I was watching the trailer for the upcoming new tv show “Scarlet”; it actually looks interesting, but I was annoyed when at the end, the announcer referred to it as “The new hit show ‘Scarlet’”.
When did this start? For several years, I’ve been seeing promos for shows that have yet to air, that have no ratings yet because they haven’t been on, yet are referred to in advertising as “hits”. Who had the balls to do this the first time?
I don’t mind a little hype. Tell me your upcoming show is “exciting”, “innovative”, even “brilliant” and I’ll just take it with a grain of salt as the promotional hype it is. But “hit”? Regardless of how good or bad the show is, it’s impossible for it to be a hit before anybody sees it. Sheesh.
Oh, this is pretty common. in the past I’ve seen new shows referred to as ‘hits’ before they had a chance to draw ratings. I guess the network could justify the label on the basis of industry buzz, or audience reaction to advance screenings, or some such.
The weird thing is that the programs which are advertised this way are often what I refer to as “caulk” shows. They are “caulk” because they seal the gap between actual hit shows. Another term I use for them is “FOX’s next failure.”
I doubt it. Even outside Hollywood, the word “classic” is massively overused. I can hardly think of a high school sports tournament, for instance, that DOESN’T bill itself as a “classic.”
In the mid-nineties, I had a rule of thumb. If Canadian TV Guide pronounced a show a hit, or, worse yet, featured it on its cover accompanied by a fawning article, it was a bomb. I figured the editors at the time had to be on the take big time.
It seems a longstanding tradition in the promotion of stage productions to call any show a “hit”, regardless of any actual financial success. Through viewings of archival television, I’ve seen that term (usually in superlative form) used for Love Life (a 252-performance financial failure), Ben Franklin in Paris (a 215-performance financial failure), and 110 in the Shade (a financial success, but, at 330 performances, not an especially long-running one).
Book publishers do this all the time. I remember back when I worked in a book warehouse picking up a copy of a Daniel Steele novel which wouldn’t even go on sale for about another month and noticing that it had “Bestseller!” on it. One could, I suppose, make the claim that this was fair since it was her 25th (or so) novel, and she was a best selling author, but you have to throw that excuse out the window when you read on the inside flap of the book jacket: “in this, her 25th best selling novel.” I suppose you could then make the argument that it was technically already a best seller, even though copies of it had yet to hit store shelves, but that doesn’t really work, either. Book retailers are notoriously bad about ordering huge numbers of books, even though everyone in the industry (save the publisher and the book retailers) admit that it’s going to bomb, and until recently, they didn’t really pay for a lot of the books they bought, any way. If they couldn’t move them in a short period of time, they just shipped them back to the publisher for credit. It’s an incredibly stupid system that’s only just now being changed.
We get this hype all the time in the UK for US shows. They’ll be advertising it as a hit show, ‘exclusive to this channel’, when you know for a fact that it was cancelled halfway through the first season.
Wasteful, but not stupid. If bookstores had to pay for unreturnable books, they’d never take a chance on a new author. Not how bookstores react to PublishAmerica books, which are non-returnable – they will not stock them except on special order (and nowadays ask for a deposit).
But preorders do make a book a best seller, since a certain percent of any book will always sell. If you have to return 70% of the Danielle Steele book you preordered, it’s still selling more copies than most other books.
Anyone else seen the commercial for “Tyler Perry’s House of Payne” which refers to it as the number one sitcom of all time? Perhaps I missed a word (number one sitcom by Tyler Perry of all time) or they’re using fuzzy numbers, but good GOD that irks me.
Also, why does Tyler Perry have to put his name on everything? Tyler Perry’s House of Payne. Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married. Tyler Perry’s blah blah blah. Just give us the title and quit blowing your own horn. You aren’t funny, anyway.
