Music impresario Don Kirshner, dead at 76, may not be remembered best for catapulting Kansas to stardom in the 1970s, nor for launching the career of the Monkees and launching the animated chart-toppers The Archies in the 1960s. Those accomplishments – even to the most die-hard, discriminating popular music critics – should be enough for us to mourn his passing today.
The era of big television series that much of the nation watched together—which lasted for more than three decades— is officially over, according to blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack, writing at newteevee.com: Internet video is growing at a significant pace. It has not yet taken a chunk out of the broadcast and cable audiences, but the trend is there. Shows on the web are infinitely more targeted than the shows broadcast and cable companies deliver. There are shows for old Jews who like jokes. There are shows for every type of video game geek. There are shows for every audience you can imagine. There is, in fact, a web show made just for you (although you probably haven’t found it yet). There will be “hit” shows on the web that have a profound influence on our culture. But they will not be the size of network television hits, or even cable television hits. The business model for broadcast television, however, requires mass audiences, because of the very nature of the way broadcast TV uses spectrum; put simply, broadcast TV distribution is too expensive to waste on niche programming. Thus, Hudack argues, the TV broadcast networks will soon die off or be
Why NBC canceled Law and Order and immediately ordered a season of Law and Order: Los Angeles is one of those mysteries only the wizards at the Peacock Network can answer. Actually, why they canceled Law and Order is obvious: the ratings had been falling for quite some time. As to why NBC thought people would like an LA version, I don’t know, but the new show is actually doing all right with audiences so far. Last week’s episode finished second in its timeslot (Wednesday, 10 p.m.), with an audience of 7.2 million (800,000 below its lead-in, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit). Viewers gave the show a B rating in the USA Today audience poll, making it the seventh-highest ranked out of twenty-one new series. Whether that success can be sustained remains in question, however, given the show’s excessive borrowings from its canceled predecessor. The show avoids one of the things that reportedly caused many people to stop watching Law and Order in recent years: overt leftist politics. But note that word ‘overt’. Many viewers will definitely be able to find things to be offended about in Law and Order: Los Angeles, though so far the show has admirably
If you’re interested in watching The Whole Truth, the new ABC legal drama (Wednesdays, 10 p.m. EDT), you might want to tune in tonight. It may not last long. The show is on life-support after debuting to an anemic total of 4.8 million viewers. It might last a little while, since it’s from Jerry Bruckheimer Productions, the makers of the successful CSI franchise and numerous other hit shows but also several unsuccessful series in recent years (such as Miami Medical and The Forgotten), but the lack of audience excitement (a C+ in USA Today‘s audience poll) suggests it’s going to be a tough slog. The show is certainly not bad, just not particularly compelling. Its biggest flaw appears to be the lack of any particularly likable characters among the leads. The latter seems an odd choice, especially given that there’s nothing in the concept to suggest the central characters couldn’t have had some charm, and the performers chosen to play them have a history of decent audience appeal. The concept is not only workable but in fact rather smart. It’s a legal show depicting both sides of a trial, as the prosecuor and defense both preapare their cases and then
TV time-shifting is becoming the norm.
I have long argued that contemporary U.S. entertainment offers a much greater variety of ideas and points of view than conservatives usually seem to realize, pointing out that many TV shows, movies, and music releases convey very sound values and ideas that traditionalists and lovers of liberty should appreciate. But there are still plenty of times when the producers of even good series that aren’t usually political (in contrast to, say, the intensely political Law and Order) have to take their jabs at the dangerously ignorant boobs they see as populating Middle America. Two crime dramas in the past week have done just that. Last week’s episode of The Closer, on TNT, set up a typical serial killer story but with an obviously political angle: the people being killed were all female illegal immigrants. Even more pointedly (spoiler alert), it turns out that the murderer is an agent of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) who chooses them as his targets because their lack of documentation makes it less likely he’ll be caught. The point of all of this is absurdly obvious, intended to suggest that illegal immigrants are unfairly singled our for abuse in the United States and made
It began with an eye opening. It ended with an eye closing. In “The End,” love conquered all. It’s a cliche, of course, but a time-honored one and it worked to brilliant effect in the series finale of “Lost,” which aired Sunday night on ABC. (This isn’t a recap, but spoilers will follow…) Millions of us followed these characters, led by Jack Shepherd (Matthew Fox), for six seasons as they struggled first to leave, and then to return, to the mysterious island where Oceanic 815 crashed in 2004. “Lost” didn’t always make sense. You had to be patient. You had to put up with a lot of nonsense. At times you wondered, with good reason, whether the writers were just making it up as they went along. But despite its flaws, “Lost” will undoubtedly go down as one of the finest, most beguiling science fiction programs in TV history. Was every questioned answered? Are you kidding? The Dharma Initiative was at bottom nothing more than a device to keep a couple of lead characters separated by space and time while bringing another pair together. The island at the center of the show was itself one big MacGuffin. Indeed, in the
In a move that bodes well to strengthen TV programming overall in both primetime and late night, NBC has confirmed that Jay Leno will be moved back to his original 11:30 slot and his 10 p.m. show canceled on February 11, as rumored over the past week. USA Today reports: Under the new plan, Late Night With Jimmy Fallon would move from 12:35 a.m. to 1:05. (Carson Daly‘s talk show, which now follows Fallon, would be canceled, though Daly would remain under contract at the network.). There are details yet to be worked out, however: But “as much as I would like to tell you we have a done deal, we know that’s not true,” Gaspin said. “The talks are still ongoing.” NBC expects to resolve O’Brien’s fate, one way or the other, by the time the Winter Olympics begin Feb. 12. The Olympics are expected to deliver a big audience the network plans to use to promote its rebuilt prime-time and late-night schedules starting March 1. Update, 4:2o EST: O’Brien says that he will leave NBC, Tonight. The new 10 p.m. schedule will likely include a return to scripted dramas. Insiders argue that cost-cutting
The ax has fallen on the first casualty of the new TV season. S. T. Karnick explains why.
A new study in the scientific journal Pediatrics confirms that sexual media content increases the likelihood of teen pregnancy.
Homosexual activists are applauding the rapidly increasing numbers of "transgender" characters and people on television, but they say there’s much more work to be done.
As the movie studios and TV channels and production companies contemplate the writers union’s demands, they might want to take a serious look at the lackluster performance of this year’s film releases and the horrible ratings for the current season’s new TV shows. The latter are simply disastrous and aptly reflect the lackluster quality of most of the new series. Although the new season has brought a continuation of the gradual increase in moral seriousness of new shows evident during the past few years, the tone of the new programs has been exceptionally downbeat, and viewerships have dropped rapidly after the first couple of weeks when viewers sampled the new shows.
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