The Staking of Angel- sabotage by WB?

I’ve been thinking about this since summer hiatus, when, hey, there weren’t any Angel reruns to watch.

I’ve heard that James Marsters was brought on board with the idea that having the most popular character from BtVS who wasn’t played by Sarah Michelle Gellar would hopefully help boost the ratings. In fact, the WB made Spike joining the Fang Gang the biggest condition for renewing the show this season. And, apparently, the show’s ratings have improved. I don’t attribute this so much to the presence of the Peroxided One as to Buffy fans moving down the dial after the Show that Started It All was cancelled. Apparently, the improvement has not been enough to satisfy the WB.

I can’t help but wonder, though…

Why no summer reruns?

Why Smallville this week instead of a repeat of a earlier episode? And, from the looks of things, the post February-sweeps hiatus will continue to be rerun-free.

If WB truly intended to give Angel a fighting chance, why would they not keep the show available for viewing on the network? Seems to me summer reruns would have given them a chance to pick up some casual viewers who usually watched something else on Wednesday nights, but might be channel surfing because they didn’t want to watch a rerun of a not-so-great episode, caught an AtS ep and thought, “Hey, this is a cool show”.

Also, for casual viewers who potentially might become regular viewers, out of sight is out of mind. Why would the WB not want to keep a show they intended to give a shot at lasting more than one more season in front of these viewers.

I smell a rat here.

I have a friend who is convinced that the WB axed Angel as part of a deal with whoever is producing the new Dark Shadows revival that’s going to be on WB next season. Don’t know if there’s any truth to it, though.

After the news that the WB was so happy to have Angel that they’re cancelling it, and the way FOX treated “Firefly”, I’m beginning to think there’s a significant anti-Joss element out there.

Joss was on NPR earlier this week, and he had nothing nice to say about Fox either. Sounds like those bridges are burned.

Although I suppose in Hollywood, feudin’ and fussin’ could end if someone came up with the right deal.

I’m not so inclined to think so. Joss is a scribe par excellence for scripted programming in the genre of sci-fi/fantasy. Sci-fi/ fantasy shows have a number of knocks against them, such as: (1) high costs of production for special effects; (2) dramatic plotlines and character development unfolding over multiple episodes, requiring viewers to stay tuned and excluding those who did not start watching from the beginning; and (3) relatively poor historical ratings, in part caused by factor (2), in part caused by the fact that there are people who simply refuse to tune in anything in that genre.

Hour-long dramas suffer from the same problem, unless they’re like “Law & Order,” where you don’t have to have watched any previous episodes to follow what’s going on. Each episode is basically self-contained.

Sitcoms used to be the mainstay of network programming, but no longer. Because you’ve got two outcomes - the show tanks, in which case you sank $$ into a black hole, or, perhaps worse, the show is a hit and the stars start demanding high salaries. New sitcoms are also hard to come by because a lot of the genres have already been milked to death, and if you go too avant garde or “weird,” you lose audience. Thus, I think “Arrested Development” and “Scrubs” are doomed because, despite being two of the most consistently funny shows around, they are not at all mainstream.

Contrast with reality shows. Cheap to produce, plotlines that unfold over a much shorter time frame, and now generally good ratings for the ones that do well. No stars, so no salary demands. And a way to keep the lineup always fresh and interesting.

Reality TV killed the scripted show.

Killed it for broadcast, at least. Seems to be pretty healthy on pay cable. So what I want to know is, when is HBO going to offer Joss a contract?

Reality tv is a fad that’ll pass.

The problem tv is facing is what to do with all the hours of programming it needs to fill. New channels pop up every day, getting more and more fragmented. A travel channel is not narrow enough anymore, pretty soon there’s gonna be an (a?) RV channel (for those who want to vacation like that), a National Park channel (for that crowd) and a RV channel for retired people. If things keep going the way they are, pretty soon, we’ll have a choice of programming, that’s so specialized that there will be more people producing the shows, than there are potential viewers (yes, hyperbole).
At this point, one has to stop and think about where the money’s gonna come from.

Sweden (my country) has a diminutive population of 9 million. We have five movie channels on cable/dish 24/7, 4-5 sports networks, about 10 national ordinary networks with a variety of programming, ppv, and a lot of international channel that are everywhere (Discovery, Disney, Animal Planet, National Geographic ASF.) Someone needs to pay for all of this, and cable fees are not enough. Neither are ads.

So who’s gonna tune in and watch tv? With no viewers, networks are going to have a hard time selling ads. Subscribers are only willing to pay some money, but not infinite. As ISPs are getting better at providing high speed connections, more and more people will download. I just got the latest ep of Joan of Arcadia today at about 6pm est and it took me about 1 hour to download. The show isn’t even on the air or on cable over here. I got 10 MBs down and 2 MBs up for about $60/mo. from VDSL (through old copper wires from the 50’s), so why should I get cable for the same amount?

Piracy (which I do engage in) is somewhat the issue, but more importantly, tv needs to figure out how to distribute and cash in on the shows that are produced. Reality tv, while not needing a script writer, still costs money to produce, and someone needs to pay the bills.

So no, Thea, I don’t think there is even a small conspiracy at Thewb. I do think they’re afraid of what the future might bring and that they have a feeling (which I partially share) that the Buffyverse has run its course. They want to find a new show, that might save them from a future that’s very uncertain and a franchise which is eight years old and newer got them top ratings is not going to do that.

So they, and the other networks, keep shuffling shows around, trying old fool proof concepts (and failing more often than not), trying to reinvent the wheel, trying to find something to hold on to, because they have no idea what the future will bring.

Reality tv gave tv as a media a rejuvenating boost, but it won’t last. The market is getting saturated. Over here, our attitude towards nudity is more relaxed, but Big Brother has shown live sex and guys doing the ‘helicopter’ and people are simply not very excited or upset. No one really cares except the headline writers of the tabloids.

Angel was doomed a long time ago. Not because the show is bad or because its ratings aren’t spectacular (nothing on thewb gets good ratings) or because the audience isn’t smart enough to tune in to intelligent tv, but because the execs are desperately trying to come up with the next big thing that’ll buy them time and let the network keep coasting. And clearly Angel isn’t it.

“The ‘helicopter’”?

Confusion about “The Helicoptor” notwithstanding, I’d just like to say that I dispair at the idea of everyone getting their TV shows on their computers and on-line.

Though I’m here now on the SDMB, I see it as an unnecessary luxury. At this time I have only a five-year-old laptop connecting me to the web, and I have no problem with that. I will have a problem, however, if folks start to take away the TV audience because of their fancy, high-speed computers.

… Actually, I just have may things to complain about with the technology thing, so I’ll be off.

Helicopter = taking out the penis and swishing it around and around.

As this board has a very strong feeling about filesharing I don’t think we need an argument about that. I know that it’s wrong, but Angel’s never been on tv here. No one’s picked it up. I’d gladly pay to get good tv, maybe the same fee as netflix or something, but it can’t be done.

However, thousands of poeple were downloading JoA yesterday evening, before it went on the air in the US. It’s a small problem so far, because there’s a difference between downloading a song of 2mb and a tv episode of 450mb - not too many people have a connection that can handle that. But they will, eventually.

My WAG: Broadcast tv as we know it will be dead in ten years.