The Sincerest Form?

Sometimes I wonder…

Television executives, whoever and whatever they are, keep throwing new series at us.  Something worked once, so they change it slightly, and put it up again.  Cop shows are popular?  See ten or twenty copies come up.  Doctor shows?  All TV is falling sick with exotic diseases.  Private eyes?  You’d think half the population had a license.

And the sad thing?  This is not new.  Sketch comedy shows were big from the late 40’s through the 70’s, with Your Show of Shows, Texaco Star Theater with Milton Berle, The Jack Benny Program, carrying over from radio, Burns and Allen, Garry Moore, Red Skelton, and Carol Burnett… Westerns, once a staple of Saturday matinees in movie theaters, dominated early TV, with shows like Gunsmoke, Have Gun, Will Travel, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Wagon Train, Wanted: Dead or Alive, The Rebel, Branded, Rawhide, Bonanza, High Chapparal, The Big Valley, and so many more.  Dragnet, another transplant from radio, led the police parade starting in the 1950’s, along with other shows like The Naked City, M Squad, Burke’s Law, and their private eye kin like Hawaiian Eye, Surfside Six, 77 Sunset Strip, and Checkmate,ringing the changes.

For every show I’ve mentioned above, I’m sure there are probably six or seven I’ve missed.

As I said earlier, imitation is a way of life in television… network executives want it “the same, but different“.  Series are sold, premiered, and, if they don’t get traction with an audience immediately, cancelled.  A series getting picked up for a full season’s worth of shows these days is news because of the infrequency of its occurrence.  The trade papers are full of stories of a series getting “the ax” after three episodes aired… and one was even cancelled before its first episode premiered.

Market research, focus groups, “target demographics”, the “Q” rating (a measurement of a performer’s “likeability”), and other quantifications are attempting to objectify the highly subjective field of audience taste.  These methods have been moderately successful, at best, mostly in providing the broadcast and cable networks with a means to set their advertising rates.  The highly coveted “18 to 49 male” demographic, supposedly the group that spends the most money, is the group at which most of the programming is aimed.  (No surprise.)  So, there are action-filled shows, adventure, sports, scantily clad women, and things on the order of “X-Games”, “Wipe-Out”, and “American Ninja Warrior”.

Since research is now showing that females are becoming more of a desirable audience, based on “purchasing power”, we have shows like “The Real Housewives of Wherever”, “The Bachelor/Bachelorette”, and nighttime soap operas which show both men and women in various stages of undress.  This, too, is not new; witness the 70’s and 80’s phenomena of Dallas, Dynasty, and Falcon Crest.  Today it’s Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, Revenge, or True Blood.

This fractionating of the audience because of the proliferation of “new media” has also been going on since the beginning of our perceptions of media… The “legitimate theatre” begat vaudeville, which spun off burlesque… Movies arrived, silent at first, then gaining a voice and raiding theater, vaudeville, and burlesque for talent, as did its main competition, radio.  When television came into view in the 1940’s, the movies, reacting to losing some of their audience, came out with big gimmicks like stereophonic sound, Cinerama, CinemaScope, VistaVision, Techniscope, Technirama, Todd-AO, and other forms of wide-screen panorama projection… Sensurround, Dolby Stereo, THX from Lucasfilm, 5.1 and 7.1 stereo systems, and so much more became the buzzwords buzzing in our heads.

And all of this in the service of putting YOUR entertainment dollars into THEIR pockets.

And what are the net results of all this maneuvering, jockeying for position, and technical innovation?

I think one song sums it up… “500 Channels and Nothing’s On”.  In my opinion, there is precious little worth anyone’s time out there… and even with the growing trend of “rolling your own” with the now-ubiquitous portable video recording and editing equipment, which also started back at the beginning of movies with home cameras and projectors, is not a guarantee of anything worth watching.  (Think about it… the most popular things to see on the Internet are cat videos and pornography.)  The taste of audiences is a fickle thing; rapidly shifting, difficult to pin down.

It always was.

So, I still wonder…

Dramatis Personae

The cast of characters so far (in order of appearance):

ME – Old enough to know better, young enough to do it anyway, and quick to reach for the pain relievers.

MY DEARLY BELOVED WIFE – Surely earning her place in whatever heaven there may be for putting up with me.

GABBY – more formally known as Gabrielle Velvet, informally known as Kitty Putty, Purr Bucket, Stinker, or Hey You.

THE KID – Our “child of the heart”, a former foster daughter who decided to stick around to see what happens.

I bought a button a long time ago, and it fits better even now – “Don’t try to out-weird me… I get stranger things than you free in my breakfast cereal.”

I do many things, including write, shoot photos, shoot video, draw, and edit.  I published a “fanzine” (a small-press science fiction fan magazine) for a number of years, and some copies are still available online at http://efanzines.com (look for “Al Bouchard” under authors, and the two titles are scopus:3007 and Lightning Round, available in PDF versions.)

One of these years I’ll post some of my previous attempts at making a web-based comic (No, Brock Heasley, you’re in no danger.)

Cheers!

Ave atque vale

Hail and farewell…

Earlier today, the 19th, we had to put down another one of our cats.  This is never a painless thing, and we have had quite a bit of problems emotionally because of it.

Shadow Rex Bouchard was eighteen years old, and lived with us for ten years.  When he found us, he had been on the street for two winters.  (We think he belonged to a senior citizen at one of the complexes at the end of our street, and when the senior died, he was cut loose.)  Once we took him in, he never showed any inclination to leave the house again.  He did look out any open screen door, but that was just mild curiosity, I think.

He would cry if one of us left the house for any length of time, and be right at the door when we came back.  He was a cuddler.  He always ate more than his share of cat food, possibly a hangover from when he was on the street.

We miss him already.

At the beginning of this year, we had four cats (having taken my mother’s cat when my mother died)… now we’re down to one.  This is not promising, I’d say, but we’re old enough that replacing any of them is not on the program.  We have no one to take care of a cat if something happens to us.

It’s hard.

Later.