birthday greetings & some general TV comments

[stellaluna_]

Happy birthday to laguera25, and happy slightly belated birthday to jillibean!

I hope you both have, or have had, wonderful days and much joy.

So out of all the new network shows I've sampled so far this season, the only one I've ended up adding a season pass for is Pushing Daisies. Everything else has failed to hold my attention, and since I'm always pretty

Comments

[webbgirl]

This is really interesting because my roommate and I were just talking about this last night during Ugly Betty.

There seems to be a dynamic change happening in television right now. You see networks that are a lot more itchy with the trigger finger, but yet willing to green light projects that make me completely WTF?

A lot of the ones that seem bright and shiny as an initial concept are almost doomed to failure by the fact that they're trying to do a finite story over a hopefully (on their part) non-finite period of time. The whole "Lost" phenomenon seems like it was a limited deal. Audiences aren't going to stick around in the long run for continuing story-arcs with no conclusions whatsoever.

Then there's the attempts at split seasons. The September to May dynamic is so ingrained into the American Viewing public that this may be a bit of a hard sell. Plus, it will require changing how ratings are viewed and calculated.

Sorry to ramble, but I find this kind of stuff fascinating too.

I need to check and see if my roommate's copy of the Hollywood Reporter is still around at home after work. *g*

[stellaluna_]

It really is a fascinating subject. I never understood all that went into interpreting ratings and how to break them down until a good friend of mine, who started off her career in network research at one of the Big Three, explained it to me and gave me some idea of everything that goes into the process. I still don't get all the numbers, but I learned enough from her to become enthralled by it.

This dynamic change is what really interests me these days -- like you mention, that itchy trigger finger plus the ever-increasing number of WTF projects. I wonder if all that is connected to the same reasons for the panicked reactions to ratings erosion and the unpredictable shifts in viewing patterns. No one knows what's going on anymore, execs don't know what audiences want or how they're watching, and they're just throwing anything at the wall to see what sticks.

The serialized drama is also a really good point, and Lost is a perfect example of that. It works as a finite story, but because it's network, they can't just say "We're going to tell this in 26 episodes over two seasons, then we're done." I kind of would like to see what would happen if not only did the nets start to break away from the September-May schedule, but took another page from the cable model, and started doing some shows with shorter seasons of 13 episodes each -- and maybe even an eye toward treating some of them *as* finite shows.

...Yes, I ramble too. I really do like this topic.