The Shaky Future of Quality Television

Quality shows are an endangered species. The turn of the millennium saw a renaissance of TV fiction, where conventional formats were abandoned in favor of cinematic appeal. Unfortunately, this happened at a time when technology was developing fast enough to bring any show quickly into the viewer's hands without a television. It's technological freedom, and it's a blessing for everyone who hates television and loves good shows- but may also be the cause of their rapidly approaching demise.


Difference in the Decades
TV in the last half of the 2000-2010 decade was full of transition, not just in hardware but in programming. HD took over standard cable, as did the ease in which programming could reach the end-user. Peer-to-peer sharing and online streaming have given the traditional, very flawed old ways a run for their money. Technology is developing faster every year, and that rate was more or less stagnant for fifty years or so, with few fundamental changes.

The integration of cable was one such change. The introduction of subscription channels like HBO was another. The popularity of pay-per-view programming- especially sporting events and softcore pornography- was yet another. Still, none of these even came close to threatening the longevity of television as a profitable media outlet. The only analogous change was the introduction of the BETAmax, and later its successor the VCR. After a brutally unnecessary format war, the VCR emerged as the victor, and for a short time made network executives sweat a little. A law was even proposed which would make the videotaping of television programs illegal, albeit entirely unenforceable. Eventually the heat cooled down, and the networks came to accept and work with video recording not as an unbeatable foe but as an integration that could make the industry even stronger.

This was huge in its day

The difference now is that the changes are happening at an alarming rate. As long as the internet remains public, people will always find ways to share their videos. Owners of intellectual property rights don't care if their work can be copied. They care about how easy it is to do it. Prior to recent laws, it was legal to rip a DVD to your computer, make a copy of it and give it to your friend as a gift, as long as alterations aren't made that took away credit from the copyright holders. It would have stayed that way, if not for online sharing. When something is easier to distribute, it can be mass distributed by anyone who feels like doing it. That's what copyright holders don't want.


Going Against the Masses
Anyone who watches quality shows, specifically fiction, likely uses some form of recording, streaming or downloading to do so. These people, myself included, probably have a skewed idea of the brutal, gladiator-style world of television programming. After all, we only see the results- the good ones that slip through the cracks and catch our attention. Then, when they're canceled, we wonder why. We wonder what kind of world would ever axe a show so brilliant, so magnificent, so underrated, so perfect. The answer is nearby, likely only a few feet from where you are at any given minute. All it requires is that you plug that coaxial cable back in (or connect the wires from your cable box), and flip through each channel on a weeknight. What you'll notice is that television is not an appropriate venue for quality fiction. It never has been. We're lucky that networks even take a chance on fiction at all. Few fictional shows have ever been simultaneously profitable and worthy of critical praise.

In the early '60s, The Twilight Zone was a small, perfect fish swimming in a bowl filled with cheesy sitcoms that catered to questionable and outdated family values. Rod Serling was an outspoken liberal who wrote fiction that challenged racism, sexism and greed- values that had been integrated into American culture. While the rest of TV programming catered to this, The Twilight Zone challenged it.

Television in the early '60s.

The challenge still exists today, and with hundreds of channels to choose from, there are even more shows that seek to work their way around tradition and make quality programming regardless of ratings. However, there is no formula for a successful show that breaks from convention. Once you have a formula, you are no longer breaking from convention. Once you break from convention, you are no longer following a formula. Because of this, there is no way to predict which of these shows will be successful and which ones won't. That's why the fiction market is dominated by hospital dramas, courtroom dramas, police procedurals and multi-camera sitcoms.

A divide is inevitable- one in which John and Kate Plus 8, The Tonight Show and Jersey Shore are on one physical medium, while Lost, Dollhouse, and Battlestar Galactica are obsolete, and must seek another home. This is a near future where investors will have to seriously consider backing web series with capital that's equal to or at least proportional to traditional television programming. Netflix Instant Streaming has been a big hit, and any subscriber will affirm that they download less now that they can stream the same programs to their televisions. It is a system that works, but its potential is unrealized. When quality television is booted for good, it will need a home. People will demand it, and there are a lot of them- enough so that no financial opportunist would be able to turn their demands away. We are only starting to realize now how specific a medium television really is. It dominated for so long, it was synonymous with broadcast home entertainment. Now that there are other ways to view quality programming, the people who still watch TV are exactly the kind of people TV was always meant for.





New Mediums
Your English teacher probably told you to kill your television. Punk rock may have told you the same thing. "But then there would be no V, no Quantum Leap, no The Prisoner," you may have responded. You were right. So, despite your angsty teenage rebellion, you watched TV. You were not alone. Now, you don't have to sit through commercials or wrestle the controller out of your sister's hand and beg your mother to turn off The Price is Right. Your world of entertainment and the their world of entertainment have finally divided into two separate mediums- but the split is far from complete. Shows still begin on television, their success is determined by television, their future is decided by television. It is the Colosseum, and you have no hope of streaming anything to your TV or downloading anything illegally until it walks out of there with its head still attached to its body. You can only stream Lost through Netflix right now because it stood up to American Idol and managed to not get crushed completely. You can only buy the DVDs of Dollhouse because FOX had a budget for Friday night dramas, and needed to fill the void with something they thought would be sexy and extreme. Once Joss Whedon turned the show into a mind-bending science fiction thriller, FOX canceled the shit out of it. Dollhouse snuck in, and when you buy the second season DVD, you can be thankful for all the improbable, miraculous and devious conditions that had to fall into place for it to exist.

Yet there is an audience for it. Someone out there knows this, and they have money to invest in making more Dollhouses and more Arrested Developments specifically for the people who want them. Remember that the ratings don't fall below a million viewers. That's a lot of people who might renew their Netflix membership if Netflix starts making more episodes. They might even upgrade to a slightly more expensive membership, and get instant access to shows that are made specifically for their audience group, not people who would rather watch Rock of Love. This system, or one similar to it, mirrors subscription-based channels like HBO and Showtime. HBO on Demand, and Showtime's counterpart, were really great until better, much cheaper ways to watch more programming were popularized. However, they can easily be rebooted within systems that we know work today.

It's like TV that you can program to be whatever you want it to be

Mo' Mediums, Mo' Problems
The new generation of On Demand programming will likely suffer from some of the same problems we have now. Blockbuster tried and failed to compete with Netflix, even when they began a nearly identical service. But if Blockbuster were to offer Dexter and Netflix were to offer True Blood, which would you choose? What if HBO and Showtime like the idea so much, they abandon television altogether and exclusively stream their content to paying subscribers? What if more companies follow suit? What if A&E, TBS, or new production companies start to do the same? Conglomerating their efforts seems like a good idea for everyone, but will they do it? The fact that we- meaning the audiences who have abandoned television- want a system based on our scrutiny and preference for what we define as quality programming may be the very thing that kills the idea in its birth stages. If we want a medium based on choice, we may get exactly that- but privatized at the smallest level. Individual shows may have the audacity to ask for subscriptions, and we can only hope that they fail. These are just some of the very difficult questions the industry is going to have to answer, but there is no doubt that they need to be answered. No one can hide from it anymore, downloading their favorite shows and slowly killing off the ratings in the process. I'm pissed as hell that Dollhouse got canceled, but not once did I watch it when it aired. Not once. It got bad ratings, and why? Because people were disloyal to the network that aired it? Or because people are too short-sighted to find a way to profit from how people are really watching the show?

As far as Nielsen boxes go, most people don't own one, meaning that it doesn't really matter whether or not you watch a show when it airs... but imagine if everyone did own a Nielsen box. Would we better or worse off? Are the complete, utter inaccuracies and questionable statistics of a third-party company the only things keeping good shows on the air? It's possible, and all the more reason for the industry to evolve.

You must watch your favorite shows, but much more importantly, someone who funds the show must know that you're watching it, and must know how to use this information to make more shows. For now, we will continue to kill our favorite shows by not watching them on TV, because the industry has not yet caught up with the technology.