(Untitled)

[bookcat]

here are two incredibly rambling comments I have left on blogs this evening, both of which in a roundabout way address issues of television and fandom:

On The Perks of Being Adapted into a Film at Thought Catalog:It's not just with marginalized groups, necessarily--look at the way nerdy Americans react when the US adapts British TV, or the way

Comments

[avenuef]

If you think Mad Men is targeted toward men, you have clearly never watched the ads that AMC airs during its commercial breaks.

Also, aren't most network sitcoms geared toward women? I'm thinking of romantic comedies like How I Met Your Mother and...I can't name any other multi-camera network sitcoms, but you know, the ones in the style of Friends.

Also, Desperate Housewives is still on the air??!!

[bookcat]

I have indeed never watched Mad Men with commercials in, _but_ the reason I stopped watching is because it was just so uncomfortably manly, I literally felt the vaguely repulsed feeling when I smell certain dudes at the gym who have a lot of testosterone, it just made me cringe and want to leave. Very subjective experience though, so just pretend I said "Breaking Bad" instead (that has to be aimed at dudes, it's about chemistry and drugs and cancer and fatherhood, right

[avenuef]

A thought: without any research or statistics to back me up, I would guess that most TV shows try to err on the side of women, simply because women spend more money than men do, and there are more products to advertise to them. I mean, that's why soap operas are called soap operas -- they're vehicles for household-cleaning-product advertisements aimed at housewives. (This is also why "women's fiction" is such a blockbuster literary genre, and why mainstream literary fiction is usually geared more toward women: only women buy books!)

[bookcat]

so here's an even more global overview of what I am trying to get at: what I want is for tv advertisers to stop segmenting the market on man versus woman and start basing it on more sophisticated models like the internet uses; but I didn't actually say it because I know that the logical conclusion of that is that we have to give up more privacy/information and that's often something people are unhappy about, and also I don't think they have the infrastructure to, and don't know if they have the capacity to, send out different TV feeds based on any criteria other than geographic location. Maybe via satellite?

I honestly don't know what I'm talking about, but I do know that for several years comedy central played the same 3 minute girls gone wild commercial twice an hour after one am. I do not know if it still happens because I have a computer now. anyway, I found it annoying as shit.

[agnes_bean]

Actually, here's a thing that I think I learned once: Advertisers LOVE the young men 18-34 group. TV stations long to find programs that do well in that demo. They try and try and try, but they keep only succeeding with sports.

So, I don't really know quite how that relates to this convo, but interesting fact.