and that the incentive for cable networks to produce high-quality scripted programming is being reduced.

The key case in this article, as in many recent articles, is FX, which has introduced two straight prestigious, critically-acclaimed dramas that completely failed to find an audience (Terriers and Lights Out). John Landgraf, the head of FX, has been sounding very frustrated lately with the change in the cable landscape, which has not only led to several high-profile flops but made it unprofitable to do the kind of complex serialized drama that he obviously likes. (Landgraf famously gave Damages a two-season renewal after its not-particularly-popular first season, a decision that proved financially unwise — and, considering that the show had nowhere to go after its exciting first season, probably creatively unwise as well.) Though the network has its share of critical and popular successes, like Justified, it’s no longer where it was a few years ago, when The Shield and Sons of Anarchy touched off serious talk of FX becoming the HBO of basic cable.

Even AMC, which pretty much is the HBO of basic cable, had to cancel the prestigious Rubicon, is having trouble getting another season of Mad Men off the ground, and broke through to mainstream success based on arguably (I said arguably) its creatively weakest show to date, The Walking Dead. Meanwhile the big basic cable success stories often involve shows that are not better-quality than broadcast network fare, and we’re not just talking about reality shows here. We’re talking about hits like The Game, Jersey Shore, Hot in Cleveland, Tosh.0 and Pretty Little Liars. All these shows are the flagship shows of their Continue…

Should We Watch TV Shows From the Beginning?

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, March 7, 2011 at 12:25 PM - 13 Comments

That’s an question that I’ve heard more often lately (though it’s been around for a while; I wrote another post addressing the issue a couple of years ago). Increasingly the answer is “yes.” The traditional way to encounter a TV show is just to drop in and start watching, and maybe catch up with the earlier episodes at a later date. But now that TV series are taken more seriously as complete and coherent works, to say nothing of the fact that we can watch from the beginning no matter how late we discover the show, there’s an increased preference for getting the full experience of the story from beginning to end. Even where the show deals mostly or partly in self-contained stories, like Justified or almost any half-hour comedy, many new viewers prefer to start from episode one.

It’s well-known, of course, that almost every TV series wants people to jump in in the middle, or at least that the creators wouldn’t object if we did. Different shows may provide different amounts of information to help new viewers get caught up, but with rare exceptions of shows that are very insular (usually limited-run shows) shows will provide signposts along the way to help people understand what’s going on, and ground the storylines in traditional emotional conflicts — love, hate, revenge, corporate machinations — that are familiar enough for new viewers to understand. Soap operas have been doing this for decades, and they’re constantly getting new followers who, after a few episodes, are completely aware of who these people are and what they want. Most shows’ mythologies and ongoing relationships are simple enough that a new viewer can understand them, maybe not the first time, but certainly without going back to the beginning.

But just because we can know what’s going on in a show doesn’t mean we really understand it, and the argument is that (particularly for a sophisticated show, or one that Continue…

Kicking television

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, January 27, 2011 at 11:21 AM - 7 Comments

Conor Friedersdorf laments for television news.

There’s an important caveat that Benen left out: Olbermann offered something that couldn’t be found elsewhere on television. For liberals who like that medium, I’m sure the show proved cathartic. But wouldn’t they be better informed, more meaningfully entertained, and psychicly happier if just read Washington Monthly instead? Yes, I know, television is a very popular medium (mostly because it demands so little from its audience). But it is the worst way to engage politics in America. Compared to reading it is a wildly inefficient time suck. The format itself often strips the issue at hand of all nuance. It rewards demagoguery, and the host’s words disappear into the ether so fast that inaccuracies slip easily past and are seldom corrected for the people misled by them. Often as not, its producers and writers just take insights from the written medium and dumb them down.

Regis Philbin announces his retirement

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 1 Comment

Regis Philbin, who has hosted ABC’s Live With Regis and Kelly (originally Live With Regis and Kathie Lee) since the 1980s, announced today that he will be stepping down from the show. The 79-year-old Philbin spent many years as a host on both television and radio; he was selected by comedian Joey Bishop to be his sidekick on a talk show that tried, and failed, to take on Johnny Carson. In addition to his talk show duties, he also hosted ABC’s version of Who Wants to Be a Millionare?, which became one of the biggest hits of its era. He also appeared as himself on my other talk shows and TV series like How I Met Your Mother, and had a role in Woody Allen’s movie Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask. Live will continue after Philbin’s departure, slated for the summer; the network is looking for a new host to work with Philbin’s co-star, Kelly Ripa.

Deadline

Is TV More Ephemeral Than Ever?

By Jaime Weinman - Sunday, January 2, 2011 at 11:44 AM - 17 Comments

Yesterday I made a snarky comment that was at least partly serious. I said that most cult flop TV shows are like American Idol contestants: they’re incredibly important for a few months, and then they’re forgotten as soon as the show is over. Every year there are some shows that make 10-best lists, get save-our-show campaigns, and inspire more online discussion than most hits. Then they’re canceled and they vanish from the discussion; even those of us who loved them no longer have much to say about them. The show that goes away and still lingers in the public memory — the Freaks & Geeks type of thing — is rare.

One one level this isn’t surprising, since most flop shows are more potential than fulfilment, and that becomes much clearer after they’re gone. Terriers, for example. I liked Terriers a lot, as I’ve said; it was my favourite new show of 2010, and one of the few that actually seemed to be a fully-formed, professionally-made show instead of something that was just potentially good. I still think that. But now that it’s canceled, the “heat” surrounding it will fade, and it might not seem as much of a stand-out as it did when it was the best of a poor crop of new shows. To bring back the Idol analogy, we’re very interested in a great contestant undeservedly losing to inferior ones. That doesn’t usually mean we’re going to follow that person once the competition is over. And a show that gets some cult attention while it’s still on is much more common than a show that builds a cult after it’s gone.

I think it’s not just flop shows, though, that start by getting a ton of attention and then are quickly forgotten. It seems to happen a lot. I can’t prove that, of course, but I think I see this cycle happening with a number of shows: they start out with an incredible amount of online (and critical) discussion, praise and argumentation, and then when they’re gone, they’re gone — nobody seems to talk about them any more. It’s inevitable that a show will lose a lot of its cultural currency once it’s no longer making new episodes; it’s not only inevitable, it may even be right and good. But a show doesn’t have to fade away completely after it stops making new episodes. Thanks to syndication, DVDs and just the fact that some of the characters became part of the language, shows like Seinfeld and Friends were probably bigger than some new shows after they were canceled; Mulder and Scully are still well-known character archetype;s and people who grew up in the ’80s still hold up many cartoons and action shows as cultural icons.

I’m not going to say that isn’t happening now, because nothing ever really stops happening. But it does strike me that it’s less common for a show that started in the ’00s to continue to be really, really famous after it’s over. More common is something like Lost, which seemed to fade away almost as soon as it ended. Even 24, the ’00s show that probably had the most cultural impact, seemed to lose its heat after it ended or maybe even a little bit before; unlike Sex and the City, it hasn’t even been able to spin off a movie version yet.

Of course, Lost and 24 and other serialized shows have the usual disadvantage in keeping themselves in the public eye: they don’t syndicate well, whereas something like SATC does Continue…

Hawaii 5-0's "Danno" dies

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 5:32 PM - 0 Comments

Actor James MacArthur, best known for his role as Jack Lord’s sidekick Danny on the long-running TV series Hawaii 5-0, has died at the age of 72. MacArthur, the son of playwright Charles MacArthur (The Front Page) and adopted son of actress Helen Hayes, had a forty-year acting career that included a great deal of work in films and stage, including a number of live-action films for Walt Disney. But his greatest success was on television, where his supporting role on Hawaii 5-0 gave him eleven years of employment (he left the show before its final season). His character was best known for being the recipient of Lord’s catchphrase “Book ‘em, Danno.” MacArthur was reportedly considering a guest appearance on the current remake of Hawaii 5-0 before he died.

Telegraph

Kicking television

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 1:41 PM - 0 Comments

Ken Dryden laments for the squawk box.

“When interaction is based on punchlines, we get nowhere,” Dryden says. He cites the example of the political panels on TV, in which partisans are seen to excel if they hold their ground and repeat their talking points until the segment is over.

“The only meaning that comes across is the conflict. What’s the message of that five-minute interaction between five people? It doesn’t have to do with the subject; it has to do with the conflict.”

When your dinner guests are out to get you

By Jacob Richler - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

‘You take wildly different people who would never meet and put them in a room and see what happens,’ says a show insider | W NETWORK

Deep in Mississauga, Ont., on a balmy September evening, a two-camera television production crew, four dinner guests, a handful of producers, PR flacks and other interested observers (well, me) sat huddled in virtual silence in a cramped basement apartment, while over in the kitchenette, a vivacious, blond woman named Cathy struggled to assert control over some defeatingly bouncy scallops.

When she at last wrestled them onto her square black dishes, she looked up at the nearest camera in triumph—but only briefly—for as she did so she caught sight of a neglected bottle sitting on top of the fridge. An overlooked ingredient? No, it was just the badly needed wine, which Cathy had evidently been keeping all to herself, while over at the dinner table her guests struggled with conversation unassisted. Even baseball wasn’t working (“Alex Rodriguez . . . he plays for the Blue Jays, right?”). So Cathy materialized to nervously splash some lubricating red plonk into four, thoughtfully chilled stemmed water glasses. Yes, into the frozen water glasses. But this was not a mistake on which to dwell. It was time to serve her appetizer—“the salty sea,” crusted scallops served with cucumber salad—and, according to my watch anyway, they were already stone cold and then some.

Continue…