D.T. Goes Off: Welcome To The Post Prime-Time TV Era (Oct 10, 2006)

With Youtube.com, live365.com, myspace.com, and a large selection of other independent streaming radio stations coming from all over the world on the Internet, and high-speed cable (Cox San Diego just upped their bandwidth to a demented high of 12mbps (that's MEGA bits per second)), fewer and fewer people have the patience of putting up with the decline of quality and diversity that prime time network television used to offer as late as the Silver Age of Television in the late 1970s.

As old shows featuring your favorite stars have ceased production and left the network schedule, so are about ten percent (my estimate, not an Arbitron measurement) of the fans who chose to replace the hour they used to spend watching "Rodney" or "Charmed" to name two with other activities or entertainment from the Internet. As time went on, as more old favorites cease either by their own choice or by the network's cancellation, time is freed up to explore other choices that they have been missing.

As you may have noticed by the look of prime time television, there's nothing on but dumb sitcoms where the men get bashed or are portrayed as idiots, serials that we just don't have the patience for, reality shows that are not important, clones of CSI and Law & Order all over the dial, medical and law dramas, and a show about a Friday night high school activity on a Tuesday night (I watched Sanford and Son and Rockford Files on Fridays when I was in high school).

On the bright side, ABC is televising college football on Saturday nights and NBC is televising NFL on Sunday nights. At least they're bringing in the hard-to-get male audiences that have been abandoning prime-time network televsion in favor of other choices. Check out this article on Mediaweek: "Basketball Coverage Might Tail ABC's Saturday Football" http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003222157

Excerpt: The considerable ratings success of Saturday night college football on ABC has some executives at the network considering a move to continue airing live sports programming in that daypart once the college football season ends. Among the possibilities—telecasts of the National Basketball Association or NCAA basketball.

Excerpt: Airing NBA games essentially in prime time on Saturdays would either require going back to the league to acquire additional rights, or working out an arrangement to give up some weeknight rights in exchange. NBA Commissioner David Stern has said discussions with the league have yet to take place, adding that while obstacles do exist, he would be amenable to negotiations if ABC/ESPN moved forward with plans.

Excerpt: Media buyers, citing the dearth of TV viewers watching scripted shows on Saturday nights, are enthusiastic about ABC continuing to air live sports programming in that slot. Ratings among men 18-34 are up 200 percent (that's a factor of three) from last year. Among men 18-49, ratings are up 140 percent and for men 25-54, they’re up 140 percent.

With the post-season baseball playoffs underway, Sunday night's embarrassment of riches occurred in prime time when Fox was showing the terminal Padres at St. Louis NLDS game opposite NBC's Chargers vs. Pittsburgh game from 5pm-8pm, giving my radio and TV dials so much of a workout (OK, Fox 6 and NBC 7 are right next door to each other, so is Chargers on 105.3 and Padres on 105.7) that my wrist almost suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome tyring to listen to both games at the same time.

The baseball playoffs provided me with a diversion away from my normal choices of listening to XM, Internet radio, or watching Comedy Central. Since there's nothing on the broadcast networks (Fox's animated comedies are pre-empted anyway for the baseball playoffs), the choice for me was basically a nobrainer. Somehow, it's the thrill of watching teams on the brink of elimiation that get me interested in the playoffs.

Jeff Probst can't get me to watch Survivor even if he paid me a million dolars just to watch though everybody on the show is on the brink of being voted out though reality shows (which does have a writer) are borrowing the element of the brink of elimination from the sporting events (which you can't script some of the weird plays).

I'm not missing anything from network prime time television since there's nothing for me to watch. I'm a male, 46, and find most of the stuff there are made either for women or for people with only a high school diploma or less.

The Union-Buffoon resident entertainment reporter, Karla Peterson, is giddy about prime time television today (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CW). Network TV is mostly a vast desert with tumbleweeds, vultures, and dead carcasses unlike the Metropolis she thinks it is today, Broadcast prime time network television is nothing but a ghost town. I don't even subscribe to TV Guide anymore since the editors with a sponge for a brain trashed it into an unreadable tabloid.

Here is the link to Carla's article. You can put in a fake e-mail address such as f**k@f***you.com (my favorite, it takes it anyway) so that you don't get spam from them buffoons.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20061009/news_1c09karla.html

News came out that networks are considering pulling some shows. One show, Smith, was just cancelled by CBS. Another, Kidnapped, is ending after 13 weeks. Others struggling or on hiatus are Vanished, Studio 60, Friday Night Lights, Six Degrees, and Veronica Mars (Stu Seagall is going to kill me for saying this). You can have the sexiest and sassiest women like Kristen Bell to star in a show, but it's no guarantee that it will bring in the viewers if (a: it's a serial of any length, b: the show doesn't appeal to a wide audience such as men and older women, c: there's only one attractive female star, and d: it's on the CW.)

The problem with networks is that once an original idea gets successful, like "Friends", "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," "Survivor", or even "The Brady Bunch", the other networks call the producers and ask them to create their own versions of the shows their competetor is running, with disastorous results in the ratings, even to the point of bringing down the ratings of the original which started the saturation of the show concept.

With over 1,000 channels (and not much on if you can't afford digital cable) on cable and satellite as well as about a dozen from local broadcasters, chances of meeting another person who watched the same thing as you did are one in a thousand, compared with 30 years ago when we once had three broadcast networks and about two independent stations on average. Back in 1976, people were buzzing about three women being the leads in a TV show called "Charlie's Angels", something that was never tried before, and it not only brought in the females, naturally, but the men who were drooling over the then-sexy Farrah Fawcett Majors.

After that became successful, the networks tried other three-women lead ideas such as "Flying High", "Blansky's Beauties", "3 Girls 3", and "Sugar Time", all bombing. Some of which were just bad to begin with, but the concept of having women leading in a TV show did work later on in dramatic shows such as "Cagney and Lacey", "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", "Gilmore Girls", "Crossing Jordan", "Veronica Mars", and "Charmed", which coincidentally, had the first four letters the same as that of "Charlie's Angels", but were both produced by the late Aaron Spelling. Needless to say, none of the successors brought in the male viewers (except for me for Alyssa Milano on Charmed.)

Back in 1976, during the Silver Age of Televison as I like to call it, an era the late Buddy Blue of the Beat Farmers fame didn't care for, there was a wealth of diversity and variety to enjoy, even in daytime and Saturday mornings, everything from game shows to varieties to comedies not featuring South Park humor, to family friendly prime-time programming, with reruns of shows from pre-1975 all over the place. That was a bustling metropolis of televsion as I remember it.

Today, where are the "Muppet" and "Carol Burnett" type of variety shows of today? Where are the family friendly sitcoms like "Sanford and Son", "Happy Days", "WKRP in Cincinatti", "What's Happening?", even "Square Pegs"? What happened to all of the private investigator shows like "Rockford Files" and "Kojak?" How about the "Ed Sullivan" type variety shows? Why do all of today's shows have to be so dark and dreary? I like to see some shows lighten up. I like to see slapstick comedy and crazy plots with unthinkable real-life ideas employed and other stuff designed solely to entertain and to enlighten, bringing the hard working viewer relief from all of the stress and bad news that they have been having all day.

For now, at least we have the sporting events, youtube, live365, and even dfsxradio.com (my station) for relief from the real world stress.

Instead of fun shows to watch, we get stuff we don't care to waste our time sampling and finding out that the show sucks. Instead of good TV we used to get in all dayparts in 1976, we get bad TV in most broadcast dayparts.

We do appreciate good TV, but aside from youtube.com, we can find it on ESPN, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network/Adult Swim, Boomerang (Cox needs to carry this channel), Discovery, History, Versus (for NHL Hockey, yay!), TV Land, Nickelodeon/Nick at Nite, Fox Sports Networks, and reruns of the five Star Trek® franchise shows on a couple of networks.

With the quality of network TV so low today that you can slide it under a pregnant ant, it's no wonder that struggling networks such as i, CW, and My Network TV (what stupid names), are not getting ratings that would make the top 20 among all networks including cable. If you don't put on what the general audience wants to see, the show will get low ratings like the UPN-sized ratings NBC had last Wednesday with Kidnapped, so low that it almost came in fifth, but was fourth, just a few tenths of a rating above the CW.

TV is worse on network television than it has been since the doldrums of the early 1980s, in fact, it's the worst it's ever been, save for the four Fox animated cartoons, the only shows on network television that I'm currently watching. It's no wonder that I'm watching less TV than ever before becuase most of the network broadcast offerings are the worst than it has ever been in the history of the medium.

Back in 1976, I had about 30-40 must-see programs (including syndication's "The Muppet Show" on Friday nights) spanning from prime-time network TV to Saturday morning and daytime game shows (when I wasn't in school, I had to watch The Match Game and The Gong Show every chance I got). Today' there's only six (Fox comedies, plus South Park on Comedy Central, and Robot Chicken on Adult Swim), plus some others I occasionally watch on the cable channels without taping them as I have not much time to watch that much TV anyway. Plus I watch the comedy variety monologues from Jay Leno and David Letterman on opposing networks (I tape both while I sleep and watch them the next morning) and watch the comedy sketches and stand-up comedians when they're on. A few weeks ago, Letterman featured a week of ventriloquists, a lost comedy art form.

Back in the late 70s and early 80s, when there were two shows I wanted to watch at the same time, we didn't have VCRs (at least not the $100 price-range kind), no TiVo®, no bittorrents of illegal show uploads, no abc.com to watch "Welcome Back, Kotter", no file sharing. What did I have so I could watch Three's Company and MASH at the same time in 1977? I taped one show's audio on a cassette tape recorder from one TV, and watched another show, then in my car, I listened to the show I taped from the night before. There were once some really good choices opposite each other in those days. Sanford and Son/Chico and the Man vs. Donny and Marie. Happy Days/Laverne & Shirley vs. Baa Baa Black Sheep, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century vs. Mork & Mindy and Benson, Real People vs. Eight is Enough. Monday Night Football vs. WKRP in Cincinnatti. Simpsons vs. The Cosby Show. I did so much cassette tape juggling that nighttime was day and vice versa, listening to WKRP or Eight is Enough at 8am or following the Luke and Laura storyline on General Hospital at 10pm (nowdays, GH does airs on SoapNet, a cable network that didn't exist in 1981, at the same time.)

What happened to impossible choices like some of these pairings in years' past when we used to have great TV shows? Instead, Karla and the others are overhyping non-appealling parings like CSI vs. Grey's Anatomy (which both hit the top 2 two weeks ago thanks to video recording machines to delay one show while watching another), My Name is Earl/The Office vs. Survivor vs. Ugly Betty, none of which I care to watch. Bring back some fun shows that we can watch for a change, and increase in viewers!

Last Sundays Chargers and Padres games on two opposite networks in prime-time gave me a taste of the old days of the late 70s. I didn't use a video recorder to tape either one, as they are sports shows, and I can catch up on the highlights after 8pm when SportsCenter airs on ESPN. Two three-hour TV shows in one night is too much for me to handle.

Television has been a vast wasteland since the Bronze Age of Television in the late 90s recently ended with the ending of "That 70's Show" and "Charmed", two last non-animated shows I was watching, along with the endings of the series such as "Buffy", "Sabrina", "Seinfeld", "Drew Carey", "Rodney", "Blue Collar TV", "Whose Line Is It Anyway?", "Malcolm in the Middle" (the first four seasons before it sucked in the later seasons), "Futurama", and even "The Weird Al Show". With that, without any new quality shows to take the place of the departed, the era of prime-time broadcast network shows has officially been declared dead as of September 2006.

Reality, crime, serial, and legal dramas are overpolluting the network landscape, with My Network TV overpolluting the serial genre with two shows running five days a week for a limited time (some 60-80 episodes on estimate). Prime Time has been transformed from a bustling metropolis to a vast desert ghost town with roads in ruin, dusty wind gusts, tattered storefronts, crumbling housing, wild animals roaming for food, industrial waste, dying vegetation, undrinkable water, and unbreathable air, and many people have good reason for no longer being interested to try any of the broadcast network offerings as the lower ratings do show from year to year.

We have no patience for serials. Turn "Veronica Mars" into a non-serialized series. Look at the low rerun ratings of "Dallas" and "Beverly Hills 90210" for the reason why serialization of shows don't work in the long run, and may not even in the short run either. Only stand-alone episode series can bring in the viewers and keep them with episodes without requiring to watch the early shows to catch up. Serials do work well in comic books and other reading material even years after it's been introduced, but TV series just can't cut it.

It's no wonder that my three VCRs sit idle most of the time until Leno, Letterman, and Kimmel come on late at night, as late night television is the last bastion of broadcast network programming for males to enjoy.

The days of time shifting are all but history, except for late-night programming when someone interesting is a guest on Conan, Daly, or Ferguson.