Sundance used to show uncut films, now they follow the AMC model (since they were bought by AMC)
While this isn’t about a channel changing it’s format, this line about uncut (or censoring) made me think of something that made me laugh a while back.
Reruns of the original Law & Order can be currently seen on Sundance, TNT and WE. A few years ago I was watching an episode rerun on TNT. During that show several words were bleeped and when the detectives interviewed someone who was working at a Adult Video store many of the packaging images were blurred.
I laughed at that because none of that censoring (bleeping, blurring) were done when that episode originally aired on NBC.
So the language and images were okay for the over the air network but not for cable? (even though it’s standard cable, it’s still pay TV)
Probably aired on NBC during “safe harbor,” after kids have gone to sleep. Reruns could be shown in the middle of the day, so editing for 24/7 decency standards doesn’t surprise me.
All your “/stops” and “/full stops” seem to ignore subscription television. HBO, Showtime, Cinemax and Starz aren’t ad-sponsored, and they probably care almost as much about prestige as they do eyeballs. (HBO is certainly Emmy-hungry.)
Even some ad-driven networks program for prestige enough to almost be a detriment. NBC has been in the shitter for a while now, and I would argue this was originally brought on due to sticking with a prestige slate of Thursday night sitcoms that never drew the ratings to justify keeping them on the air. (30 Rock, Parks & Rec, Community) To a certain extent, FX is doing the same thing with The Americans, which has truly abysmal ratings (like half a million viewers or something) but is still going.
Pretty sure the execs view this as a rising tide lifts all boats kind of scenario: Prestige projects give you credibility to lure high profile talent to make shows on your network.
Well, that and their wrong headed decision to give up it’s 10:00 hour (EST), five days a week to Jay Leno. Even if Leno was 100% loved by all, giving him five hours a week on prime time was…well, nuts! It angers many local affiliates who claimed his show was hurting their local news casts, thus hurting their ratings and ad revenues.
Excellent point.
That’s because they’re part of a different continuum. However, they are not completely free of advertiser/marketing influence, either.
They derive most, but not all of their revenue from producing material people will pay to see. There are a limited number of such channels because there’s a very limited amount of “television” people will pay for on a profitable basis.
Giada’s recipes are actually not bad at all- usually not involving too many weird ingredients nor particularly unhealthy. And she is easy on the eyes, I have to admit.
I’d much rather watch re-runs of “Good Eats” or old dubbed “Iron Chef” than watch some actress and friends half-assedly cook a recipe that was almost certainly developed by a professional chef, and then have a fabulous party with friends. Or, even stupider, I don’t want to see some pretentious pre-teen trying to cook some sort of dish they can barely pronounce on some cooking show.
The only one of those competition shows worth watching is the one with Alton Brown, only because he seems to take sadistic glee in tormenting the competitors with some fucked-up handicap like prohibiting them from using knives, or having to wear a 50 lb anchor around their neck, or something equally awful.
But I agree- television channels are essentially following a sort of natural selection process- they adjust based on what prices advertisers are willing to pay for certain shows and time slots. And apparently the American public mostly likes to watch uninspired garbage that’s pretty and sensationalistic, because that’s what sells. I mean, WHO in their right mind watches those Bravo shows like the various “Real Housewives” or any of the others? It’s total contrived crap to basically either show contrived drama and obnoxious people with too much money, or worse, to make fun of people of lower socio-economic groups (Honey Boo Boo).
But apparently a whole lot of people dig that kind of thing, and based on what I’ve seen about pro football and boxing matches, they’d probably love gladiatorial combat as well.
The fact that there were Nicktoons could be seen as a sign of network decay. When I watched Nickelodeon in the early 80s, there was a strict no-cartoons policy, and a lot of the programming was more of an educational or serious bent, with shows like Livewire, Kids’s Writes, Standby: Lights, Camera, Action (with Leonard Nimoy!), and What Will They Think of Next? Pinwheel was the mainstay of the morning programming, and the after-school block that I watched was You Can’t Do That on Television, The Tomorrow People, and the horror/mysterty anthology The Third Eye. The only cartoons I ever saw on Nick until Mysterious Cities of Gold and Belle & Sebastian showed up in the mid-80s were part of Special Delivery, which was an anthology showing a grab bag of kids’ made-for-TV movies and afterschool specials that Nick had hoovered up.
And worse, Nickelodeon would hold onto one or two episodes of a show for years, so it could release them one by one and keep claiming that they had new episodes? Then again, it wasn’t just Nickelodeon; IIRC, when three new episodes of Recess were created after the final three-parter was turned into a theatrical movie (so there would be 100 episodes to sell to foreign markets), IIRC, two aired one year, and one aired the next, and both times, ABC’s Fall Saturday Morning Preview special would mention “new episodes this season.”
Back to being On Topic…when The Weather Channel debuted, did it have reality programming, or was it just 24/7 weather forecasts?
They are still part of the universe of “TV channels (of all media).” Just pointing out that your definitive declarations don’t apply quite as broadly as your assertions. And then went on to point out that your universal truths aren’t even universal for ad-sponsored channels.
I’d like to give a shout out to Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim.
Yes, I realize that much of their content is reruns and even live action shorts (and the live action goes against “Cartoon” in their title) but thanks to AS and especially for it’s trying out so much different stuff (not all of it works, but got to love the attempts) it’s been on my radar to tune in every night for quite a long time now. And I can’t say that for many channels on my satellite.
But back to the OP…
Has Headline News been mentioned yet? I skimmed through all the posts and didn’t see it. Back in the 90’s when I used to stay out a lot more often and get home at some ungodly hour, if I wasn’t too wasted, I’d turn on HN to at least catch up to what was going on. Every half hour, all the top stories, weather, sports, etc… would be covered. It was convenient to tune in at any time and get the news. Now if i ever turn on HN, it’s the same as all the other “news” stations. Pundits bitching about something or other.
The problem is that “television” is no longer a simple monochromatic (or even RGB) continuum. If you don’t differentiate the various services, everything turns to mushy, meaningless “but what about…” exceptions… just as you’re doing.
Over the past several years of fairly focused study and writing on the topic, I’ve developed a simple two-tined taxonomy: if it’s supported by ad revenue (and usually otherwise “free” and unlimited), it’s what we have traditionally called “television” and what’s shown is content to drive ad revenue. That’s true whether it’s Big-3 OTA, the bulk of mainstream cable channels or most streaming services that include or embed ads.
If it’s supported by direct payment and subscription and no overt ads, what’s shown is commodity, and other than being shown to individual viewers, is pretty much indistinguishable from “movies.”
Even the latter is heavily influenced by advertising and marketing content, but it’s not entirely funded by (and thus driven to dance to the tune of) advertising.
Or you can mush it all together, from CBS-NBC-ABC to cable channels to HBO to YouTube, call it “television” and argue in endless vague circles.
USA Network in it’s scrappy alt days used to broadcast The Grateful Dead’s New Year’s Eve shows live and had late night programming ‘UP! All Night’ with cheesy hosts and MST3K level B movies and shows.
Quite a while back, the Sacramento area got a new channel (58) that ran nothing but the oldest, dustiest reruns - on the “Car 54, Where Are You” and “Leave It to Beaver” level. It was a great break from everything else at the time.
As they developed their footing among the more established channels, they went more mainstream until they were indistinguishable, and eventually they were one minor network or another, switching every few years. A loss.
One of their first steps towards mainstream was to add 1-minute “news updates” every hour or so, read by frozen-face Sorta Pretty People in the most bizarre manner. I had my 12yo convinced they were animatronic figures.
None of your focused study has discovered the prestige projects that networks keep on the air as loss leaders?
Just how many K words do you want me to post? Of course I’m aware of the exceptions and outliers. Which, by the way and more as confirmation of my point than contradiction, usually makes trade and sometimes public headlines when a program is kept on the air against insufficient revenue.
None of which changes the basic assertion: if it’s funded by ad revenue, the quest for that revenue trumps all other aspects. All other. Either a program pulls in what the channel operators perceive as adequate-to-maximum revenue, or it’s gone. Doesn’t matter if Shakespeare wrote it, CB DeMille fillmed it and it changes every life it touches. Gone for another reality show.
Until you really grasp how ad revenue drives nearly everything we see on television, you can’t really make sense of the choices and actions. You get “My god, another reality show about supermodels tearing off each others’ bikinis. Just how low does [channel] have to stoop to get viewers?” - which becomes a self-answering question. It’s not even that different for the premium channels: if enough people don’t pay, the program goes. Case in point, Carnivale, which was visually stunning, groundbreaking in storytelling, and was given a second season only through something between charity and stubbornness… despite HBO’s stated commitment to finish all the shows it started.
The really, really, really short version: what seem to be exceptions often aren’t.
Happy to talk by the hour about the details, but this doesn’t really seem to be the thread for it.
That was my only point. Your original claims didn’t seem to be aware of the exceptions and outliers.
Well, duh. This basic point is obvious and self-evident. Nobody would ever question it. It’s equivalent to studying water to see if it’s wet.
I was correcting your absolutist, no exceptions post. eg: All the “/Full Stop” crap.
I think, for the most part, everyone realizes that TV channels, be they on regular airwaves or cable/satellite, exist to make money. And (unfortunately) like many businesses, will simply see what others are doing to make money and will just copy them. Despite what your original Business Plan or Company Directive was, you’ll change it to follow suit with everyone else.
Yes, we all know that.
But that doesn’t mean, as viewers, that we have to like it.
What gets me though, is that if ANY of the heads of these channels, the businessmen who make the decisions had an ounce of creativity in their mind, they could find a way to make their channel work AND make revenue with sticking to their origins.
Take TV Land for instance. A very recognizable name that lets potential viewers know that this channel is a land populated by TV. Years ago they began showing movies, which in and of itself doesn’t go against it’s roots of TV, since TV, networks especially, having been airing movies since it’s inception, but why did they have to air movies that EVERYONE (TNT, AMV, TBS, FX, USA etc…) was airing?
Really, TV Land had an avenue to go down and stay true to their roots that NO other cable channel had. Why didn’t they air Made for Television Movies? There have been hundreds and hundreds of films made strictly for TV (the old ABC Movie of the Week comes to mind, which gave us “Duel”, “The Night Stalker”, “When Michael Calls”, “The Point!” and “Killdozer” to name just a few) it could be promoted as both retro, for those who remember them, and new, since I’m sure MANY of these films have never been seen since their first airing 40, 50 years ago.
Yes, most channels begin with a unique premise but unfortunately after a few years look just like all the other channels, claiming that it’s only for revenues, but if that’s the case, IMO, they’re lousy businessmen. If you have a station that has a different business plan then anyone else, with a little imagination and creativity you can make it work AND make revenue. If you have to resort to being just like everyone else, why are you bothering to exist in the first place? You’re just clogging up one of my Cable channels.