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Tag television programming

A One And A Two And A Three

By Brian Filed in Food, Links Tagged with , , , , September 6th, 2011 @ 11:30 am


Original photo by ejdoolittle

This 3Quarks Daily post from a few weeks ago takes an easy swipe at TV cooking shows by loosely dividing them into three main types: “Exotica” (lots of unusual ingredients, expensive kitchens, etc.), “Dumb Gluttony”, and “Celebrity Chef”. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the various genres of food television, and he’s missed some of the categories that Food Network has experimented with to greater and lesser success, most notably the competition/reality genre, but some of his observations are good.

Sometimes I wonder how much longer the Food Network and its imitators (mainly the Travel Channel) can go on. I have to admit that the advent of the competition shows on Food Network really revived my interest in that channel after several years of them casting about for programming other than the traditional cooking show. There were definitely a few lonely years in there where there wasn’t a whole lot worth watching. Maybe Food Network will ultimately find itself going down the same road as the History Channel, which is no longer about history, and TLC which is no longer about education (TLC originally stood for “The Learning Channel”) and stop running food-related shows entirely.

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Deconstructing Mythbusters

By Brian Filed in Infographics, Links Tagged with , , May 16th, 2011 @ 11:19 am

Thanks to the Miracle of DVRs, I almost never have to watch an episode of “Mythbusters” in real time, but this excellent post at Baekdal.com does a great job of breaking down an episode into its components and then explaining exactly how the producers assemble the segments into a show that manages to stretch the viewer’s tolerance for commercials and filler to the very breaking point and still deliver an hour-long program that keeps you watching for the whole time. I have learned from years of experience taping the show that if you’re particularly sharp with the remote, you can even trim out the repetitious exposition and “Don’t Try This At Home” bits and watch just the myth segments in only a little more than half an hour.

It’s worth noting that just because he’s singling out “Mythbusters”, it doesn’t mean that every single show on television isn’t doing the exact same thing, although “Mythbusters” is particularly egregious about the repetition of the setup compared to some other shows. Cable reality shows in particular are very adept at using as little actual content as possible, and the tactic that I particularly despise is the “teaser” that leads in to almost every commercial break. Between unnecessarily leading clips and clips that spoil a moment that would be funnier left un-teased, they aren’t doing much to keep me tuned in, they’re just wasting time.

I was also intrigued to learn that the “Mythbusters” site offers so much additional footage. They hype it on the show all the time, but I’ve never really bothered to look, since most of the Discovery Network show websites are even more content-free than the shows. According to Thomas Baekdal, though, the additional footage online frequently outstrips the amount shown on-air. As he points out at the end of the post, this really highlights the dilemma television producers face with the diminishing value of their product on-air in a world where everyone expects everything to be online.

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I Must Go Down To The Sea Again

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , April 16th, 2008 @ 3:47 pm

TV watching is a “feast-or-famine” situation for me. I only regularly watch about half a dozen shows, all of which have either limited runs or produce new episodes in small batches. That means that some of the shows I like are only on a couple of times a year, and others I get to watch in six-week clumps then ignore for three months while they repeat over and over. It doesn’t help that a good number of the shows are on the Discovery Channel, which has never met a series it couldn’t run into the ground by airing it four times a day, five days a week.

For those of you just dying to know about my television watching habits, these are the shows I watch regularly: (after the jump)

Read more

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Must See TV?

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , , April 3rd, 2008 @ 3:00 pm

NBC got a jump on some of the other broadcast networks this week by rolling out their fall schedule earlier than usual. Not that there was all that much to roll out. They’re only premiering four new series in the traditional September slot, and only have a few more slated for later debuts throughout the season.

While the Writer’s Guild strike undoubtedly played a significant part in weakening new offerings from all the networks, the AdAge article linked above points out that it’s not the only factor in reshaping the networks’ approach to programming. Over at NewTeeVee.com, Chris Albrecht points out that NBC also announced a handful of original online series as well as supplementary online content to go along with shows like “Heroes”, “The Office” and “30 Rock”. The significant drop off in television viewership is reducing the value of new television series, and so the networks are beginning to pay attention to using online distribution as a lower-risk method for attracting audiences, though they’ve yet to demonstrate that you can successfully port an online show to primetime (witness the embarrassment NBC suffered with the utter failure of “Quarterlife”).

Even though the television networks have been trying to adapt to the changes wrought by the arrival of the Internet since practically Day One, they have floundered year after year after year without really understanding the nature of the change. The writer’s strike was really just the catalyst that seemed to finally compel the networks to revisit their tired models of programming. It will be interesting to see what the other networks bring to the table in terms of reimagining the relationship between themselves and the viewers.

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The Box They Buried Vaudeville In

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , , , , January 18th, 2008 @ 2:28 pm

Television genres come and go. Sitcoms rule the airwaves for a few years, then hour-long crime dramas take over, or doctor shows, or soap operas, or whatever. The current strength of “reality” TV is due in no small part to the surprise success of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”, which ushered in a slew of prime time game shows, which had been absent from television since the scandals of the 1950s. The game show craze spawned “Survivor” and “The Bachelor”, both of which were game-like, and so on and so on.

So it was inevitable that another hoary old television genre would work its way back — musical variety shows. If you are over the age of 40, you are old enough to remember at least some of the shows at the tail end of this genre in the late 1960s and 1970s like the last years of the Ed Sullivan Show, or possibly the Smothers Brothers or Carol Burnett. If you’re over the age of 50, you definitely remember those shows and probably a good deal more of them, as there were plenty to go around. TV historians like to say that the TV variety show was “the box they buried vaudeville in” because it was the last venue for that entire style of entertainment.

MIT media professor Henry Jenkins is back at his blog and lets us know that he recently was included in an upcoming PBS series about the history of early television, and wrote this article for the series’ website about the variety show episode. In that article he lays out his claim that the variety show has returned in its 21st century guise as a variation on reality shows; American Idol, America’s Got Talent, Bruno vs. Carrie Ann, etc. are quintessentially variety shows repackaged for contemporary tastes and sensibilities. To make the throwback complete, there are even off-air scandals about rigging, just like the quiz show scandals of yore.

You realize, of course, that this means we’re a bit overdue for the return of the Western. Deadwood did pretty well on HBO, and if they ever resolve the writers’ strike, maybe they’ll work in a few horse operas.

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