Posted on 11/04/2004 11:30:27 AM PST by hispanarepublicana
IF YOU'RE A TV critic, it's hard not to look at Tuesday's election results and realize that you're covering a medium that's probably still out of touch with large segments of the country.
Red-staters, security moms, conservative Christians - whatever label you pin on the people who helped give President Bush four more years, they're not the people you're likely to see showing up as sympathetic characters on "Will & Grace," "The O.C." or "Saturday Night Live."
Some of that shouldn't be surprising: Commercial television, certainly, is largely pitched toward the people Madison Avenue, not George Bush or John Kerry, is seeking to reach.
Advertisers aren't so much interested in our hearts and minds as they are in our pocketbooks. They may prefer to think of themselves as uniters, but in the cold, hard numbers of demographics they're dividers, separating young from old, rich from poor, male from female. Say what you like about those of us from blue states, but a lot of us still have money to spend.
And yet things are changing. While broadcast TV continues to chafe at the FCC restrictions many believe keep it from competing creatively with cable, CBS, for instance, has been winning audiences back with twists on the traditional cops-and-robber franchise like "CSI" and "Cold Case" that red-staters probably prefer to, say, NBC's "Joey."
Or do they?
It's probably dangerous to try too hard to link the country's mood to what we watch on television.
CBS' soulful "Joan of Arcadia," for instance, is down in the Nielsens this year, and ABC's "Desperate Housewives" is a hit, to the distress of some family-values types.
But if I were going to crawl out on a limb - and that's what they pay me for - I'd predict that:
• Cable will benefit from an FCC crackdown on broadcast- TV standards that's likely to get even tougher in a second Bush term. Whether or not the majority of Americans want more nudity and strong language on television, there's clearly a significant enough minority to keep networks like HBO, Showtime and FX in business.
• Gay writers and producers in Hollywood may for now, at least, have a harder time pitching gay-themed programming to the major networks, whose suits, however personally liberal, can't have failed to notice the results of all those gay-marriage-ban votes. Marginalizing that audience, however, may only increase cable systems' incentive to pick up some of the gay-themed channels now in development.
• While the Fox News Channel will continue to prosper, its growth could level off in the absence of a tangible threat to the Republican majority. A Kerry victory, on the other hand, would probably only have increased Fox News' hold on the cable-news audience, as frustrated Republicans sought comfort from like-minded talking heads.
• NBC's "The West Wing," assuming it lasts past the end of this season, will continue to twist itself into a pretzel in an attempt to attract people who were never likely to watch a show about policy and politics in the first place.
• CBS' "Survivor" will continue to be the one show on television in which conservatives and liberals regularly put aside their differences to defeat common enemies.
• Donald Trump's hair will show no improvement whatsoever, no matter how big his tax cut becomes.
thank goodness for tvland :-)
Not since the sixties when they cancelled every show with a tree in it.
The Waltons, The Wonder Years....
here's a joke that explains a lot of this:
Q: How does a kid "come out of the closet" gently these days?
A: "Mom, Dad...I want to move to Hollywood to write situation comedies
for a major television network!"
Never seen West Wing, never watched Survivor, don't turn on ABC,CBS,NBC,CNN, or MSNBC and I buy what I want not what some advertiser tells me is "new and improved"
Note to TV executives: I last watched TV on a regular basis just before I headed off to college .... almost 30 years ago.
Cable-free all these years, and we wonder where we'd get time to watch TV if we even wanted to....
Andy to Aunt Bee: "Just.......call the MAN". LOL
What we must do is start a faux Demo website and create the most outrageous comment threads about how much we love what Hilary said about ****. Just lead them down the path to oblivion.
I must go..I am getting demolusional.
Liberal propaganda garbage...rather watch paint dry.
As much as I think Debra Messing is cute, "Will and Grace" is show that I have a big dislike for. Too much shoved in my face.
I am presently watching "Desperate Housewives" because Teri Hatcher and Evan Longorio are just too hot.
.."when they cancelled every show with a tree in it."
Good one. You're right!
It wasn't the big family value show, but it was awful good.
It wasn't the big family value show, but it was awful good.
(ick, ick, and ok)
CSI (the original) is excellent.
As for "reality" TV:
MTV started that trend in this country. That really should be all that need be said about any of them. But I shall elaborate...
When "Survivor" first came out I was working in the engineering department in a mid-sized airfoil manufacturing company. I recall the folks in Eng and QC jabbering about it. I do not recall the folks in Tooling or on the shop floor wasting any time discussing it.
At length, the folks in Eng asked me my opinion of Survivor. I looked up from the operations sheet I was CADding and asked "Do the losers DIE? No? Then it isn't a 'survival' issue, is it?" And then I went straight back to my work.
No one ever polluted my working environment with such trivia again.
I suspect many conservatives react the same way I do to such false "reality" television programs.
The only network show I watch. Unfortunately, the cr*p before and after makes it next to impossible to remember when Raymond is on.
Okay, confession time.... They got me.
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