Programmers Used To Dream of Hits; Now It's the Ghost Of Autumn Present
By Tom Shales
Washington Post
America's TV networks are programming every season as if it could be their last. And it could.
With new technologies exploding left and right and new media competing for eyeballs, there is the sense of being on the brink, a precipice, the last little beat before "the tipping point" is reached, but no one knows for sure what we're going to tip into. So it is that the networks' new fall prime-time schedules -- for the season about to begin , after the Emmy Awards -- could be posted right next to the proverbial Handwriting on the Wall. The new season is notable not for hype and hoopla -- the kind of trumped-up excitement that used to reach an infectious state in years gone by -- but by a sense of the network executives holding their breath and hoping to survive.
Happy anticipation has been replaced by mystified desperation.
This is not the season of the reality show, or the game show, or the sitcom, or the unscripted comedy, or any other particular genre. It's the season of hanging on by the fingernails, of trying anything that just might work.
One could say that network programmers are out of touch with the American people and that their selection of new shows lacks relevance. But new shows are always patterned after past successes, so this year's batch does reflect to some degree the mood of the viewing nation. A surplus of superheroes and superheroines pulling off superheroics suggests a renewed appetite (also evident at movie theaters) for escapist fantasies that center on miraculous abilities, and this must be related to a national mood of yearning for a marvel to "save" us from a dispiriting status quo.
(Continued here.)
Washington Post
America's TV networks are programming every season as if it could be their last. And it could.
With new technologies exploding left and right and new media competing for eyeballs, there is the sense of being on the brink, a precipice, the last little beat before "the tipping point" is reached, but no one knows for sure what we're going to tip into. So it is that the networks' new fall prime-time schedules -- for the season about to begin , after the Emmy Awards -- could be posted right next to the proverbial Handwriting on the Wall. The new season is notable not for hype and hoopla -- the kind of trumped-up excitement that used to reach an infectious state in years gone by -- but by a sense of the network executives holding their breath and hoping to survive.
Happy anticipation has been replaced by mystified desperation.
This is not the season of the reality show, or the game show, or the sitcom, or the unscripted comedy, or any other particular genre. It's the season of hanging on by the fingernails, of trying anything that just might work.
One could say that network programmers are out of touch with the American people and that their selection of new shows lacks relevance. But new shows are always patterned after past successes, so this year's batch does reflect to some degree the mood of the viewing nation. A surplus of superheroes and superheroines pulling off superheroics suggests a renewed appetite (also evident at movie theaters) for escapist fantasies that center on miraculous abilities, and this must be related to a national mood of yearning for a marvel to "save" us from a dispiriting status quo.
(Continued here.)
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