I don’t think people in waiting rooms are a big enough market to craft any show for - with the exception of the version of CNN meant for airports.
My daughters like those flipping shows, and they like the shows where someone is out looking for a house or tiny house. That’s probably because they have never bought a house (yet) so there is some fantasy involved.
I don’t think you get the niche programming model. With so many specialized shows, someone not in the niche turning them on is going to think they are stupid. But the target audience loves them.
When I was a kid in the early '60s there was no alternate programming so the 7 channels on UHF was all we had. (I lived in New York - lots of people had fewer choices.) The good shows from them were Dick van Dyke, the Defenders, and … Not thinking of any.
You are right that some shows are not made for bingeing, like any from that time period where no one thought about viewers with pause of DVDs. We watched all of Secret Agent/Danger Man, and while it is interesting to see the precursors to The Prisoner, there was a lot of “we saw that set before.”
Plus ratings are not everything anymore. Netflix and Hulu and Amazon, following HBO’s lead, want to have shows that will get you to sign up. Once that happens they don’t give a crap about ratings.
The number of shows have exploded, the number of good shows have exploded. Sure the number of crap shows have also exploded, but the hours in the day have not, so anyone watching crap has only themselves to blame. We’re in a golden age. Even the critics say so.
Also, side note, Price is Right is a great game show. Go watch some of the game shows that GSN plays middle of the day, or any of the random game shows that last for a season on primetime network TV. There’s a lot of garbage out there.
I’ve heard* this called “Babylon 5 Syndrome”. When a show is great, but really requires that you watch the whole thing to understand what is going on. Turning on a season 3 episode of Babylon 5 is almost pointless without having been on board the whole time.
Many years ago, I temped at a clinic that serviced a low-income clientele, a sizable percentage of whom spoke little or no English (Spanish or Bosnian). Because we had a lot of kids, we had it on a cartoon channel, and since the pharmacy was in a glassed-in area alongside the waiting room, we could watch it too, and laughed along with the patients even though we couldn’t hear the TV. We did have a few women who were annoyed that we wouldn’t change it to their soap opera, but those were the rules.
We did change the channel once, when we realized that severe weather was headed our way.
I do sometimes wonder, while watching those flipper shows, where they’re filmed. $750,000 for THAT, as an example? Come to my city, and you can get a mansion and a few acres for that amount of money, or a decent house for 1/10 of that.
We’re a bit all over the map here, but let’s deal with these things right away.
Reality shows are cheap. That’s why there’s so many of them; you can make money off them. Even if your ad revenue is modest, they are dirt cheap to produce because you aren’t paying writers or actors and the cost for set design and costuming is minimal. Game shows are scarcely more expensive; in the world of TV production, the prizes they give away don’t cost much if they cost anything at all. Consequently, you don’t need a huge number of viewers to turn a profit; the subset of people who like shows about making cupcakes are enough. And if your reality show becomes really popular, well, you win the lottery.
Shitty sitcoms like “Big Bang Theory” sell. I know a lot of people don’t like them but many do. They are simple and comforting.
I mean, that’s about it. A lot of bad TV isn’t bad because it wants to be; it’s bad because it doesn’t have to be any better than it is to make money.
Of course, even within these boundaries, some shows are good enough to stick and some aren’t. American Idol was, originally (both in its British incarnation and its first American seasons) an utterly brilliant idea that was well executed, and it made a grillion dollars. The Price is Right is quite a good game show, which is why it’s been on since the Civil War.
I think this misses the mark. It’s not bad because it doesn’t have to be better to get ratings. It’s bad because if it were better, it wouldn’t get ratings.
Community, 30 Rock, and Arrested Development were all great and had shitty ratings. I don’t think you can make a quality sitcom like that and get big ratings.
According to Jim was utter shit but had decent or even good ratings. Most of the top ratings-getters are comfort food. The McDonald’s of television. In that sense, I think the OP is absolutely right. TV made to get ratings has a similar relationship to quality that McDonald’s does.
Not to say that everything with good ratings is shit. More like, everything intended to get good ratings is deliberately made into comfort food. A prestige loss leader might end up getting good ratings, like Breaking Bad, but shows like that aren’t intended to be ratings grabbers. They’re more about awards and subscribers.
It’s pretty common these days, although the ready presence of shows online to catch up with means that it’s mostly been mitigated.
In other words, you can’t come in halfway to “Breaking Bad” or “Game of Thrones” and have a clue either, but I’m pretty sure that you could catch up with a lot less trouble than you could with B5 in 1996.
Yeah, I think the OP is right in some cases. My cite is the new Magnum PI retread. Cop show? Check. Been done before? Check. Military worship? Check. Formulaic and cheesy? As hell!
But, yeah, sometimes I don’t want to analyze something for the deeper meaning. If you just want to hang out on the couch for an hour or two with the cat and the gf, it is fun to make fun of all the ridiculous inconsistencies of Magnum PI, laugh at his failed attempts to pick up every woman who crosses his path even though he is wealthy and handsome, and yet he is a genius juuuust often enough to solve the case by the end of the hour. It isn’t “good” by normal standards, but it is fun if you are in the right mood.
Also, watch it in On Demand mode an you can’t ffwd past the commercials. Mission accomplished.
I honestly think this answer is totally wrong. Of course some critically acclaimed shows will have low ratings. Conversely, many critically acclaimed shows have been huge hits, as you yourself admit.
Pablum like “The Big Bang Theory” isn’t made deliberately bad. It would do no worse if it were better, as evidenced by the many, many shows that were better that did fine ratings. It’s made the way it is because quality’s not always a relevant point. BBT would do great ratings if it was actually funny, but some shows just don’t need to be better than they are. You could make a Honda Civic better, but why bother?
Conversely, “30 Rock” wasn’t unpopular because it was good. It was unpopular because, in my opinion, it just wasn’t relatable. Frankly, TV celebrities making a show about how hard it is to be TV celebrities is likely always going to be a hard sell; it’s also generally agreed that the show peaked in the first season or two, and it’s hard to grow your viewer base if you shot all your bullets and are presenting worse material once people are actually getting used to the show.
It’s hard to say why shows succeed and fail. There’s a lot to it, including timing; I don’t think Big Bang Theory would have lasted a season if it had debuted in 1991, whereas I suspect Freaks and Geeks would have done way better if it had debuted today.
I didn’t say “many” prestige shows had good ratings. I merely said it was possible and listed one example. What are these “many” examples you’re thinking of? Can you list them for us?
BBT is currently the highest-rated scripted show on television, and has been in the top two (with NCIS) for the better part of a decade. (“Scripted” qualifier to remove NFL football from the list.) In other words, it’s one of the most successful shows of all time. The many, many shows that “did fine ratings” aren’t really relevant, as they aren’t remotely in the conversation in terms of success.
BBT gets great ratings because it’s a broad comedy, which appeals to a large audience. Broad comedies aren’t very high quality by nature, much like McDonald’s appeals to a very large audience even though it isn’t very high quality. Broad comedies can only get to a certain point of quality before they stop appealing to the masses, much like fast food restaurants.
Taking a different approach, what is your list of the highest quality successful sitcoms? Let’s use Top 10 in the ratings as the benchmark for successful.
Now, that’s a sentiment I strongly disagree with. The notion that mass appeal means something is inherently bad is just ridiculous to me. Targeting and achieving appeal to a broad audience is a form of quality itself. Maybe not the one you want, and certainly not the only form of quality. But it’s a type of quality to me
I’ve made similar arguments about why music like heavy metal or progressive rock is so much less popular than all-sounds-the-same pop music. It’s because metal and prog don’t work as “background” music. It’s music that’s meant to be actively listened to, not be simply “heard”. It’s much easier for the average person to turn on some “I know what to expect” music to provide background noise while they do something else.
I don’t think we need to resort to They Live-type manipulation on the part of hospitals, dentists and retirement homes to explain bland shows although that may be why those places tune in to those shows. The more likely, though dispiriting, possibility is that there is a significant chunk of the population that wants something bland. Think of the number of people who make the conscious choice among many other options to go to Olive Garden and order spaghetti, eat their steak well-done, put ketchup on their hot-dog or drink Budweiser.
I’ve noticed that when incurious people reach middle-age, they get quite lumpen and set in their ways, like the light in their mind turns a dim beige.
As for the production side of it: I used to work in a restaurant and one of the best selling items was breadsticks which, while not actually bad, were nothing to call home about either. But customers just kept ordering them so the restaurant kept serving them up. If pigs pay for slop, somebody will get it in their trough.
I know this is a TV thread, but I’ve got to say your comment regarding music is the most condensed and yet concise explanation of the dynamic I’ve heard.
Seinfeld, Frasier, Friends, All in the Family, The Cosby Show, The Simpsons, Cheers, just off the top of my head. All very highly rated, all very popular.
In 2017-2018 the top shows included shows like This Is Us, Modern Family, Empire, Scandal, The Orville, The Goldbergs, and The Good Doctor, all of which are very good shows. Of course, the traditional ratings system doesn’t really fully capture the success of pay-as-you-go shows like Game of Thrones, Better Call Saul, Westworld, Atlanta, The Handmaid’s Tale, etc.
Even the shows in the top fifty we’re denigrating like Big Bang Theory - I mean, they’re generally not BAD. They are competently made and performed. Bad shows don’t last.
I disagree about Big Bang Theory. It *used *to be hilarious, back when it was about loser nerds doing sciencey stuff. You could tell then there really was a studio audience, and they were laughing hard at the comedy.
It started to go downhill about five years ago, when they got into crap like “relationships” and “character development.” That’s when I stopped watching it regularly. It was also around the time you could tell most of the laughter was canned.
The reason it’s so bad now is that they betrayed and abandoned the original concept in favor of something totally unsuited for the characters that had already been established.