"So what about TV, Jay? That going away too?"
Reload your snacks, this'll take a while.
And I'm glossing over a lot.
Still, there's a shitload of history that's relevant.
I know some of you think broadcast TV is what sports bars show because they don't have streaming, but it's the foundation of a lot of this. And a lot of the legacy code for it is based on the premise that Leave it to Beaver is real.
TV, like it's older cousin radio, began as a sponsored business.
Given that the airwaves are considered a public good, anyone can watch broadcast TV for free.
You buy the TV, of course, but watching broadcast doesn't cost you anything.
(And no, that's not a universal thing. Places like the UK charge an annual tax for every TV in your home and fund the BBC with it. Anyways...)
Although licensed by the government, broadcast channels sell commercial time as their product.
I'm talking about ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and the CW.
(PBS is also broadcast, but it's a publicly funded nonprofit and operates differently. No, I won't be elaborating).
Shows broadcast on these networks exist to keep you watching until the next commercial.
Period.
That is the be-all and end-all of their existence.
If they make good art? Great.
But they gotta sell the time.
So how do they figure out what to charge?
You always hear about how Super Bowl commercials cost a stupid amount of money, right?
They do it by determining roughly who's watching TV and when.
A shitload of people watch the Super Bowl, ergo, commercial time there brings in top dollar.
This is usually broken down by gender and age in what we traditionally call ratings. The formula gets complicated and has changed over time, but it's easiest to explain with our Leave it to Beaver model.
Imagine a prototypical suburban WASP family, led by Walter and Wendy Whitebread.
He's in middle management, she's a homemaker.
They have two kids, Wally and Wilma.
On a typical school day, there might be a news segment or there might be a kid's program starting around 6AM.
By 9AM, Walter's off to work and the kids are in school, which means from 9AM-3PM, if anyone's watching TV, it's Wendy.
So shows scheduled then are aimed at her: soap operas, game shows, daytime talk, and so on.
At 3PM, the kids are back, so there's usually something aimed at them, which could be something wholesome for the family, or it could be a glorified toy commercial.
Walter works 9-5, so he's home by 6, just in time for the news.
(Remember "film at 11?" News footage used to be on film, which had to be processed. So the 6PM news would comment on it and the 11PM news would expand on it with the newly processed footage.)
Then comes 7-9PM, or Prime Time.
Everybody's watching, so commercial buyers are paying a premium.
By 10PM, the kids are in bed, so there's some adult-oriented drama, news at 11, and maybe a late night talk show around midnight.
Back in the day, stations didn't broadcast 24-7. But by the 80's, late night and early morning was a good spot to run old movies and reruns so you could at least sell something.
Prime time was 7-9PM, Sunday night through Thursday night.
It's assumed everyone was doing other things Friday and Saturday nights.
Friday prime time was a common dumping ground for unpopular shows, called the Friday night death slot.
The rest of the week would be arranged similar: cartoons for the kids on Saturday morning, religious programming before noon on Sundays, with movies and sports interspersed on the weekends.
That's the typical school day. The year is set up similar.
Notice how old TV shows usually had twenty-odd episodes a season?
There's a reason for that.
A TV year (called a season, though it lasts all year) typically starts around Labor Day.
You used to hear ads for "the new fall lineup."
Favorite shows from last year would be back with new seasons, while new shows would debut, chasing the audiences.
Back at the studio, these shows would begin filming the second half of the season, taking notes from the executives who carefully watched the ratings.
This would go on until Thanksgiving or so, when shows started being preempted for sports and holiday specials. (Not too big an issue, it's the holidays, people weren't watching as much)
At the same time, the suits start deciding which shows they want to renew for a new season, which ones they're considering dropping, and which pilots they want to see.
In some cases, they'll cancel a show during the holidays and replace it with a show they passed on last year, what's called a midseason replacement.
(Buffy was a midseason replacement. That's why the first season is so much shorter than the others.)
When a network hears a show pitched, it can do one of three things: pass entirely, order an entire season, or order a pilot.
Pilots are commissioning a prototype or a dealer sample: when you're intrigued, but not convinced by the paper alone.
January through early March is traditionally pilot season, when new pilots are shot and shown.
It's an exciting time for actors, as being cast as a regular on a show can be both lucrative and stable as we'll see later.
Pilots that are greenlit to become shows are added to that year's fall lineup, and start filming the first half of the season in the spring.
For audiences, the spring operates much like the fall.
They see the second half of the season, and the season (and in some cases, series) finales all show around Memorial Day.
The summer, it's assumed viewership is down.
So reruns of episodes from the previous season are usually shown, and a hiatus lets the suits and the productions enjoy a bit of a vacation too.
Then in September the new fall lineup debuts and it starts all over again.
Twenty-odd episodes a season lets you show a new episode every week for almost half of the year.
(with summer reruns and holiday preemptions taking up the other half)
The real big long-term win was syndication.
100 episodes was seen as a big deal because that meant you had about three or four seasons worth of shows. This could be sold as a syndication package, where some other network could show reruns for a year without repeating itself.
That meant a nice residual for the creators and performers.
If it sounds kind of sedate, that's because it is.
Broadcast TV is a relatively stable and comfortable middle-class life for the actors and writers who got to do it.
And because there were new stories happening every episode, there was room for a lot of stories to tell.
But like all things, it changes.
Cable introduced the idea of paying a subscription for an expanded selection.
It also introduced niche programming.
You wanted to watch news all day? They got you. Sports? It's here. The government? Have some C-span. It also had looser standards and practices than broadcast, because cable signals aren't a public good.
Then the idea of premium channels came up.
Pay more for a premium subscription, and you could watch movies uninterrupted and uncensored with no commercials. Thus HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, and later Starz came into the picture.
That set the stage for big shifts at the turn of the millennium.
While TV was enjoyed and celebrated, it was still kinda hampered to it's existence in selling something else. This meant inevitable constriction on artistic choices.
Don't get me wrong, a lot of shows thrived within the confines, kinda like haiku thrives within the syllable count.
But broadcast TV was fundamentally designed to be enjoyed long enough to keep you for a commercial to show. Comfort food for the eyes.
If you watched a police procedural or a sitcom or a soap opera, you knew what you were going to get, sure as if you'd walked into a McDonald's or bought a can of Campbell's soup anywhere in the country.
An old joke in acting schools used to be that you did TV for the steady money, movies for the fame, and theater for the art. Heavily exaggerated, but like most jokes, there was a grain of truth in it.
The first show to break out of this is generally considered The Sopranos. Shown on HBO and thus free from the interests of both commercial sponsors and FCC obscenity regulations, it was given an environment where it could not only thrive, but show off the art inherent to series television. It showed that mature themes and complex storylines could be shown and enjoyed as series TV, making it a commercial and critical success. It also showcased exquisite writing, directing, and acting. This let it draw professionals who had cut their teeth on films and in theater, and could now have the artistic challenge and the steady money.
The Sopranos was also one of the first major TV on DVD shows, selling discs like hotcakes.
TV on VHS had been tried before, but for a number of reasons didn't particularly sell well.
I personally blame the bulk of having only two episodes per tape.
But a season's worth of TV in a package the size of a hardcover book? Oh yeah.
Thus began the birth of binging: Watch at your own pace instead of once weekly.
The Real World came to MTV in 1992 and showed the reality TV format was viable, but it wasn't until 2000 that Survivor not only made reality TV viable for prime time, but brought in big ratings even during the summer. American Idol would double down on this two years later.
(The fact that it helped the music industry, suffering from file sharing and losses in court, outsource their artist development to a TV show, didn't hurt).
Because they weren't narrative TV and thus had much looser union rules, especially when it came to actors and writers, Reality TV showed both savings and earnings. This had a big effect a few years later when the WGA strike of 2007-2008 resulted in lackluster gains.
In 2005, youtube launched, and with it the reliability and viability of not only niche online video viewership, but independent production.
Two years later, the first iPhones were launched, putting internet-capable cameras in the hands of millions.
Netflix launches streaming video that same year.
In 2010 Netflix acquires Breaking Bad from AMC. A mature themed and complex storylined show in the wake of the Sopranos, Breaking Bad not only lasts two seasons longer than it normally would have, but kicks off the Netflix Effect, where new audiences on streaming binge old episodes as well as boost numbers for new episodes on the original network.
As all of this comes together, Game of Thrones releases on HBO in 2011.
With the rise of cable and premium and streaming and video hosting, Game of Thrones does the nigh-impossible and unites a TV audience into becoming the narrative show everyone talks about around the water cooler again, something that hadn't really been a thing since the 80's. Even The Walking Dead, which launches a year earlier, doesn't have the impact that Game of Thrones does.
So much so that it single-handedly kicks off a golden age of fantasy television.
For all of it's creativity, TV still maintains a "if you can't break ahead of the pack, follow the leader" mentality.
Every network wanted Game of Thrones numbers.
So they were willing to spend Game of Thrones money to fantasy shows to get it... for a season or two.
A lot of good fantasy shows made good numbers, but not Game of Thrones numbers, and were cancelled early. The last standing now are Wheel of Time (a line item on Amazon's spreadsheet), Rings of Power (Ditto), and House of the Dragon (Ending with season 4)
But even at these peaks, we're seeing some cost-cutting.
The Walking Dead based in Atlanta, while Game of Thrones spend the first seasons mostly in Northern Ireland, both for tax credit and studio space availability reasons.
Unbeholden to broadcast calendars, both shows also feature shrinking episode numbers.
Whereas NCIS was filming 24 episodes a season, The Sopranos averaged 13 episodes a season, while Game of Thrones began with 10 a season, then 7 and 6 for the last two seasons.
The Walking Dead, oddly enough, started the first season with only 6 episodes, filmed most seasons with 16 episodes, then filmed 22 and 24 episodes for it's last two seasons, respectively. That said, the anyone-can-die effect undoubtedly had a deterring effect on any individual cast members being overzealous in asking for pay raises as filming continued.
Game of Thrones ends with a bomb right before the pandemic, while The Walking Dead ends with a whimper and a bag of spinoffs right after it.
Then the strikes happened in 2023.
We went over that in the movies.
Broadcast was hit particularly hard, what with actors and writers asking "where's our money?" just as advertisers are asking "just what is our money buying anyway?"
There effectively was no pilot season in 2023, and a very anemic one this year.
So, what now?
The Whitebreads (remember them?) ain't the model to follow anymore, but there's nobody around to replace them.
Everybody hates ads, but broadcast and to a lesser extent cable has to justify their existences around them.
The streaming wars ended in mutually assured destruction.
And while Peak TV is effectively dead, there's still gems that show up here and there every year.
Niche programming is flowing through on the tubes and the clock apps.
And while people still hate commercials, that's still how their favorite creators are going to get themselves paid long into the future.
And yes, we're still going to be seeing a lot of comfort food.
Those reels we see that all look the same?
Those creators are all doing what the Al Gore tells them they need to do in order to be seen, so that's what they're doing.
It's the sponsors and Nielsen ratings all over again.
I honestly think SVOD (Streaming video on demand) and AVOD (Ad-supported streaming video on demand) are going to be the two big pillars to come in the future. Broadcast will either fade away or be supported by their streaming arms. Cable is just going to be another streaming bundle.
Budgets are going to be tighter.
The middle class of Hollywood is shrinking just like it is everywhere.
"Smaller, fewer, cheaper, less" applies here too.
What I think the elusive People Who Can Say Yes are figuring out right now is exactly how smaller and fewer and cheaper and less they can go while still being able to Say Yes on occasion.
But I'm not one of them, so all I can do is guess, keep my skills sharp, and carry on.
Take care of yourselves out there.
Reload your snacks, this'll take a while.
And I'm glossing over a lot.
Still, there's a shitload of history that's relevant.
I know some of you think broadcast TV is what sports bars show because they don't have streaming, but it's the foundation of a lot of this. And a lot of the legacy code for it is based on the premise that Leave it to Beaver is real.
TV, like it's older cousin radio, began as a sponsored business.
Given that the airwaves are considered a public good, anyone can watch broadcast TV for free.
You buy the TV, of course, but watching broadcast doesn't cost you anything.
(And no, that's not a universal thing. Places like the UK charge an annual tax for every TV in your home and fund the BBC with it. Anyways...)
Although licensed by the government, broadcast channels sell commercial time as their product.
I'm talking about ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and the CW.
(PBS is also broadcast, but it's a publicly funded nonprofit and operates differently. No, I won't be elaborating).
Shows broadcast on these networks exist to keep you watching until the next commercial.
Period.
That is the be-all and end-all of their existence.
If they make good art? Great.
But they gotta sell the time.
So how do they figure out what to charge?
You always hear about how Super Bowl commercials cost a stupid amount of money, right?
They do it by determining roughly who's watching TV and when.
A shitload of people watch the Super Bowl, ergo, commercial time there brings in top dollar.
This is usually broken down by gender and age in what we traditionally call ratings. The formula gets complicated and has changed over time, but it's easiest to explain with our Leave it to Beaver model.
Imagine a prototypical suburban WASP family, led by Walter and Wendy Whitebread.
He's in middle management, she's a homemaker.
They have two kids, Wally and Wilma.
On a typical school day, there might be a news segment or there might be a kid's program starting around 6AM.
By 9AM, Walter's off to work and the kids are in school, which means from 9AM-3PM, if anyone's watching TV, it's Wendy.
So shows scheduled then are aimed at her: soap operas, game shows, daytime talk, and so on.
At 3PM, the kids are back, so there's usually something aimed at them, which could be something wholesome for the family, or it could be a glorified toy commercial.
Walter works 9-5, so he's home by 6, just in time for the news.
(Remember "film at 11?" News footage used to be on film, which had to be processed. So the 6PM news would comment on it and the 11PM news would expand on it with the newly processed footage.)
Then comes 7-9PM, or Prime Time.
Everybody's watching, so commercial buyers are paying a premium.
By 10PM, the kids are in bed, so there's some adult-oriented drama, news at 11, and maybe a late night talk show around midnight.
Back in the day, stations didn't broadcast 24-7. But by the 80's, late night and early morning was a good spot to run old movies and reruns so you could at least sell something.
Prime time was 7-9PM, Sunday night through Thursday night.
It's assumed everyone was doing other things Friday and Saturday nights.
Friday prime time was a common dumping ground for unpopular shows, called the Friday night death slot.
The rest of the week would be arranged similar: cartoons for the kids on Saturday morning, religious programming before noon on Sundays, with movies and sports interspersed on the weekends.
That's the typical school day. The year is set up similar.
Notice how old TV shows usually had twenty-odd episodes a season?
There's a reason for that.
A TV year (called a season, though it lasts all year) typically starts around Labor Day.
You used to hear ads for "the new fall lineup."
Favorite shows from last year would be back with new seasons, while new shows would debut, chasing the audiences.
Back at the studio, these shows would begin filming the second half of the season, taking notes from the executives who carefully watched the ratings.
This would go on until Thanksgiving or so, when shows started being preempted for sports and holiday specials. (Not too big an issue, it's the holidays, people weren't watching as much)
At the same time, the suits start deciding which shows they want to renew for a new season, which ones they're considering dropping, and which pilots they want to see.
In some cases, they'll cancel a show during the holidays and replace it with a show they passed on last year, what's called a midseason replacement.
(Buffy was a midseason replacement. That's why the first season is so much shorter than the others.)
When a network hears a show pitched, it can do one of three things: pass entirely, order an entire season, or order a pilot.
Pilots are commissioning a prototype or a dealer sample: when you're intrigued, but not convinced by the paper alone.
January through early March is traditionally pilot season, when new pilots are shot and shown.
It's an exciting time for actors, as being cast as a regular on a show can be both lucrative and stable as we'll see later.
Pilots that are greenlit to become shows are added to that year's fall lineup, and start filming the first half of the season in the spring.
For audiences, the spring operates much like the fall.
They see the second half of the season, and the season (and in some cases, series) finales all show around Memorial Day.
The summer, it's assumed viewership is down.
So reruns of episodes from the previous season are usually shown, and a hiatus lets the suits and the productions enjoy a bit of a vacation too.
Then in September the new fall lineup debuts and it starts all over again.
Twenty-odd episodes a season lets you show a new episode every week for almost half of the year.
(with summer reruns and holiday preemptions taking up the other half)
The real big long-term win was syndication.
100 episodes was seen as a big deal because that meant you had about three or four seasons worth of shows. This could be sold as a syndication package, where some other network could show reruns for a year without repeating itself.
That meant a nice residual for the creators and performers.
If it sounds kind of sedate, that's because it is.
Broadcast TV is a relatively stable and comfortable middle-class life for the actors and writers who got to do it.
And because there were new stories happening every episode, there was room for a lot of stories to tell.
But like all things, it changes.
Cable introduced the idea of paying a subscription for an expanded selection.
It also introduced niche programming.
You wanted to watch news all day? They got you. Sports? It's here. The government? Have some C-span. It also had looser standards and practices than broadcast, because cable signals aren't a public good.
Then the idea of premium channels came up.
Pay more for a premium subscription, and you could watch movies uninterrupted and uncensored with no commercials. Thus HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, and later Starz came into the picture.
That set the stage for big shifts at the turn of the millennium.
While TV was enjoyed and celebrated, it was still kinda hampered to it's existence in selling something else. This meant inevitable constriction on artistic choices.
Don't get me wrong, a lot of shows thrived within the confines, kinda like haiku thrives within the syllable count.
But broadcast TV was fundamentally designed to be enjoyed long enough to keep you for a commercial to show. Comfort food for the eyes.
If you watched a police procedural or a sitcom or a soap opera, you knew what you were going to get, sure as if you'd walked into a McDonald's or bought a can of Campbell's soup anywhere in the country.
An old joke in acting schools used to be that you did TV for the steady money, movies for the fame, and theater for the art. Heavily exaggerated, but like most jokes, there was a grain of truth in it.
The first show to break out of this is generally considered The Sopranos. Shown on HBO and thus free from the interests of both commercial sponsors and FCC obscenity regulations, it was given an environment where it could not only thrive, but show off the art inherent to series television. It showed that mature themes and complex storylines could be shown and enjoyed as series TV, making it a commercial and critical success. It also showcased exquisite writing, directing, and acting. This let it draw professionals who had cut their teeth on films and in theater, and could now have the artistic challenge and the steady money.
The Sopranos was also one of the first major TV on DVD shows, selling discs like hotcakes.
TV on VHS had been tried before, but for a number of reasons didn't particularly sell well.
I personally blame the bulk of having only two episodes per tape.
But a season's worth of TV in a package the size of a hardcover book? Oh yeah.
Thus began the birth of binging: Watch at your own pace instead of once weekly.
The Real World came to MTV in 1992 and showed the reality TV format was viable, but it wasn't until 2000 that Survivor not only made reality TV viable for prime time, but brought in big ratings even during the summer. American Idol would double down on this two years later.
(The fact that it helped the music industry, suffering from file sharing and losses in court, outsource their artist development to a TV show, didn't hurt).
Because they weren't narrative TV and thus had much looser union rules, especially when it came to actors and writers, Reality TV showed both savings and earnings. This had a big effect a few years later when the WGA strike of 2007-2008 resulted in lackluster gains.
In 2005, youtube launched, and with it the reliability and viability of not only niche online video viewership, but independent production.
Two years later, the first iPhones were launched, putting internet-capable cameras in the hands of millions.
Netflix launches streaming video that same year.
In 2010 Netflix acquires Breaking Bad from AMC. A mature themed and complex storylined show in the wake of the Sopranos, Breaking Bad not only lasts two seasons longer than it normally would have, but kicks off the Netflix Effect, where new audiences on streaming binge old episodes as well as boost numbers for new episodes on the original network.
As all of this comes together, Game of Thrones releases on HBO in 2011.
With the rise of cable and premium and streaming and video hosting, Game of Thrones does the nigh-impossible and unites a TV audience into becoming the narrative show everyone talks about around the water cooler again, something that hadn't really been a thing since the 80's. Even The Walking Dead, which launches a year earlier, doesn't have the impact that Game of Thrones does.
So much so that it single-handedly kicks off a golden age of fantasy television.
For all of it's creativity, TV still maintains a "if you can't break ahead of the pack, follow the leader" mentality.
Every network wanted Game of Thrones numbers.
So they were willing to spend Game of Thrones money to fantasy shows to get it... for a season or two.
A lot of good fantasy shows made good numbers, but not Game of Thrones numbers, and were cancelled early. The last standing now are Wheel of Time (a line item on Amazon's spreadsheet), Rings of Power (Ditto), and House of the Dragon (Ending with season 4)
But even at these peaks, we're seeing some cost-cutting.
The Walking Dead based in Atlanta, while Game of Thrones spend the first seasons mostly in Northern Ireland, both for tax credit and studio space availability reasons.
Unbeholden to broadcast calendars, both shows also feature shrinking episode numbers.
Whereas NCIS was filming 24 episodes a season, The Sopranos averaged 13 episodes a season, while Game of Thrones began with 10 a season, then 7 and 6 for the last two seasons.
The Walking Dead, oddly enough, started the first season with only 6 episodes, filmed most seasons with 16 episodes, then filmed 22 and 24 episodes for it's last two seasons, respectively. That said, the anyone-can-die effect undoubtedly had a deterring effect on any individual cast members being overzealous in asking for pay raises as filming continued.
Game of Thrones ends with a bomb right before the pandemic, while The Walking Dead ends with a whimper and a bag of spinoffs right after it.
Then the strikes happened in 2023.
We went over that in the movies.
Broadcast was hit particularly hard, what with actors and writers asking "where's our money?" just as advertisers are asking "just what is our money buying anyway?"
There effectively was no pilot season in 2023, and a very anemic one this year.
So, what now?
The Whitebreads (remember them?) ain't the model to follow anymore, but there's nobody around to replace them.
Everybody hates ads, but broadcast and to a lesser extent cable has to justify their existences around them.
The streaming wars ended in mutually assured destruction.
And while Peak TV is effectively dead, there's still gems that show up here and there every year.
Niche programming is flowing through on the tubes and the clock apps.
And while people still hate commercials, that's still how their favorite creators are going to get themselves paid long into the future.
And yes, we're still going to be seeing a lot of comfort food.
Those reels we see that all look the same?
Those creators are all doing what the Al Gore tells them they need to do in order to be seen, so that's what they're doing.
It's the sponsors and Nielsen ratings all over again.
I honestly think SVOD (Streaming video on demand) and AVOD (Ad-supported streaming video on demand) are going to be the two big pillars to come in the future. Broadcast will either fade away or be supported by their streaming arms. Cable is just going to be another streaming bundle.
Budgets are going to be tighter.
The middle class of Hollywood is shrinking just like it is everywhere.
"Smaller, fewer, cheaper, less" applies here too.
What I think the elusive People Who Can Say Yes are figuring out right now is exactly how smaller and fewer and cheaper and less they can go while still being able to Say Yes on occasion.
But I'm not one of them, so all I can do is guess, keep my skills sharp, and carry on.
Take care of yourselves out there.
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