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The Guardian asks: Is the golden age of television over?
Money is the root of TV's problems. In the US, where the TV economy is headquartered, TV and internet access costs two to three times what it does in the UK, and networks are in a tug-of-war with Americans, who are increasingly shredding steep cable bills in favor of Netflix and streaming services. This summer, many networks became locked in all-out legal battles with cash-strapped cable companies, with multibillion-dollar distribution deals at stake to fund those networks' huge programming budgets.
Executives are planning for a less luxurious future, in which TV shows may be briefer, lower-budget and filled with the kind of product-placement ads that audiences hate and advertisers pay for. Worse still, the company that started much of the trouble may soon confront flaws in its own business model.
Netflix reports earnings on Monday. Its problems, and those of companies like it, are more pressing than those of traditional television. At a conference in New York this month, chief executive Reed Hastings was blunt.
"Disney, who is very good in China, had their movie service shut down," he told an audience at the New Yorker Tech Fest. "Apple, who is very good in China, had their movie service closed down. It doesn't look good."
Hastings said his company was seeking to expand in other countries, India in particular. But there's a reason media businesses seeking vast scale tend to view China as the solution to all their problems: internet penetration in India is rising from 26% according to the World Bank. In China, it's rising from 50%.
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Netflix needs the money that increased scale would provide, in part, to pay top dollar for shows such as Arrested Development and Lost. In January, it told investors it owed $10.9bn in TV show licenses alone, with $4.7bn of that due this year. After that, almost the entire balance is due before the end of 2018.
Netflix will have to keep buying reruns at what will almost certainly be increasing rates if it wants to retain its users, and the companies selling those shows are now in a tight spot too – largely thanks to the ad-free Netflix model.
At US television networks, budget struggles mean making shows more as UK networks do, except with lots of ads and product placement: shorter lifespans, fewer sets and special effects, fewer episodes per series – and then little margin for error if shows look like they're failing early on.
Netflix cannot scale back. Its viewers pay for it outright and express their displeasure by canceling subscriptions, not by changing the channel. If anything, its executives are spending more: Baz Luhrmann's 1970s New York period piece, The Get Down, came with a record price tag for a service that had already driven up the cost of new scripts: $120m for 12 episodes, according to Variety.
In short, television content is expensive. With fewer people watching, the advertisers are getting fed up with paying the premiums the television networks ask for, and people aren't willing to pay the real price required for good television content. Unless something changes soon, expect cheaper television shows with shorter seasons and lots of product placements within the shows.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @08:26AM
"I believe he means television, sir. That particular form of entertainment did not last much beyond the year two thousand forty."
In 1988, it was a cheap shot at TV, but this humorously self deprecating televised prediction of the demise of television is beginning to come true. In the future of Star Trek, ordinary Federation citizens seek entertainment primarily through virtual reality in the form of interactive holonovels, pornographic holosuites, or simulated vacation trips. Even today in the present, video games are becoming more like interactive movies, and ubiquitous social media provides constant distraction, to such a degree that traditional passive scripted entertainment is numbingly dull to trendy socialites. Not to me though. Call me Barclay, I've always been an antisocial loser. Gonna go watch some TV.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday October 18 2016, @12:31PM
Oh boy unleash the star trek nerdiness debates everyone put on asbestos.
First of all the 2040s in cannon were roughly around the WW3 end of civilization thingy, think Kahn and his buddies and first warp drive flight wasn't till 2063 so things were pretty Fed up.
A cheap shot example would be the death of baseball predicted I believe in DS9 where they have the trends correct but the dates all wrong. Major league baseball does not have much longer; the fans are literally dying out.
I suspect TV and baseball will never die of course it'll just drop from being a national obsession to a minor cottage industry like polo or sailing. How do you stop a bunch of kids with a ball and bat in a park. Or how do you stop a dude with a video camera and some video podcasting inspirations.
The citizens practically never did holodeck anything. Look at the ratio of people to decks. And sometimes the decks were used for training or were broken. A good analogy would be an orchestra. My little city has 100K people and seating for 200 people and about ten concerts per year. Its gonna take 50 years to cycle all the citizens thru a concert. For all practical purposes people where I live do not have a symphony although for bragging rights we certainly do have an itty bitty semi-volunteer one. Likewise the average fed citizen might visit a holodeck once in their lives, maybe. Probably the script required this. It would be too culturally weird for viewers to handle if every elementary school room was a holodeck or every crew quarters had one. Needless to say rank has its privileges and much like orchestra attendance skews a bit upper class its no surprised that commander so and so or LT so and so gets more holo time than random red shirt dude.
The real killer of TV is lack of creativity because risk is extremely expensive. Much like video games which also mostly suck being incredibly risk adverse they're all ripoffs of WWII FPS or something like GTA:The 99th Sequel. Much like every entrepreneur-loser in my city had to simultaneously open their own froyo restaurant at he same time such that they all failed by flooding the market, then repeat with fancy cupcakes and pirate stores and candle stores and scrapbooking stores and the idiocy probably goes back in time a lot further. TV is the same, there's only a couple stupid stories that can get funded today, and once the viewers are tired of them, theres not much to watch. If you avoid the FCC by not broadcasting you can go degenerate and add over the top amounts of sex and/or violence and/or language, but that only helps a little. Its like top 40 music, which is stable selling to 13-25 year old girls so it'll never die and we'll never get anything better as long as theres a consistent supply of youth ready to be sold the same old crap. Its likely that TV will settle into a small niche and never leave it. Probably the niche will be sportsball bros with a side dish of potboiler womens soap operas.
Its possible that given enough time generational changes will occur in TV. For a couple decades its been all cop shows with a peppering of laywers and docs have been in decline since the 90s, and there's an undercurrent of a tiny handful of teacher/high school dramas. However I could see as an experiment something like westerns coming back. Or non-progressive message focused dramas (think like, lassie, or waltons, or little house on the prairie, at least mostly). We have an overdose for decades of cop shows, not so much detective. I don't watch much TV but I'm under the impression there were like ten wartime vietnam shows ranging from drama to comedy in the 80s and there's nothing military now that I'm aware of. Just a generation ago it feels like there was a year when there were three simultaneous trek shows and maybe ten knockoff sci fi wanna be shows, nothing I know of now.
Something interesting to think about WRT length of shows is I kinda like a half hour to a couple hours. What I don't like is a hundred episodes. I am a busy dude and I just don't have time to sit thru 70+ episodes of the Sopranos to catch up on what was good. I tried to watch B5, I really did, but people telling me I had to sit thru 25 hours of filler before it starts getting good are not exactly encouraging me. Maybe the "modern world" needs more mini-series and less hundred episode series. I watched some of the "breaking bad" and strongly got the feeling they had a killer miniseries in there, then they got 100 episodes signed and the shark jumping commenced, that series should have been about 10 hours long at most.
(Score: 1) by Oakenshield on Tuesday October 18 2016, @01:26PM
Baseball will eventually evolve into blernsball sometime around the year 3000. Fry, Leela and the gang go to games all the time. In fact, Leela once pitched for a blernsball team.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday October 18 2016, @02:11PM
https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/3aajfy/how_much_holodeck_time_can_i_have_on_the/ [reddit.com]
Top comment:
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(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 18 2016, @04:00PM
Yeah interesting observation.
One cultural thing I saw that's worth speculating about for MMORPGs or multiplayer FPS or some future virtual reality is a least on trek groups always did innocent hangout parties (lets have a picnic lunch!) and more serious "we can charge this to the .gov under mission contract 1234" work was all alone when they'd simulate a warp drive and debug it and the third category was single dude meets green skinned orion slave girl or whatever insinuation.
I wonder if that was accidental or if the writers consciously thought that up, that privately paid credits or allocation was invariably group party time but "we're gonna charge this to the federation as official business" invariably was one dude working alone.
Yeah yeah I know American 90s culture was (is) that everyone's an extreme extrovert and introverts are just malfunctioning extroverts but I was surprised even dudes who meditate never seemed to meditate or whatever on a holodeck (maybe its expensive and when your eyes are closed your quarters are adequate for Vulcan meditation, I donno)
Honestly I'm surprised they ever did any training at all outside the holodeck, seems like it would have been ideal for, well, everything.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday October 18 2016, @05:54PM
Yeah, it seems like Engineering could have had its own dedicated holodeck. Even if there wasn't an important training session/experiment they could let new crewmen go through a few failure scenarios and eject the core or something.
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @05:52PM
I tried to watch B5, I really did
I can not blame you on that. Part of B5 at the time was the build up (the hype echos on to this day). The wait 'what are they going to do next episode'. Now? You can find out very quickly its probably the next one on the disc. Many times it is not that good. The whole thing is good. But individually most are very mediocre.
The story kinda still holds up. But the sets and effects do not hold up as much. Until they do that time travel episode the show is kinda creaky and 'ok'. Then it picks up from there and does not stop until the second to last episode in season 4. However, that the ending was rushed in season 4 shows. It was hand wavy and 'blah blah blah' done. Then woopsee we jumped the shark and have another season to deliver. They did OK but it was not as good. During its original run I missed 1 episode. Nothing made sense for 5 episodes after that until someone told me the plot of that episode.
SG1 still holds up. But it is a monster to watch. But it usually has a bit of humor in each episode to keep it fun. You can usually jump in anywhere and be mildly entertained.
Andromeda started off strong. It had an unfortunate lead actor and people skipped it because of his previous show but he actually did very well in it. But by season 3-4 it was starting to creak under its own story/mythos weight. Season 5 was pretty cool being one complete story.
If you want to watch a cop show watch columbo or dragnet. They are self contained and usually if you miss things you will still be up to date on what is going on.
In many ways the story arc is kind of cool but tends to make the individual stories not as good. Also many shows have decided to have a bunch of preachy messagey stuff in it. I watch this to get AWAY from that sort of thing. Not to double down on it. Some people like that and it is why those shows do well. I personally give it a skip.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday October 18 2016, @06:39PM
Andromeda started off strong. It had an unfortunate lead actor and people skipped it because of his previous show but he actually did very well in it. But by season 3-4 it was starting to creak under its own story/mythos weight. Season 5 was pretty cool being one complete story.
Unfortunately they fired the showrunner after season 1 episode 22, then the story kind of wobbled away from where it started. You can generally draw a line through "Ouroboros" and consider before and after as separate canons.
Robert Hewitt Wolfe released a script [cyberspace5.net] online of what his original series finale would have been, and we really missed out :-(
The horribly existentialist fifth season was highly allegorical and generally didn't make any sense, and at the very end they popped back to the end of season 4. Argh!
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday October 18 2016, @06:46PM
Er, sorry--season *2* episode 22. So when you say "by season 3-4 it was starting to creak under its own story/mythos weight" I blame that on the replacement showrunner not really understanding half of what RHW was trying to do in the story. There are a lot of plot threads from those first two seasons that never end up leading anywhere.
The machine collective Harper was supposed to join, Trance story that only sort of half-happened, the futuristic cyborg version of Beka they ran into, the isolated Commonwealth planet that survived the fall and they dropped by like 3 times ever, etc.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 19 2016, @12:32PM
Also many shows have decided to have a bunch of preachy messagey stuff in it.
Yes the famous "prog-trek" thing where you can tell progressive ideology at the time of filming pretty easily. Goes back to the days of the first on TV interracial kiss on TOS, although technically as a fictional work I believe Kirk had banged several other species before he kissed a different colored human.
Sometimes that makes old soft sci fi hard to watch. The whole point of the episode was around kissing a black chick and you're not going to get the full effect, not get any effect really, unless you're in Mississippi in the 60s. Think of that classic screen cap of the cross dressing trans dude in a skirt in movie 1 or was it the first episode of TNG (doesn't really matter) the point being that was a major effect that will be missed.
Maybe an analogy as imagine if the special effects were so legacy/old you couldn't figure out the story. Nothing is that bad but imagine it for a bit. And in that context Kirk kissing a black chick is kinda like a special effect that is just going to blow right by 2016-culture people.
I suppose the whole essay above is kinda a justification for why very soft sci fi probably has to be remade every decade or so, whereas hard sci fi is cool for eternity, so thats why people mistakenly think soft sci fi is more popular because there's more churn in the "SJW narrative with a cut and replace setting change on Mars".
For example stranger in a strange land really needs a remake because "Hippies misadventures in Texas in '67 cut and paste thinly reskinned as sci fi" has gone beyond obsolete and beyond entertainingly campy to WTFs-ville. I mean, that book was part of the cannon of "Science Fiction Literature" academic classes in the 80s, I know because I was there... abut now a days my son thinks the characters are so weird and so far from 2016s culture that its easier to understand the culture and people of The Hobbit than SIASL. Or at least I haven't tried torturing him with the Silmarillian yet. Which isn't actually all that bad book other than perhaps defining high density. Like I remember WTFing at some higher math books for a few hours in school but eventually I figured all that out, unlike the Silmarillian.
I'm kinda motivated in my infinite spare time to re-read SIASL again and see if its as bad as I remember. Hard to believe the same dude wrote The Moon is a Harsh Mistress which still rocks decades later. I think generally Heinlein was a genius with the except of any time he tried to write a hippie into his books it just didn't work, like his typewriter was made of pure anti-hippie-ium.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday October 18 2016, @09:23PM
Oh boy unleash the star trek nerdiness debates everyone put on asbestos.
First of all the 2040s in cannon were roughly around the WW3 end of civilization thingy, think Kahn and his buddies and first warp drive flight wasn't till 2063 so things were pretty Fed up.
A cheap shot example would be the death of baseball predicted I believe in DS9 where they have the trends correct but the dates all wrong.
I'm a very long-time Trekkie, but definitely not to the level of obsessiveness of some people. One thing you need to realize about Star Trek is that it isn't entirely consistent in its "universe" and has a lot of errors. Just look at TOS: for the whole first season, there was no "Federation"; they ran around calling themselves "United Earth Ship Enterprise". Then at some point, there was magically this "federation of planets". Kahn and his buddies were supposed to happen way back in the 1990s in the "Eugenics Wars", and were supposed to leave the planet shortly after that. None of those guys look like they're under 20, so supposedly they must have been born in the late 1970s! DS9 and VOY were already airing in the mid/late 90s, and ENT came out in the mid-2000s, well after this.
In short, you need to take historical references in ST with a giant bowl of salt. They made up some silliness about Colonel Green and the Eugenics Wars back in the TOS episodes (probably season 2, ~1967), when it was just a silly low-budget TV show that no one had any idea would become a cultural icon for the next half-century, because Gene wanted to warn people about things like eugenics or whatever. Then, a quarter-century later with spin-off shows like TNG, they're doing their best to try to not completely ignore the backstory, but there was only so much they could do, and the writers didn't comb through every single old episode and piece together a detailed timeline to make sure they wouldn't make a mistake.
As for modern TV, I can't help you there, except to recommend Game of Thrones. It's really the only thing I watch (and of course I have to wait until next April to see the last season, so right now I don't watch anything at all). I've really lost interest in TV; I have too many other interesting things to do with my time, and I can't often find people who want to watch stuff with me anyway (except GoT--it seems everyone loves that one).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @05:22AM
Here is the great thing about fiction. If there is an inconsistency they can make something up and wave it away.
Take for example the throw away line from doctor who with 12 regeneration. It turned into this mythos. How did they get around it? They made something up and the show goes on.