Last night, I was watching Conan O’Brien, and in a sketch that purported to introduce new characters, they introduced Anna Nicole Smith’s even lazier brother. The point of the joke was that Anna is really, really, lazy. From the laughter and applause, it appeared that the audience got the joke.
This got me thinking. I assume the “Anna Nicole = lazy” got started with the Anna Nicole Smith Show on the E! network. But when you look at the ratings, no one watched the damn show. How did particular events in a show that maybe 500,000 people watched each week become ingrained in our popular consciousness?
I’ve noticed this a lot recently. The Osbournes took America by storm - but only a few million households tuned it in. Buffy the Vampire Slayer made Sarah Michelle Gellar a star - yet the show consistently ranks around 90th in the ratings. Sex and the City, the Sopranos, Six Feet Under - all cultural phenomenons that very few people are actually seeing.
In the days of the Big 3 television networks, shows that got 10 times the audience of some of these programs would be considered disappointments and their stars failures. What has changed? I know the audience is more fragmented and even the #1 network shows get very small ratings compared to the past. But wouldn’t that audience fragmentation imply that most of that O’Brien audience wouldn’t know anything about Anna Nicole Smith? Now it seems that the audience is completely fragmented in what they watch, but unified in what they know about the shows they don’t watch.
Sometimes the media expresses a high degree of interest in someone few people are really interested in. For example remember how much Windows 95 was in the media? You would have thought it was the second coming of Christ but outside of computer weenies I don’t think anybody really cared. Even if you didn’t own a computer or a PC you knew Win95 was coming out and that the Rolling Stones sang the theme song.
In a similiar vein, Sex and the City, Sopranos, and the Osbournes are, or were, all over the media. Even if you’ve never seen an eposide of the Sopranos you probably have a pretty good idea of what it is about.
Back in the day, a TV show was a TV show. It came on the TV, people watched it, and mayb ethey talked about it with their friends the next day.
These days, an episode of a show comes on and you get articles in several magazines, TV shows about the TV show, and innumerable internet people all happy to discuss it in munite, agonizing detail. Same input, much different output. More people may have watched an individual episode of “I Love Lucy” than of “Buffy”, but fewer of them rhapsodized at leangth about it afterwards to people who both cared and didn’t.
Also don’t forget that Conan isn’t the first to make the joke. As people on shows like that make these jokes people come to understand the show second hand so they get the later jokes. You just sort of start getting jokes about subjects, TV shows and not, that you keep hearing. This is independent of knowing anything about what is being made fun of.
As a somewhat tangental question does anyone have a quick answer or link about how exactly ratings are tallied? I’ve always wondered and never gotten a good answer.
You can also download clips for Anna on the net and never never underestimate the power of a good PR team. They go out and get the mentions in magazines and articles. Ever see Buffy (or Cordy or Willow) on the cover of a mag or in FHM?
mmmmmm Willow in FHM mmmmmmmm
So while not actually watching the show you still get exposure to the show from a lot of different venues.
More big influence, small audience examples: Trading Spaces and 24 (at least last season – apparently 24’s doing much better in the ratings this season)
There’s also the inverse phenomenon these days: a popular show with little or no buzz whatsoever. Just about any show on after Friends would qualify – Jesse, Just Shoot Me, Veronica’s Closet . . .
“The Internet is a communications tool used the world over, where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another.”
But that begs the question. The goal of magazines and the like is to sell copies. Why does an article about/photos of a show or actor whose show no one (or very few people) watch sell magazines? A few years back you certainly would not have seen the star of a show languishing in the ratings on the cover of a magazine.
Also, don’t forget that many of the apparently low-rated but highly-influential shows like SITC, “The Sopranos”, and Anna Nicole Smith are repeated many times by the cable network shortly after their initial airing. Back in the day, a typical network TV episode was shown once when it was new and again during the summer as a rerun. Then, if the show had a long and successful run, it would be aired again in repeats a few years later. Now, if you miss the first airing of “The Sopranos” on Sunday night, you can catch it a couple days later and then at least several other times during the week. And, if you have all of the HBO channels on your cable or satellite service, you can catch it several times a day. (Also, don’t forget the episode blocks of shows like “The Osbournes” where all a season’s episodes are aired at once.) That’s why the ratings aren’t as a reliable indicator of a show’s success as they were in the day when there were only 3 networks.
I think you also have to look at the demographics for those shows. If 3 million kids aged 12-20 watch Angel it’ll have a much larger affect on popular culture as a whole than if 3 million aging baby boomers watch Touched by an Angel.
Popular culture is largely about youth. They have a disproportional impact on what gets talked about.
(first off thanks for responding to me, I’ve been feeling lately like I’m on everyone’s ignore list)
If you take a Magazine like FHM or the like there are a couple of featured babes. So maybe a babe from a small show can be the ‘secondary babe’ in a mag. Maybe those magazines, being somewhat new, go after the babes from the secondary shows. But probably there is some ‘block booking’ going on where an agency reps several stars, some huge some small. So if you want to take some photos of Pam Anderson in her underware then you got to take some photos of “new chick from lame WB show” as well.
I think photos of sexy women sell magazines, no matter who they are. You can have a photo shoot of J. Random SexyWoman, which will sell X number of copies, or you can have a player on some WB show, which will sell the same X number of copies PLUS whatever chunk of that viewership buys it.
To wit: I never even heard of FHM until Gillian Anderson posed in it, and the X-Files geeks were all talking about it. Now, to this day I’ve never bought an issue and don’t plan to, but I know a lot of people did buy that one, a lot of people who otherwise had never heard of it.
I know this doesn’t apply to the majority of the shows SuaSponte mentioned, but never underestimate the power of sydnication.
Star Trek never did well in the Neilsen ratings when it first aired, but it was popular enough that a lot of stations, and later cable networks, ran it as a “filler” show (the 3-4 o’clock time slot, daily on one of the local stations back home in Indiana when I was a kid). The show would come on during a time of day when mostly kids were watching, the adults being busy doing other things. Thus, it becomes part of the consciousness of the younger set, which then grows up to become adults that can get a reference to what was once an obscure show.
Ditto for BtVS, I think. FX is more widely available than UPN, and the sydnicated episodes are on before prime-time starts, but at a time when the high-schoolers who actually do their homework have finished it. I actually never heard the show talked about much (but maybe that’s because I don’t really stay up with what’s popular entertainment-wise) until after it went into sydnication, and I had already been watching the reruns on FX for a couple of months before I started watching the first run eps on UPN.
I haven’t read all the replies so maybe I am repeating this but isn’t Anna Nicole Smith a celebrity even apart from her show? For instance she seems to be a regular target of Jay Leno jokes which have nothing to do with her show. And I would imagine she is a regular presence in the tabloids.That’s how people know about her, probably.
As for the three HBO shows the reason that they are widely known may be that they are considered the peak of American TV craft and keep getting written about by journalists. I haven’t seen any of them but I keep reading reviews and references to them in places like Slate. So even if John Doe doesn’t watch them, the people who work in the media do.
Well yeah, but prior to the show, the jokes were about her breasts or about her marrying a 90 year old billionaire. It was the specificity of the joke - her purported laziness - that led me to tie it to her show.
Another thing to mention is that when you have a television series, even for one season, everyone (for the sake of this discussion, let’s say the North American viewing public) has several chances to watch an episode of that show. Even if you have only seen one episode of the Anna Nicole show, or half an episode of The Sopranos, you can get the joke. If each episode of a series has 500,000 viewers, it’s not the SAME 500,000 viewers each week (although some certainly are repeat viewers), so you’re increasing your pool of joke-getters each week even without increasing the number of viewers per week.
Well I have never seen her show but I had still heard about her laziness from a profile of her in Time magazine(IIRC). So the joke may not be that show-specific. Even if it was it’s perfectly possible that people who never watch the show might read an article or review about it. And a celebrity show would be just the kind which is likely to be written about (or discussed on TV) even it doesn’t have high ratings. Probably the same applies to the Osbournes. Just the fact that a celebrity is doing some kind of reality show probably generates a fair amount of news on its own.
Entertainment Tonight and Extra (and other brain dead shows. Helloooo The View et. al.)
E Channel
Print and internet media
Word of mouth (including talk show/comedian jokes)
She already had fame. Now she she has fame and an extra 100 lbs.
Straight Dope Message Boards:D
OK 6 is specific to Anna but you get the drift. FYI, I never watched an episode of The Sopranos (No HBO) but from hearing about certain episodes in conversation I might understand a joke here and there.
I’m just going to pick on this a little. Sopranos actually has a large viewership. Almost 10 million viewers, which would put it in the top 20 most weeks.
