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Brazil… Which is where we were.

Brazil… Which is where we were.

Tonight, we say goodbye to Adult Swim’s Childrens Hospital after seven seasons and over 80 episodes.

The show started out amid the writers’ strike, in 2008, as a web-series on TheWB.com.
Yes, that WB.

Post-strike, Childrens Hospital got picked up by Adult Swim, making it the first-ish web-show to jump to television. (And still kind of the only one still around.)

It had everything you could want from a live-action night-time 12-minute comedy:
Jokes, hospitals, cameos, non sequiturs, self-deprecating characters, irreverent humor, spin-offs, and Brazil…
Which is where we are right now.
(Fun fact: they actually flew to Brazil just for that running gag.)

As a commenter said over at the AV Club:

I have nothing but love for Childrens Hospital. Not only did it remain hilarious throughout its run, but it did a brilliant, ambitious job experimenting with different storytelling formats, especially given its 12-minute time slot. It got super-meta without ever becoming inaccessible or weird for the sake of weird, and it stuck to its own established continuity, with the history of the show-within-a-show (except for when it didn’t).

You can turn to BBF LaToya Ferguson (also at the AV Club) for great analysis on what made those experimental minutes of television so special.
Just this season, Childrens Hospital had an episode spoofing 1950s variety shows, a black-and-white exploration of one of their meta-characters, and their own take on plots from I Love Lucy.

If you’re a fan (or are becoming one), you’ll be excited to learn of the many interviews posted about the show this week. I highly recommend reading two specific ones:
– The oral history of Childrens, published by WIRED, featuring a bunch of the players & writers; and
– Inverse’s off-the-cuff sit-down with Rob Corddry and Rob Huebel
(How have I not realized until now that they share the same first name?)

As an avid watcher of both Childrens Hospital and Party Down, I must conclude this post by sharing an all-time favorite episode of mine (thankfully available on the interwebs)…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB6J6965WU4

Here’s to hoping they do an inevitable reunion show within the next few years.

Is the future of television another article about the future of television?

Is the future of television another article about the future of television?

Around TCA season, we always get inundated with articles related to “the future of television” or “the end of online streaming”.

It’s always funny to read these wannabe prescient articles about the rise and fall of television. Especially since they’re always reverberating the same thought over and over, year after year.

As usual, we had the one about how “live TV will be irrelevant in the future“. There’s also that other one about Netflix producing–wait for it–a bunch of original shows. Whodathunkit.
Let’s also not forget the obligatory “Netflix: Is this the end of online streaming as we know it?” versus “The future of television? HBO.”

And then there’s the palme de la creme de la cherry on the top.
That one article desperately wanting to coin (and crown) a “new art form” within a sub-subset of a television trend.

This year’s winner: “Netflix is accidentally inventing a new art form — not quite TV and not quite film“.

Oh, boy.

Let’s take a glance at the article’s h3 points…

1. Binge watching versus weekly watching: It changes everything

How is this news in 2015?
Nearly six years ago (!) I wrote about that exact same thing.
You know, when House of Cards was but a twinkle in Ted Sarandos’ eye.

My point is not to back-pat myself (that sounded dirty); it is to explain that, hell no, Netflix did not create an “art form” (ugh) that predates it.

Just because you make it “easier” to do something doesn’t mean you “accidentally invent” that something.

Ford did not invent transportation.
Apple did not invent mobile communications.
Netflix did not invent binge-watching (or, as we used to call it in the good old days, TV marathons).

Hold on. Something else is coming back to me…

I remember… I remember watching X-Files episodes back-to-back on VHS in the 90s.

Holy shit. I INVENTED BINGE-WATCHING!

2. Netflix thinks more in terms of seasons than of episodes

Yawn.

Should I really bother talking, yet again, about the concept of “bigger picture” in television?
ABC renewed Lost for three seasons in 2007.
We can all move on now.

3. But the 10-hour story is still a new craft — and an imperfect one

And film is in its infancy compared to literature.

Truth is “10-hour stories” are older than American Idol.

Ever heard of a show called Roots? Or HBO’s Band of Brothers? Or Sci-Fi’s Taken?
I hadn’t, and then I googled “mini-series”.

“Mini-series”, “limited series”, “event series”, “anthology seasons”. Call them what you want. It’s all semantics.
Roots and True Detective are, at the end of the day, close-ended 8-hour narratives.

But then, you tell me, this isn’t about anthology seasons. It’s about shorter seasons!
And, once again, I’ll point you to a distant post from the distant past.

The year was 2008.

“Here are nine ideas to save television“, I bravely claimed. And one was about shorter seasons:

Remember Dirty Sexy Money? Probably not, because it only had 13 episodes last season.
But that’s okay.
Less is definitely more when it comes to shows like Lost. A radically shorter season definitely helped the show to condense its mythology and get on with the answers instead of waiting around for 5 other episodes.
It might not be that good for the Big Five in terms of cash but in a qualitative way, it’s certainly a game-changer.

Now, combine shorter seasons with 55-minute long shows around the year available for free whenever wherever on VOD.
Boom.
Welcome to the new world, Networks.

Holy shit. I ALSO INVENTED NETFLIX!

Look. I understand the temptation to be right about “the future of television” or the desperation to be the first to “call” something. We’re all guilty of this. But if you really want to do that, at least have something new to say.
Why are you shocked HBO is going into sports (“Inside the NFL” anyone?) or that Netflix is doing–gasp!–original programming.

We all know Ted Sarandos’ provocative statement about how Netflix’s goal “is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.”
That was three years ago.

And this brings us full-circle to the reason of this entire post–or rant.
Maybe I needed to air my frustration about TV circlejerking.
Maybe I needed to point out how ridiculously narrow these echo chambers have become.
Or, maybe, I needed to quote this actual statement about HBO Now and Netflix:

If, as The Awl’s John Hermann argues, “the next Internet is TV,” then subscription-based streaming services are the next Facebook.

I thought orange was the new black? Wait, what is this again?
Oh. Now I remember.
It’s not TV, it’s articles about TV.

Cord-cutting is not a myth

Cord-cutting is not a myth

I’ve been watching television shows on my computer for most of my life.

No, I’m not 10 years old.

I started in 2001. Before 1080p MKVs and crappy AVIs.
Buffy Season Six was my first.

When I moved to the US, I continued watching TV on my laptop, and then my desktop. And in 2012, I finally bought an actual TV. Not because it was a TV, but because it was a screen. And an awesome one at that.

Earlier this week, a room full of executives gave a conference about the TV industry. Forbes published an article on the subject, entitling “Why cord-cutting is a myth“.

A myth? Isn’t that going a bit too far?

Hearst Ventures’ George Kliavkoff didn’t think so:

Cord-cutting is a great “story”, but I think it’s over-reported.

Amy Banse, managing director of Comcast Ventures concurred:

The volume of press around cord cutting doesn’t quite match reality.

The thing is, numbers don’t lie.

For the first time ever, Comcast now has more high-speed Internet customers than cable TV (22.55 million vs. 22.3 million).
The number of US households has been growing around 1 million a year, yet TV cable has been stagnating for a long time while Internet has skyrocketed (in addition to being a utility).

Comcast_2nd_Quarter_Customer_Growth_2011-2015_High_Speed_Internet_Customers_in_thousands_Video_Customers_in_thousands_chartbuilder

So where is all this denial coming from?

Let’s go back to that Forbes article–

Joe Marchese, president of advanced advertising products for Fox Networks Group, pointed out that Internet access still requires cord—in the form of a cable or a phone line.

Okay. Literally requiring a cord to use the Internet means you can’t be a cord-cutter.
That is, literally, the most literal argument I’ve ever read. Also, completely nonsensical.
People aren’t “cord-cutting” a physical apparatus, they are cutting ties with a specific content delivery method. Simple as that.

Which brings us to the main eyebrow-raising maneuver to reassure shareholders that, don’t worry guys, cord-cutting is totally not a thing.

As Kliavkoff explained:

What’s more likely to gain sizable traction is cord “shaving”. […] A la carte purchasing of channels—and not taking most of them—is a far more interesting area.

With HBO’s a-la-carte inevitable success, such a statement is undoubtedly true–except for the fact that subscribing to HBO Now or Showtime Anytime and cancelling Time Warner have substantially the same outcome.
In other words, the difference between customers changing behaviors and customers never having that behavior to begin with is irrelevant.

Playing word games to argue literal cord-cutting is “over-estimated” is a waste of everyone’s time. Cord-cutting isn’t a “myth” simply because it doesn’t fit a company’s very narrow definition. Worse, you are being disingenuous towards all your current, past, and potential customers by ignoring the motivation behind their actions.

I’ve never had to “cut the cord” because I’ve never wanted to pay $100/month for a cable TV package.
I guess I’m not a cord-cutter. I’m a “cord never(er)” (or “never-cord”).

People are finding newer, better alternatives than the old cord-a-roo.
Whether that means they’re doing it from the get-go or are realizing it years later leads to the same result…

Candle-making can’t stay profitable for long now that people are getting light from a series of tubes.