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Grant McCracken at "This Blog Sits..." has a good post about the new HBO comedy series "Flight of The Conchords". It caught my interest because I really like the show and have been trying to convince some of my online buddies to watch it.
McCracken is dead-on to call the show a "second-look" series. The humor in the show can be bone-dry at times, and there's a lot of background information to process. As a result, it's the sort of television show that's difficult to appreciate at the superficial level that most of us use when evaluating a new show. And that makes the show a very difficult sell. In fact, though McCracken doesn't mention it in this blog post, the show was actually pitched to at least one "traditional" network, which passed on it. Which is probably just as well, because it probably would not have survived more than a couple of episodes on ABCNBCCBSFOXGW.
As he notes, by landing on HBO, the show gets a completely different model for distribution than a traditional television series gets. HBO runs their programming at a wide variety of times throughout the week, making it possible for a viewer to watch an episode more than once (if they haven't already recorded it). They also make entire episodes of their series available online for the week following the first on-air broadcast. (McCracken mentions a sort of "digital divide" between viewers who "get" the idea of watching online and those who don't, and this turned out to be relevant in my group with regard to enticing people to watch this show)
What he doesn't consider in this post is the effect of the emergence of BitTorrent and the vast P2P sharing of television shows. It's trivial to find almost any television program on any network in almost any country that isn't uploaded to a BitTorrent site within moments of it being aired. The effects of this "underground" redistribution are several: by significantly increasing the availability of a program, it invites even the most casual viewer to watch one or more episodes with a very low threshold of investment. Thus it's even easier to get that "second-look" viewing which might be necessary to get a viewer to make the on-going investment in watching. Unfortunately for HBO, though, this series of investments happens completely outside of their control -- it probably will not bring new viewers to HBO itself, even if the fan base of the show grows and grows. However, there is probably some spillover effect: if the show is popular enough among the "digerati", there is likely to be enough interest to entice more traditional television viewers to watch the show. HBO surely knows this and wisely does not do much to limit the digital redistribution via BitTorrent (which, frankly, I'm not sure they could anyway).
I'm not much for repeat viewing, personally, but I didn't really need it to develop an interest in this show. It's definitely not everyone's cup of tea, but by the end of the first episode I was hooked.
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