Posted on 11/15/2007 12:45:46 PM PST by Caleb1411
She didnt have a missing front tooth?
Since I use my tv watch old classic tv shows and movies (on DVD and cable).....I couldnt tell you. :-)
In Our Time (Radio 4) with Melvyn Bragg and a panel of three discussing everything from science to art to history to philosophy
The Choir (Radio 3) with Aled Jones
Composer of the Week (Radio 3) - my wife’s must-hear program
Friday Night is Music Night (Radio 2) with Aled Jones - light music, but stuff I haven’t heard in years.
Various dramas and comedy on Radio 7, including the Terry Pratchett stuff.
About half the dramas on Radio 3 on Sunday night
I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue (Radio 4)
From Australia:
Singers of Renown (Radio National)
The Philosopher’s Zone with Alan Saunders (Radio National)
All in the Mind with Natasha Mitchell (Radio National)
The Science Show with Rob Williams (Radio National) (even if he is a dogmatic evolutionist)
For the God Who Sings (Classical Radio); I play it Sunday mornings here.
From WFMT in Chicago:
The Lyric Opera
The New York Philharmonic.
The Met, when it comes on for the season.
From KING-FM in Seattle:
The opera recording at 7:00 local time Saturday night.
The only time I listen to local radio is in the car, and that is a 10 minute drive.
Who’s got time for TV? I have books and other things to keep my mind busy!
Anne of Green Gables from 1985. It was mentioned in the article. It was a great mini series that was shot by the CBC in Canada. It was based on the book “Anne of Green Gables”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_of_Green_Gables_(1985_film)
I believe that the reason the subject keeps coming up is that we can't believe that we were paying them all that jack monthly for naught.
Let me take a wild guess — you don’t fit into a profitable demographic?
The people who put shows on TV are not crazy — they have a very specific audience in mind to deliver to advertisers with each show.
I can quit the whiskey ...and even the beer ...
but please tell me how to quit the TeeVee!!!!
Sure we fit into a profitable demographic. I think what happened was it was in between seasons, and they had dropped the ball on a couple of our favorite shows.
We got busy with the spring, and by the time we thought of it again, we noticed that we hadn't missed it.
Oh, Netflix helps also...
A Frank Zappa Lyric from the 70’s:
“I’m the slime oozing out of your TV set”!
That’s interesting, thanks. You’re one of those viewers who just drifted away.
I have a couple of shows that I enjoy, but nothing I’d schedule my evening around. I watch TV pretty much randomly and don’t have cable.
Together, we’re the kind of unreliable viewers that networks and advertisers hate.
What a lot of people are missing on this thread is that TV is no longer the old time “mass media.” If 20 million people watched Bonanza in the old days, but only 2 million were car buyers, then the other eight mil were wasted eyeballs for the advertisers. Today, with the multitude of shows via cable, the networks and advertisers can zero in with laser-like accuracy on their target market. No more wasted eyeballs, which meant wasted money.
Ping
By the end of this decade or shortly thereafter, television networks as we know them today will cease to exist. Network evening newscasts will go dark after the ‘08 elections and their news divisions disbanded.
Or do people watch what's on TV because that's all that's on? I believe it's a combination of the two: the shills in Hollow-wood air some pilot; it passes the initial sniff test, so they put some money behind it. Now that they're committed, they're going to push this crud down viewers' throats, trying to repeat the initial success. And even when viewership dwindles to embarrassing lows, the networks keep pushing programming that is offensive, derivative, repetitive, and downright boring, as long as it promotes their agenda.
The folks who produce the shows and those who buy the commercial time that makes the shows possible are not in business to amuse themselves.
They certainly aren't in business to amuse their viewers, not if the plummeting Nielsen ratings are any indication.
Excellent point about a cartoon character and his trashy wife.
Generally speaking. The shows do attract viewers and, more importantly, advertisers. There isn’t a “sniff test,” but a whole industry built around what viewers want. Any show you see on TV has been focus-grouped to within an inch of its life.
This stuff isn’t random.
Viewership is dwindling, but there are several forces at work:
A)The market is increasingly fragment. The piece of viewership pie the shows are reaching for is getting thinner and thinner in demographic terms.
B)There is more competition out there, both for key demographics among TV shows and against other media, such as video games, DVDs, the internet etc.
And don’t forget that the Nielson rating system was post dated the day the first home use VCR shipped. I’m waiting for the day one of the networks talks to a cable company to get the box info to compare to the Nielsons, I think that’s the future of TV ratings information, the cable can always know what you’re watching rather than relying on people self reporting and the cable companies can draw data from a much larger sample set than Nielson. And I think it will change the ratings picture almost as dramatically as when Billboard finally started including department store music sales (the day the music industry found out country actually does sell lots of CDs).
The FNC news babe (not Gretchen) that accompanies the Fox N Friends 7-9 AM program has been showing more thigh than a chicken plant lately.
TV defies the most obvious fact about its customers -- their prodigal and efflorescent diversity. people perform scores of thousands of different jobs; pursue multifarious hobbies; read hundreds of thousands of different publications. TV ignores the reality that people are not inherently couch potatoes; given a chance, they talk back and interact. People have little in common except their prurient interests and morbid fears and anxieties. Necessarily aiming its fare at this lowest-common-denominator target, television gets worse and worse every year....The top-down television system is an alien and corrosive force in democratic capitalism. Contrary to the rich and variegated promise of new technology proliferating options on every hand, TV squeezes the consciousness of an entire nation through a few score channels.
... Television acts as a severe bottleneck to creative expression, driving thousands of American writers and creators into formulaic banality or near-pornographic pandering.
The current system dictates that thousands of writers and directors labor to supply a few channels and distributors and that few of America's best TV and motion picture artists regularly have their work produced. Rather than creating original works, most TV writers merely fill in the blanks of formatted shows, contriving shocks and sensations to satisfY a mass audience. The entertainment industry pays them well, not to create innovative programming, but to endlessly work and rework a few proven themes.
...The very nature of broadcasting, however, means that television cannot cater to the special interests of audiences dispersed across the country. Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar, it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns. All of world industry is moving increasingly toward more segmented markets. But in a broadcast medium, such a move would be a commercial disaster. In a broadcast medium, artists and writers cannot appeal to the highest aspirations and sensibilities of individuals. Instead, manipulative masters rule over huge masses of people.
...In the world of the teleputer, broadcasters, educators, investors, and filmmakers, who thought they could never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people, are going to discover they were wrong.
SoundScan, raising the drinking age to 21 and MTV changed pop music forever. Prior to SoundScan an artist had two, maybe three albums, to find an audience. No more. And raising the drinking age killed a lot of the music venues that depended on liquor sales to stay open. MTV, of course, put the nail in the coffin.
What most people don’t realize is that there is no “Hollywood.” There are five/six major corporations — Sony, Disney, Viacom, Time/Warner and News Corp, Bertelsman — that create 95% of pop culture.
That’s not only poorly written, but just flat out wrong.
Once he says that people are not inherently couch potatoes he lost the argument. One of the constants of history is that people like to sit on their butts and relax, that’s why there’s been some sort of entertainment industry for as long as there’s been recorded human history. Whether it’s sitting around a fire while the village elder spins tales, or sitting in a hut while somebody plays music, or sitting in an amphitheater for a Greek play, sitting and letting someone entertain you is an old human tradition. We are inherently couch potatoes.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.