This is my first post to tumblr. I joined partly to see what the buzz was about and partly because it seems like a nice place to record/share those thoughts that are too large for a Twitter update and not fully formed enough to warrant a full-fledged essay, which is mostly what seems to end up on my Website.
My thought for the moment is about the Warner Brothers/NBC television series Chuck. It’s a terrific show and, frankly, I’m hooked on it. More so than I have been on any show in a long, long time. I could wax eloquent about all the reasons I like it, but there are entire fan sites where people have posted volumes of personal accolades concerning the show. At the same time, given the myriad blitzes to NBC’s reputation as of late, the series continually finds itself in a somewhat precarious state. This, along with the show’s quality, and its near-cancellation after last season, has encouraged dedicated viewers to rally and sprouted a rabid Chuck fan culture reminiscent of (and partly constituted by) Firefly enthusiasts.
And that’s the thing. For the first time, I’ve cared enough about a program to actually visit those fan sites—even comment on them—and to think a bit longer and harder about a few of the possible futures of television through the lens of a single show. Here are a few of the broader themes I’ve been considering.
Niche programming and broadcast television. The appeal of Chuck is fairly broad, but it definitely caters to specific tastes. A lot of the humor comes from references to cult films and television shows, and most episodes are full of Easter eggs for film snobs and tech geeks. Everything about the program is extraordinarily post-modern and self-reflexive, relying for its punchlines on myriad cultural references. It requires sophisticated viewership—which is not to say it requires elite viewership. Chuck calls to mind a lot of Steven Johnson’s observations about the increasing complexity and reflexivity of TV programming and TV viewers. At the same time, I don’t know that Chuck would appeal to everyone, and it certainly seems to have a specific audience in mind.
From the beginnings of niche marketing in the publishing industry in the 1980s to Nicholas Negroponte’s 1995 vision of the Daily Me to Cass Sunstein and Christine Rosen’s contemporary concerns about “egocasting,” we’ve been moving steadily toward increased personalization of media. As Sunstein, Shirky, and others have pointed out, new media have increased, not only the ease with which we can consume personalized media, but also our ability to locate other consumers with similar tastes. In short, the digital age has been a boon to fan culture. And authors like those above have argued that new media can also make fans feel vindicated—as though everyone shares their interests, precisely because other fans were easy to find, fan groups appear so large, and their boundaries appear so fuzzy.
In short, while Chuck is performing well for NBC right now ratings-wise, that good performance is relative. The fact is, most of NBC’s lineup is tanking. In the absolute sense, the show’s numbers aren’t exactly off the charts. And they may never be—precisely because it’s a niche show. I want Chuck to stay on the air as much as anyone, but it’s status raises an interesting question about whether—and how long—cult programming can stay afloat on a broadcast network whose target audience is ostensibly much, well, broader. Of course, audience size and audience value aren’t necessarily the same thing, which raises another interesting theme.
The valuation of audiences. In his book, The Sociology of News, Michael Schudson discusses a high-profile example of the discrepancy between audience size and audience value. The case comes from publishing, and more specifically, from the New York newspaper industry. In the 1980s, the New York Times was extraordinarily worried that their competition, the New York Daily News, would fold. The reason was that the Daily News audience tended to be made up of lower-income subscribers. If the News went under, those readers would jump to the Times and dilute the latter’s high-income demographic numbers, which in turn would cause high-end retailers and other especially valuable advertisers to withdraw their ads from the Times.
TV networks worry about these things, too, which is why they focus not only on absolute numbers of viewers when looking at their ratings, but also the number of “demo” viewers—those who fall into their desired demographics. This was a lesson learned the hard way. For instance, NBC famously regretted canceling the original Star Trek series after finding out—too late—that its relatively small audience contained some especially valuable demographics.
Today’s connected fan culture may add additional nuance to the process of valuing audiences. For instance, in a bid to keep Chuck from going off the air, fans created a campaign in which they not only wrote letters to the network, but also went out and ate extensively at Subway, one of the series’ sponsors. Subway, as a result, became especially enthused about the program and subsidized the cost of bringing back the show for a third season. The (digitally) enhanced ability of contemporary fans to organize around a program in ways that have a financial impact on the show and its sponsors means that niche audiences may be increasingly valuable to networks. Which is why the seeming paradox of niche programming in primetime isn’t going anywhere soon.
The placement of programming. That leads to yet another theme. If Chuck was shunted from NBC primetime, would that be the end of the show? Or, in today’s evolving media, is there a middle way between continuation and cancellation for programs with niche audiences of proven value? My take is that there is. Chuck may not be the particular program to blaze this trail (hopefully because it will stay on NBC primetime), but it seems to me there are alternatives here. First, and most obviously, there’s cable.
A number of cable programs have moved to—or re-aired on—network television over the years. Bill Maher’s talk show, Politically Incorrect is one example. In the scripted-TV world, Monk and Dexter are both examples of cable shows that at least filled space in network TV lineups (though Dexter’s CBS debut was more a corporate necessity born of the Hollywood writers’ strike than anything else). It might be possible for a show to move the other direction as well (and perhaps it’s happened before—examples anybody?).
Cable channels and premium channels are owned by the same parent companies as the broadcast networks, and already cater to a segmented market. Moreover, some original cable programs—Burn Notice, for example—already have per-episode budgets in the same ballpark as the cheaper episodes of Chuck. Moreover, Chuck is actually owned not by NBC, but by Warner Brothers, making a potential switch between channels potentially a bit easier.
Second, modes of consumption may be a bit different for the geek-laden audience of Chuck than for some other primetime shows. I’m missing the link, but I recall reading that nearly 30 percent of the show’s fans watch it via TiVo. Moreover, it’s also one of the most popular programs on Hulu. That means that a huge portion of views aren’t captured (or are only partially captured) by the program’s traditional Nielsen ratings.
If such a large portion of viewers—many of whom are presumably some of the show’s most dedicated fans—are watching the show digitally and on-demand, why not take advantage of that? Might the same fans who bought all the footlong subs continue to pay a reasonable amount to see the show online if it left primetime? Moreover, once you’d suddenly cut out broadcast intermediaries the creators at Warner Brothers might see more direct profit.
At the very least, why not charge advertisers more to provide the program free on Hulu, theWB.com, and NBC.com? Friends and I have hypothesized that people retain ads from Hulu and its ilk better than either TV or TiVo. TiVo’ers skip ads altogether. Live television ad breaks are long enough that people tend to talk through them, run to the bathroom, or make themselves snacks. But on Hulu, the 30 second ad breaks are (a) impossible to skip, and (b) too short to run away from. Thus, the ad recall on Hulu is likely to be superior to that from other types of media, to say nothing of the medium’s ability to target customers. All these are reasons the networks should be able to market ad space online for great rates. In reality, that doesn’t seem to be happening. My understanding is that Hulu ads go for a song, and most of the time the spots there seem not to be ads at all, but PSAs and network promos. Sooner or later, though, it seems to me that the networks will test these waters a bit more strenuously—especially if they have a program that’s strong in the right demographics. It might, at least, be a good thing to try with a program that can no longer survive in primetime, but appears too profitable to kill outright.
Lengthy plot arcs and early cancellations. Speaking of killing programs outright, Steven Johnson, in his book Everything Bad is Good For You, was one of the earlier people to notice the increasing complexity of television plots. Shows in the UK have long been pitched with season-long or multi-season plot arcs. But that sort of thinking is relatively new in the U.S. Johnson argued that while some shows, like Twin Peaks, went this route in the early 1990s, increased syndication, DVD sales, and Internet forums all made it possible for viewers to stay current with shows, even as they introduced bigger and longer plot arcs. Were the book written a couple years later, Johnson would no doubt have also included online distribution as part of this trend. In short, he pointed out that the ways in which shows are both produced and consumed have co-evolved radically in recent years. Now it seems nearly every sitcom has Seinfeld-style inside jokes that viewers need several seasons’ worth of viewing to fully appreciate. And nearly every drama has a multi-season plot arc, a la 24. Chuck has features of both, in fact, as the show is a drama-sitcom hybrid.
But when the appeal of a show is based on its addictiveness and ability to hold the attention of an increasingly committed fan base over the long term, when both audiences and producers understand that shows grow richer over time—When these things are true, how do they complicate decisions about the fate of shows? In short, I imagine it must be much harder to make a decision about whether or not to cancel a program that’s constructed in this way. Despite its recent late-night troubles (which involved unscripted programs), NBC generally seems to be playing the high-risk, high-reward strategy in this game, backing developing shows that are down in the ratings, like Heroes, and experimenting—as I mention above—with arguably niche programming like Chuck in primetime.
For my money, I’d say the lengthy plot arcs and character development in contemporary programs mark a great improvement in the overall quality of TV screenwriting. But it also means that shows take longer to develop and that TV will suffer more if network executives cancel programs at every little dip in the audience meter. NBC’s decision to stand by some excellent shows despite the ratings struggles of the moment is a high risk, high reward strategy. Right now they may be in a losing streak, but it doesn’t mean that their way of doing things is invariably wrong.
The academic benefits of vegging out. Lastly, the obligatory navel-gazing observation—the hallmark of every blog post. I started watching Chuck with escapist motives. It was an attempt to find some mental chewing gum to balance out all the academic reading and overly serious discussions that grad school invites. But I ended up considering the show through the lens of all these things. The realization I’ve come to is how much value there is in that. And by “that,” I don’t mean hyper-analyzing television comedies (though I did go to film school, so if the shoe fits…). No, I mean that it’s good when our entertainment simultaneously allows us to escape from our day jobs and gives us an opportunity to think about them in a way that doesn’t feel like work. That I’m thankful for.
