Category: TV

Pareene pummels CNN:

According to the sort of people for whom CNN’s ratings woes reflect a moral failing of the American people as opposed to a series of boneheaded decisions by CNN executives, CNN is posting its worst ratings in 20 years because people only want to watch biased news that they agree with, and they no longer care about Original Reporting and Unbiased Fact-Based Journalism. In reality, CNN is failing because CNN sucks. It doesn’t fill its daylight hours with hard-hitting reporting from far-flung locales, it fills it with Wolf Blitzer sputtering softballs at politicians followed by shouting partisans (from both sides!) having idiotic arguments. For hours. 

Felix Salmon piles on:

TV news is ultimately much more an arm of the entertainment industry than it is of the news industry. Its star anchors get paid millions of dollars because they’re popular on TV, not because of their reporting skills; and while the occasional news magazine program will sometimes break news, newspapers and websites have always been the undisputed leaders on that front.

Are the old and the uneducated:

Children may be stereotyped as rotting their brains with too much TV, but actually the time spent in front of the tube generally rose steadily with age. … Additionally, the less educated you are, the more TV you watched on the average day last year. Americans with college degrees spent 1.76 hours watching television on the average weekday, whereas high school dropouts spent an average of 3.78 hours per weekday.

(Chart from Derek Thompson)

A reader writes:

What always struck me about Sorkin's writing was the pace of delivery. When most of us interact, we hear something, process it, develop a response, and say it. A Sorkin protagonist's response is fully formed on the tip of the actor's tongue, waiting for the conversational foil to serve the set-up. The characters seem impossibly intelligent because while the rest of us mortals are still processing the call, the protagonist is already delivering the response.

Another focuses on "The Newsroom":

I did not have high hopes after reading the reviews last week. But after watching the first episode, I have to say that the show is not nearly as bad as the reviews would suggest, and I am wondering why journalists have been so critical of the show. 

I agree with some of the critiques; the characters are preachy and this is probably not an accurate portrayal of cable news journalism. However, the characters in "The West Wing" were pretty preachy and the media tended to let that slide. Could all of the negative reaction stem from the fact that the press knows that it isn't doing a very good job?

On that note, another reader passes along a passage from Noah Gittel's review of the new show's first episode:

"The West Wing" was, of course, a liberal response to Clinton’s move to the center. Many episodes literally recast his decisions while in office, with President Bartlett doing what liberals wish Clinton had done in that situation. It seems that "The Newsroom" is up to the same tricks.

In tonight’s episode, Sorkin replayed the first day of the BP oil spill and showed us the kind of reporting that he wished he had seen. But this is more than liberal wish fulfillment. When Sorkin reveals what news story they are covering, I felt like I had been hit in the gut. I realized that I had not thought about the spill in probably a year. In the midst of a presidential campaign, with its attack ads, surrogate drama, and politically motivated executive orders, it was as if – in my mind – the biggest environmental disaster in American history had not happened just two years ago. This was amazing to me. I consider myself an environmentalist and an animal advocate. And I had forgotten that this occurred.

And that’s exactly Sorkin’s point. By replaying major recent events – and covering them right this time – he is shining a light on the disastrously poor state of journalism today.

Alyssa Rosenberg differs:

The thing that I find genuinely disturbing about The Newsroom is its narrow identification of cable news as the problem and Will McAvoy as the solution. Cable news polarization is a problem, but it’s a problem that ultimately effects a fairly small number of Americans day to day and year to year. The larger problems are ones that affect all sorts of news programs and publications: shrinking staffs and budgets that support less-ambitious reporting, government secrecy and control of information, increasingly stultified and PR-controlled interviews that decrease the possibility of honest conversation and homogenize reporting. Tone and presentation are issues that float on top of this sea of larger challenges.

NSFW:

A reader writes:

I find Todd VanDerWerff's comments severely lacking. "The Sopranos" and "Arrested Development" are hardly the only two good models for television. The elephant in Mr. VanDerWerff's piece is "The Wire". That series followed no frame or conventional TV show structure and is more comparable to a novel than anything seen before. 

Mr. VanDerWerff claims that non-comedic TV is "serialized drama – often on cable – that probes the darkest limits of the human experience and has a bad-boy protagonist". This would be a pathetic description of what "The Wire" depicts in Baltimore. It's drama and certainly probes the darkness, but it has no protagonist. It is not about one person, but many. It reveals the tapestry created by the many threads of life woven together in a community. It also goes far behind the white sensibilities that Mr. VanDerWerff claims permeate all good TV shows these days. It is a cliche to say that the decisions of one life affect others and we have responsibilities to each other, but watching "The Wire" I was struck by the fact that the show moves beyond the cliches and shows us the real faces and lives.

Paula Marantz Cohen, an English professor at Drexel University, describes why she taught an undergraduate course on "The Wire":

Joseph Conrad famously proclaimed his goal as "above all, to make you see." Conrad was aiming to do this, of course, "by the power of the written word." Movies and television may seem too attached to literal seeing to make Conrad’s conceptual "seeing" seem relevant. But a show like The Wire is an exception. It requires you to follow closely a complex plot and the often oblique, slang-ridden, and profanity-soaked language. It means determining where a character is feigning or authentic, where a storyline involves foreshadowing and where it is false or cheesy (very little in The Wire is). In this way the show is a literary work. Indeed, the quality of seeing—how rich and contradictory this is with respect to characters’ motives and the implications of their actions—becomes an index for how good the work is, regardless of the medium.

Like Emily Nussbaum, Alan Sepinwall finds Sorkin's The Newsroom wanting:

His shows are vehicles for entertainment — at his best, Sorkin is on the short list of the most purely entertaining storytellers this medium has ever known — but they are also vehicles for Sorkin's ideals about how the world should be, how often it falls short of those ideals, and how noble it is to keep trying to make them into a reality.

Sorkin claims to be politically unsophisticated:

All of my training and experience and education has been in playwriting. I have no political sophistication or media sophistication, so if I was talking to Howard Kurtz or you, you could easily dismantle whatever argument I’m going to make. It is a layman’s amateur argument. Oftentimes, I write about people who are smarter than I am and know more than I do, and I am able to do that simply by being tutored almost phonetically, sometimes. I’m used to it. I grew up surrounded by people who are smarter than I am, and I like the sound of intelligence. I can imitate that sound, but it’s not organic. It’s not intelligence. It’s my phonetic ability to imitate the sound of intelligence.

Alyssa Rosenberg counters:

Sorkin insists he’s just an artist, he doesn’t have anything sophisticated to say, even though the animating subject for a huge chunk of his career has been critiques of the media. He can’t have it both ways.

Emily Nussbaum pans the latest Sorkin:

"The Newsroom" is the inverse of "Veep": it’s so naïve it’s cynical. Sorkin’s fantasy is of a cabal of proud, disdainful brainiacs, a "media élite" who swallow accusations of arrogance and shoot them back as lava. But if the storytelling were more confident, it could take a breath and deliver drama, not just talking points. Instead, the deck stays stacked. Whenever McAvoy delivers a speech or slices up a right-winger, the ensemble beams at him, their eyes glowing as if they were cultists.

Todd VanDerWerff questions our artistic standards for the small screen:

We have a very particular idea about what makes "good" TV in this age of episodic online reviews. "Good" TV is either a single-camera sitcom filled with pop-culture references or moments of pathos (ideally both), or a serialized drama—often on cable—that probes the darkest limits of the human experience and has a bad-boy protagonist. In essence, we’ve created a world where the only two shows that can be copied to make good TV are Arrested Development and The Sopranos. 

There’s nothing wrong with this, actually. Copying those two shows has resulted in a lot of great series. … But copying those two shows has also resulted in a narrow TV palette, a limited series of colors to draw from when constructing the next "great" TV show. These series tend to have sensibilities that are very white and masculine, largely because they’re all created by white males, and, hey, write what you know. 

Alyssa Rosenberg nods.

Andrew Palmer has watched a decade of The Bachelor(ette) and confesses in earnestness that the show has "taught me as much about myself and the world as all other TV shows and Edmund Spenser combined":

No TV show is sadder than The Bachelor(ette). I think we can say that after these ten years. It’s not just the commodification of love, though there’s that. It goes beyond all those shots of men and women alone on balconies, leaning on railings, gazing into the distance, wondering about where they fit in the world.

We enter every season ready to laugh and have fun. There are drinking games. We know better than to believe these people will find love. But then, usually around the fourth or fifth episode, provided the Bachelor(ette) is sincere-seeming enough ("It really can work," says Emily, "you just have to be open to it"), we start to wonder if maybe these people might, in some meaningful sense of the word, actually be falling in love—a love less real than the love we’ve known, premised as theirs so obviously is on self-delusion and cliché and the conventions of society and reality television (stale dichotomy), but love nonetheless. … I challenge you to watch all of season 15 of The Bachelor and not believe that both Emily and Brad feel their love is real, which can be the only measure of love’s reality.

A professor who specializes in media history writes:

You linked to an article that is so incorrect on the history of the broadcast television season that I can't let it go. It sounds perfectly reasonable that the auto industry ran early TV – but it's completely inaccurate. The original television season was wholly adapted from the traditional radio broadcast season, which had been in existence for two decades by 1948-9 when television first exploded.

That season generally ended in June and started the first week of October. The classic radio and early TV season – 39 weeks, with 13 weeks off for the summer – was adapted from the traditional vaudeville season. In the summer, before movie theaters got air conditioning, it was just too hot over much of America (and farm workers were just too tired) to have the vaudeville circuits running at full steam. The summer is when the second-stringers went into the near-empty theaters (if they even stayed open) while the stars rested in various vaudeville beach colonies. The great radio comedian Fred Allen wrote extensively about both the connection between the vaudeville, radio, and TV broadcasting seasons in his two classic autobiographies, Treadmill to Oblivion and Much Ado About Me.

The author's statements about automobiles dominating early TV advertising to such an extent that they set the parameters of the broadcast season makes zeros sense in other ways. For example, here are the sponsors of the 15 top-rated broadcasts in 1950-1: Texaco, Proctor & Gamble, Philco, Admiral, Colgate, Gillette, General Mills, Lipton Tea, Sunbeam Bread, Maxwell House Coffee, Lucky Strike Cigarettes (two programs), RJ Reynolds Tobacco, Kraft Food products, and, finally, in 15th place, the only car company – Lincoln Mercury. Auto advertising came late to TV – the most important sponsors in early TV were selling low-cost, everyday use, items: household cleaners, foodstuffs, personal care products, and cigarettes. This is very well-established by media historians.

A reader responds to another who bemoans the loss of ESPN after canceling his cable subscription:

There are two very good options for watching streaming ESPN content. One is the Watch ESPN app, which is restricted to a handful of Internet service providers. I've never used it and am unsure of content restrictions. The other is the ESPN Live via XBox Live. It is not full content (no Sportscenter or Monday Night Football) but I have watched every ESPN network broadcast game played by my favorite college football team via this app. Streaming live or viewed on replay. One could augment that with an MLBTV subscription with an XBOX app coming soon. I'm sure NBATV will be soon to follow. NFL is the difficult one. I chose to go with NFL GameRewind. There's no convenient porting to my television (ie an XBOX, Roku, or Apple TV app) and it's watching everything after the fact, but it serves my purpose.

By the way, according to our unscientific survey of Dish readers, 29% of you have "cut the cable" and 66% of you are sports fans. Another writes:

"Eventually, I would suppose that ESPN would wise up to the fact that they are sitting one of the most valuable assets in the cable package and look for ways to offer their product to streaming viewers on a stand-alone subscription basis." That's exactly what won't happen.

ESPN already has plans to do to Internet service what the content have done to cable. They are blocking access to ESPN3 streaming content and forcing Internet companies to pay a per-online subscriber fee to unblock streaming access. There is no option for individual subscribers to purchase access and there is unlikely to ever be one – it is a much more successful business model to force consumers who don't use your product to pay for it.

Earlier this year, they dipped their toes into exclusive content with their first Badger football game being exclusive to ESPN3. It was a minor game and we received only a couple calls, but of course their hope was to start adding pressure to ISPs to pay the fee to allow access to their content. By resisting any pressure to buy into their Internet content agreement,  I will fight this effort of ABC/Disney and other content companies to ruin Internet like they have cable TV. But frankly it will probably take an act of Congress to stop it if they find financial success in this near extortion tactic. Is it actually starting to dawn on people that there are layers of evil beyond the cable company that make their television services so expensive? Is anyone clued into the potential threat to the Internet posed by these content companies?