The Reason for the Coming Collapse of Television...? The "Second Screen" Principle

For years, I have been railing against "prestige" cable.

It's too flabby. Rather than getting to points quickly, every show now pads the hell out of its runtime by limiting the number of consequential events in an hour's worth of show to 1-3, and then filling up the rest of the time with people talking to each other about their soap opera problems.

And not resolving them. That is key. If there's an interpersonal problem that gets resolved, fine, that's a bit of drama carried by conversation.

But when they just keep blabbing about the same problems every week, never resolving them? That is just stringing the audience along, padding the runtime, and spinning plates on stage.

Another element of the flabbiness is that every actor takes long actorly pauses when speaking. To further pad out the runtime.

That can be an effective tactic when used sparingly.

When used with

Every

Single

Sentence,

it's maddening.

People, and by people I mean women, keep suggesting I watch this show or that one. And I keep telling them, I cannot sit and watch an hour long TV show to see three or four minutes, tops, of actual story.

If I had that kind of free time, I'd actually read a book for once.

I had previously watched shows like this, "prestige" shows which thought "prestige" meant "wasting the viewer's precious time." Netflix's overpraised Marvel TV shows were all like this.

I've noticed that women have solved this problem by... always being on their phones or computers while watching -- theoretically -- television. They have realized that 90% of the runtime of the shows they watch is pure filler, so they mostly play on their phones scrolling through Twitter and watching TikToks and occasionally look up if they hear someone shouting dramatically or maybe if they hear a gunshot.

I've said before, maybe not here, that a cell phone is now a required peripheral for "watching" television. You absolutely just cannot watch this very expensive paint drying without something else to occupy your mind.

I quit watching the Marvel TV shows when I realized that when I was "watching" these shows, I was actually just reading Twitter 90% of the time (this is when I was on Twitter) and only occasionally looking up at the TV show. Usually I would miss the few important moments in a show, but would realize I missed something, so I'd rewind a bit and see if anything consequential happened.

A show that had to be watched like that is not worth watching. That's how people watch porn.

Yesterday Instapundit linked an article from July 25th. Not only is Hollywood aware that their "prestige" cable shows are 43 minutes of flabby filler and three minutes of actual story, but they're actually demanding that scripts be written this way.

And they're demanding that shows be written this way because they're aware that they've now conditioned their audience -- mostly women -- to play on their phones while "watching" their boring content, and don't want to interrupt "viewers" too much by requiring that they pay attention too much.

They don't want the TV shows interfering with Twitter and TikTok.

This was all confessed by Justine Bateman. Yes, that Justine Bateman. Mallory from Family Ties. She's a producer now.

And she says that scripts get notes that say, basically, too much is happening in this episode, it might bother viewers to make them look up at the TV too much.

They have a term for this type of "entertainment" -- Second Screen.

No, the phone isn't the Second Screen. The phone is the First Screen, the more important screen people are looking at.

It's the TV that's the Second Screen, the unimportant one.

Today [this is from July 25, remember], I came across this amazing interview with Justine Bateman in The Hollywood Reporter. For those of you who don't know, Justine Bateman is a writer, director, and producer. Recently, she contributed her expertise as an AI consultant for SAG-AFTRA's negotiating committee.

Bateman began her career in Hollywood with an acclaimed and Emmy-nominated portrayal of Mallory Keaton on the TV show Family Ties.

In her interview, Bateman discussed a range of ideas in Hollywood, but one quote about storytelling shook me to my core.

Bateman said, "I've heard from showrunners who are given notes from the streamers that 'This isn't second screen enough.' Meaning, the viewer's primary screen is their phone and the laptop and they don't want anything on your show to distract them from their primary screen because if they get distracted, they might look up, be confused, and go turn it off. I heard somebody use this term before: they want a 'visual muzak.' When showrunners are getting notes like that, are they able to do their best work? No."

It's hard to put into words how horrifying this situation is to hear for a writer and for anyone interested in storytelling as a career. The very idea that streamers would want us to dumb down material so people who are not watching won't lose their place is the direct antithesis of the art we all strive to create.

Well to be honest I saw clips of She-Hulk and I'm not sure you guys have anything better to offer.

But yeah, I agree with the general point. Television is now written by people who are only pretending to write, and watched by people only pretending to watch.

In the headline I promised a "collapse" of television. I can't guarantee that, but the future looks dim: Disney is trying to sell off its broadcast and cable operations, because they see little future in them.

They're going to focus on streaming.

Which is also a bust.

The Anticlimactic Death of the Streaming Wars

Productions are grinding to a halt and Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, and Max are leaning hard on ad-supported models. The result of all this disruption might just be everything old being new again.

The article whines that the "queer" A League of Their Own just got cancelled by Amazon after only one poorly-viewed season. Amazon took the cover of the strike as an excuse to cancel a show they had already tried to cancel once, before the woke gay producer made noise about it and forced Amazon to give him a second season with half the episode count of the first one.

The article starts by complaining that this kind of edgy All Gay All the Time crap was what made streaming and "prestige" cable different, but now market forces are pushing streamers to offer shows that normies might actually want to watch.

Just like regular TV.

When the world looks back in, say, 30 years, the halcyon days of streaming will be looked upon as optimistic and fleeting--a time when Silicon Valley largesse meant Amazon would drop hundreds of millions of dollars on the Tolkien adaptation Rings of Power and Netflix would back money trucks up to Shonda Rhimes' house so she could develop Bridgerton. In all likelihood, those kinds of deals will still exist in 2053, but as competition in the streaming space gets tighter, the moonshot projects will likely be fewer and the emphasis on return-on-investment will only increase.

This writing has been on the wall for a while, but got reinforced this week when The Hollywood Reporter pointed out that streamers are increasingly guiding users to ad-supported versions of their services, largely by increasing the cost of their ad-free tiers. Earlier this month, Disney announced that the cost per month of Disney+ and Hulu would be going up three bucks. Paramount+ swapped its $10 ad-free plan for a $12 one that includes Showtime. Netflix offers a $7/month ad-backed plan and a premium one that costs more than $15. Peacock, in July, upped the price of its ad-supported version by one dollar and its ad-free iteration by two.

As long foretold, this all just seems like streaming becoming the new cable TV. Now that there are more streaming services than there used to be network television stations, people are trying to save money on all those subscriptions. If ads help them do that, so be it.

So... people cut the cable because they were tired of paying huge amounts of money for TV, and then having to sit through commercials to watch it.

And now streamers are charging people an arm and a leg to subscribe to their services, and then forcing people to sit through commercials to watch it. (At least, if they don't want to pay about double the subscription fee for the ad-free version.)

And this is going to work out better than the dying broadcast TV sector because why, exactly? Just because they have 50% gay and "diverse" content, which people aren't interested in watching?

posted by Ace at 04:30 PM

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