In all three cases, key decision makers have deluded themselves about demographic reality, and basic economics.
If Indie 103.1 failed because it was not 1983 any more, and there were not enough (White) youth, and the LA Times slowly sinks underwater because the attempt to become a print version of KCRW was doomed to be a money loser from the start, broadcast TV networks, and NBC in particular, fall from grace is far more puzzling.
Because once upon a time, the Brandon Tartikoff strategy actually worked for NBC. When Tartikoff was running it. Boiled down to it's essentials, it meant giving shows without much audience appeal that were well written, acted, and produced, several years to find an audience, and allowing some lower-rated shows (Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, the first few years of Seinfeld) to stay on the schedule as long as they drew high advertising rates based on wealthy yuppie audiences. For the time, the early 1980's, this was new. But a critical component of Tartikoff's strategy was shows with broad, popular appeal. Tartikoff was instrumental in launching shows like Miami Vice, the Cosby Show, Knight Rider, and Family Ties. Not to mention the A-Team.
Now, NBC's schedule is among the lowest rated of the broadcast networks, excluding the teen-girl oriented CW. Even it's head, Ben Silverman, has given up on the idea of becoming the number one rated network. Moves such as canceling the acclaimed "Life" and moving the similarly acclaimed "Chuck" to a thirteen episode run in the Spring of 2010 were something Tartikoff would not have done. Nor would the emphasis on cheap, disposable reality shows that make money on low ratings be part of the old Tartikoff strategy. Instead, NBC is loading up on cheap, female-appealing reality shows, and running a Jay Leno hour-long talk show at 10 pm every weeknight. Only Fox still programs new shows on Saturdays, "Cops" and "America's Most Wanted." NBC abandoned Saturdays in the late 1990's after the failure of the XFL stunt (a weird cross between football and Wrestling created by WWE head Vince McMahon). CBS and ABC had stopped running new shows several years earlier.
NBC is not alone, of course, in having problems with profitability. Ratings leader CBS has shown reduced operating revenue, compared with years before, prior to the recession. Fox, ABC, and the CW are also hurting. ABC canceled the series "Samantha Who?" with star Christina Applegate, due to an inability to reduce costs. According to Deadline Hollywood Daily, half a million per episode had to be cut from the budget to get the show renewed. It's possible that CBS made a similar decision in canceling the excellent "Eleventh Hour" which got good ratings.
The reason for the move to cut costs is clear: the networks, pretty much all of them, don't believe they can get enough viewers. Probably most of the networks don't want to do the things required to gain viewers. Since it would be too uncomfortable for network executives dealing with producers. NBC's Silverman, after all, was a reality show producer himself before becoming head of NBC programming, and will surely return to that once he leaves NBC, as is true for most programming heads. [Former "Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Hill Street Blues" producer Grant Tinker became Tartikoff's boss at NBC.] Programming heads don't like to pressure producers outside their comfort zones, knowing the places can and will be reversed some day soon. Today's programming heads and producers are relatively happy creating content that is "edgy and hip" and aimed almost exclusively at women 18-34, the female youth demographic, so desired by advertisers. It was a strategy that worked reasonably well, during boom times, but is out of touch, and dangerously so, with economic reality today.
It's useful to compare today's America, and state of television, with that of the America in the 1960's. It's true that in the 1960's, there were only three broadcast networks, as opposed to five today (Fox and CW did not exist then). But there are about 100 million more people today in the US than there were during the 1960's. In 1970, the population of the US was about 203 million. Today, America has about 306 million. This increase of about 103 million people amounts to about roughly a 50% increase from 1970 levels. The Beverly Hillbillies drew about 60 million viewers during it's peak years. Today, with 50% more people, the highest rated show on broadcast TV is "American Idol" with about 25-30 million viewers. By contrast, HBO which is available to almost every household in the US, has only a third of households subscribing, which amounts to about 8-9 million viewers for the Sopranos, and 11.9 million viewers for the finale. Only the Superbowl, with ratings of around 100 million viewers or so has accomplished keeping near pace with population increases. One would imagine, that all things being equal, shows that were popular would be posting viewers in the 90 million range (about a 50% increase from the 60 million that the Beverly Hillbillies drew). This is not so. Even during the 1980's, before Fox and the CW, and widespread cable TV, the A-Team only drew 20 million viewers at it's height. [Fox first broadcast in October, 1986]
Even during the early 1980's, viewership had declined, despite the lack of alternatives (no Fox, no CW, no UPN nor WB networks, no cable inroads). A cable show like HBO's True Blood generates only 1.4 million viewers per showing. Broadcast network executives and producers argue that viewer erosion is a function of audience fragmentation, but clearly viewers were not watching TV, by the droves (nearly 50% less compared to the late 1960's) in the 1980's, comparing say Beverly Hillbillies (60 million viewers) to the A-Team (20 million viewers). This without cable, Fox, CW, UPN/WB, and so on. Even with cable competition, the numbers don't add up, i.e. there's just not enough total viewers of stuff like True Blood to account for the "missing" viewers. Moreover, cable networks like HBO, Showtime, USA, Sci-Fi, and others run their schedules in the Summer months, precisely to avoid competition with the broadcast networks, who have re-runs or unwatchable reality shows during that time.
The missing viewers, are of course, men. The Long Tail Blog has old data from the 2004-5 controversy over the "missing" male viewers reported by Nielsen. [Changes in methodology in 2004 had a 10% decline in male viewership 18-34, which was "adjusted" back to previous viewership levels in 2005.] Nevertheless, TV is a mostly gay-female ghetto. Sitcoms can have up to 80% of their viewers female, as a quick look at shows like "Friends" or "How I Met Your Mother" would confirm.
Look for example at ABC's 2008 Fall Schedule:
Number of shows (Primetime): 16.
Number female skewing: 16.
NBC's Fall Schedule has:
Number of shows (Primetime): 18 (I'm not counting the Saturday edition of Dateline NBC).
Number of female skewing: 13 (note, the five shows that are male skewing include the two Sunday Night Football shows, the pre-game and the Sunday Night Football.)
CBS's Fall 2008 Schedule is here:
Number of shows: 22.
Number of female skewing: 21 (I'm including only NUB3RS as not female skewing, and even that might be pushing it, if you added NCIS, Without A Trace, and the Unit, you would get to 18 as female skewing. My standard for not female skewing is a "male" show like the A-Team, i.e. few female roles, not much concern for relationships, other things women viewers like to see).
Fox's Fall 2008 Schedule is here:
Number of shows: 17 (I'm counting the Saturday shows of Cops and America's Most Wanted).
Number of female skewing shows: 15.
CW's Schedule for Fall 2008 is here.
Number of shows: 10.
Number of female skewing shows: 8 (I'm counting Smallville and Supernatural as at least not female skewing shows, they are weird hold-overs from the WB days).
This gives us the following graphs:
[Click Image to enlarge]
As you can see, NBC had the most shows that were "Men Friendly" in the sense of not being female skewing (such as say, ABC's "Desperate Housewives") with five, two of those related to Sunday Night Football (the pre-game show and the game broadcast, respectively). Moreover, even shows such as "Heroes," and "Chuck," and "My Own Worst Enemy" had substantial female-friendly elements (soap-opera style relationship stuff, and so on). NBC, moreover, did not do very well with it's line-up of shows. "My Own Worst Enemy" was canceled fairly quickly, and "Life," "Chuck," and "Knight Rider" failed to catch on (though "Chuck" was renewed).
[Click Image to enlarge]
The percentages were overall, fairly dismal. Men make up approximately 50% of the population, but only NBC cracked 25% of their shows being "Male Friendly" and that was a function of the Sunday Football broadcasts. One could argue about how to classify such CBS shows as "Without A Trace," or the various CSI-en, or "Eleventh Hour," but even adding them to the male-friendly mix would not approach 50% for the network, let alone total.
What's wrong with the television networks is the lack of men. Men are the missing viewers. Even counting cable systems, we have the following female-oriented cable networks: Lifetime, Lifetime Movie Network, WE, Oxygen, Bravo, Out, HGTV, Food Network, TLC, A&E, HBO, Showtime, Fine Living, Travel Channel, and Tru. That's a total of 15. Male oriented cable networks include: History Channel, ESPN, NFL Network, National Geographic, Discovery, USA, and Spike. That's a total of 7 networks. As we can see regarding broadcast networks, ALL the current broadcast networks are oriented overwhelmingly towards women.
This emphasis on female viewers has done two things. First, it has made entertainment dull, predictable, and PC-driven. Pushing the message that say, criminals (like the ones always breaking into the house "protected" by the Brinks Home security system in the series of commercials) are mostly mid thirties White guys who look middle class:
Or the endless supply of middle aged, White guys who probably resemble the ex-husbands of the script writers (Law and Order-en family of shows is notorious for this). Instead of the depressing reality of violent crime committed by Blacks and Hispanics. The White female audience demands PC and Multiculturalism, not just because those populations are totemized as some "Magical Negro" (ala Spike's Lee's famous essay decrying the dehumanizing effects of movies such as "Legend of Bagger Vance" where Black characters have magical powers ... that they use to spiritually enlighten White protagonists). But also because women find most "beta" males tedious, as workplace competitors, and bearers of unwanted sexual attention. Thus TV gives women the wrong ideas about who are the risky ones (hint: it's not the boring mid-thirties White guys) for crime and violence, and in asserting the PC dogma, boring and predictable.
Television, after all, has advantages over movies. Longer running times allows complex story lines (about 15 and a half hours for a 22 episode season, compared to 2 hours for most movies). Television is usually dominated by writer-producers, allowing creative continuity. Lacking big budgets for Michael Bay type special effects, television relies more on character than explosions and CGI. Being free or mostly free, television can reach far more people per year than all but the biggest of movies. The actors, too, can often be more skilled, selected for the ability to make the audience like and care about the lead over years, rather than tabloid celebrity. Particularly in a recession, television should be attractive, given the ability to reach far more people with less marketing costs than a big budget movie.
If Television producers and writers were forced out of their female-pandering comfort zone, to create more male-oriented dramas and sitcoms, or at least "male-friendly" in that shows did not have many elements that turn off male viewers (primarily female views of men: "beta losers" and bad-boy winners, along with soap opera emphasis on "doomed love" relationships with bad-boy characters) the creative output would be higher, on average, because those crutches would be gone. More mature, complex, and intelligent characters would be created, with an emphasis on fun. You would also see a net improvement in the kinds of social information given. Far less "evil White guy" villains, and more accuracy in social information.
This relentless focus on female audiences to the point where some networks have no male-friendly shows on them at all (ABC) is of course driven by advertisers, who have traditionally felt that women consumers make most household purchases. As marriage is delayed, or never happens at all, and more and more women are single mothers, and divorce rates remain high, this assumption is seriously flawed. A relic more of the 1960's than today. The food magazine Cook's Illustrated ten years ago had only 17% male readership, today it is over 50%, according to the Wall Street Journal (print edition only). Anyone shopping at the Supermarket will find Dads with kids in tow, doing the shopping and decision making. The female-only strategy, which has been a long-time in coming (as seen in the huge drop-off in ratings from the 1960's to 1980's, long before cable and the internet and video games), was sustainable in good times, but clearly not in bad times. Advertising revenue is down, substantially down, from good times. The female viewership, not the male viewership, is fragmented and hotly competed over. Much hyped CW series "Gossip Girl" for example, can get 1.9 million viewers for new episodes. Meanwhile men have sports, some shows on USA and Sci-Fi network, and the History Channel. That's about it.
Attempts to be "edgy" with hip-female oriented shows such as the remake of Battlestar Galactica have not been ratings winners, for reasons original series star Dirk Benedict explained. [Read the link, it's hilarious.] Two to 1.7 million viewers is "Gossip Girl" territory. Lower even than the Dollhouse finale. [Clearly Dollhouse was renewed because execs want to be on-set for Eliza Dushku's scenes in skimpy costumes, even if the audience could care less.]
NBC's strategy of pursuing the lowest cost possible schedule, and damn the ratings, is doomed to failure. Silverman, coming from a reality producer's perspective, can't understand the fixed costs of a broadcast network, and the coming danger to Television. Broadcast networks, after all, are simply a way for content to be delivered, at the same time, to affiliate stations. The TV networks are merely the outgrowth of the original radio networks, which sought to provide national news, sports, and entertainment through the network model. Just as the LA Times started to decline long before the internet, so too has television viewership. But now the challenge in particular for NBC is worse. It's not just the recession and advertising market being down considerably. Or the brutal competition for female viewers among all the cable and broadcast networks.
The internet allows content creators to deliver serial shows either streaming on-demand, for free, or pay-per-download (the Itunes model), or indeed both. Amazon and Itunes both will gladly sign agreements for content providers, for downloads. The cost to the content producer is relatively low. Even setting up a website like Hulu (or piggybacking on that existing site, and those like it) is not that expensive, far less than say the marketing budget for the film "Sideways," and the former is a cost that can be expensed against many shows.
The future is unlikely to be in broadcast television. There was, for a while, a brief shining opportunity to put content on broadcast television (as a promotional opportunity), on the web as advertiser supported free streaming video, and pay-per-download Itunes/Amazon content, all supported by the vertically integrated mega-media corporations. But predictably, executives looked to their next jobs with content producers, and assumed the years ahead will look like the years behind. That's a dangerous assumption, in all likelihood.
Television is likely to become even more a gay-female ghetto, ala ABC, with almost no men watching it (it's clear in retrospect that execs could not wait to dump ABC's one male-skewing show, "Monday Night Football"), while challenges to the broadcast network arise from places filled with lean and hungry content creators craving access to all those under-served male consumers. Just as American TV is filled with actors from the UK and Australia, it could well be that Hollywood's TV (and movie) complex is replaced by creators from Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, eager to take a risk and make entertainment appealing to men as well as women. The technology exists, today, to provide that challenge.
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78 comments:
I watched as much tv as any Gen Xer, but now it simply can't compare to the internet. When I do watch tv, sitting through commercials feels like it's sucking the life out of me.
Men are watching sports, using the Internet, and playing video games. Women do the latter two things, of course, but probably not to nearly the same extent as men.
And I second "Anonymous'" prior comment: commercials make TV almost unwatchable. I have absolutely no tolerance for them.
Peter
Even counting cable systems, we have the following female-oriented cable networks: Lifetime, Lifetime Movie Network, WE, Oxygen, Bravo, Out, HGTV, Food Network, TLC, A&E, HBO, Showtime, Fine Living, Travel Channel, and Tru. That's a total of 15. Male oriented cable networks include: History Channel, ESPN, NFL Network, National Geographic, Discovery, USA, and Spike. That's a total of 7 networks.
Some nitpicks:
- You count ESPN as just one (male oriented) network, when in fact it's a collection of networks showing different programming, the main ones being "regular" ESPN, ESPN2, and ESPN Classic, plus some specialized ones like ESPNU.
- Many parts of the country have regional sports networks that target men, for instance in the New York area there is SNY, YES, and MSG Network.
- Much of the Travel Channel's programming consists of adventure-type stuff that probably appeals mostly to men, for instance Man vs. Food, Bizaare Foods, and Tony Bourdain. It also shows poker tournaments. I also have the impression that the Food Network isn't nearly as female-skewing as one might expect.
- Comedy Central is a popular cable network that seems mostly male-oriented. So is the Sci-Fi Network.
There's probably other things that I can't think of right now.
Peter
Very good article, Whiskey.
It's the rise of the internet, really.
TV morphed and skewed more female as men were increasingly decamping into other forms of media and entertainment, such as the internet and video games, as ironrails says.
I agree with you, Whiskey, that this is unlikely to turn around in the years ahead. If anything, the internet is really picking up steam as a place where men feel comfortable. I've often thought that this was because the male spaces in the real world were taken away from men. And then TV shows were taken away as well, gradually. The internet remains, though, as a kind of el-dorado, where anyone can express any view. This is attractive to men in a culture where they feel hemmed in, in terms of what they are permitted to express in public. I don't see the fascination for broadcast TV coming back to men in any significant way, really -- it can't possibly compare to what is on the internet of interest to men.
Curious: I noticed that the man who answered the emergency call and the husband actor were all the same body type as the intruder. The "husband" of course was dressed as management alpha.
Also: Smallville is more female oriented. The creators have basically deballed superman and the females have more self-awareness and are complete in their powers when they do have them. Notice that they got rid of Lex Luthor and replaced him with a female. Also Lana Lang, when she obtained her powers was more complete in them.
Curious: I noticed that the man who answered the emergency call and the husband actor were all the same body type as the intruder. The "husband" of course was dressed as management alpha.
Not to mention the fact (I read this elsewhere) that the man at the call center is alert, helpful, English-speaking and articulate. Most call-center workers fail on at least three of those four characteristics.
Peter
Whiskey,you know a lot about media and entertainment,far more than I do.But I havent heard you ever mention anything concerning a glaring media/ent fact;the ownership and operation of the industry by Jews.Surely,the anti-male,anti-white media atmosphere and its Jewish overlords arent merely coincidental,are they?
@Ovid - it's important to distinguish between some of the more religious Jews, who often have conservative values, and the secularized ones for whom progressivism is a substitute religion. Plus you have to keep in mind the important minority of Jewish/part Jewish commentators who point out entertainment/media pathologies - Michael Savage, Mark Levin, Ann Coulter, David Horowitz, and many others.
Jewish media dominance was not always synonymous with anti-Christian/anti-male/anti-American overtones. Think of, for example, classic
1940's Christmas songs & musicals - most of which were written by Jews. It seems like the entertainment industry gradually adopted by osmosis various "progressive" ideals from the outside, as opposed to creating & disseminating them to help further a Secularized Progressive Jewish agenda.
That's true Peter, but Travel Channel at least when I surf past it has folks like Samantha Brown, or lots of luxury stuff about houseboats and stuff.
I just don't know how to classify the ESPN and regional sports networks. Even so, on a pure entertainment level, the imbalance is striking, and even adding the sports networks fully they would be likely counterbalanced by the Home Shopping Network, E! and a few other networks I didn't think about when writing it.
At any rate, I don't see the "missing men" being spread out on Sports networks, etc. Not enough aggregate numbers. Ironically, there have been several Nielsen studies, I'll have to find the link, that suggest women use the internet MORE. It's very telling to browse around Television Without Pity -- almost 100% female dominated.
As for commercials, it's striking to watch say Fox Sports Net for a Dodger game, and see the commercials there, vs. the stuff like Food Network (which is trending more male, but commercials are lagging). Food Network's most popular personality is Alton Brown, who has a huge male following for his nerdy, science-based approach to cooking and eschewing of both chef-oriented stuff and feminine-feel-good hosts.
Oops forgot to add Sci-Fi is a tough one. Shows like Battlestar Galactica have more women than men watching. Not surprising, given the "edgy/dark" plotlines and soap opera relationships, compared to say the straight-ahead adventure sci-fi of Stargate and the very masculine Richard Dean Anderson. As opposed to the female-oriented brooding hunks on Galactica. But some shows are male, some very feminine.
Novaseeker -- I would be hesitant to blame the internet. In fact, if you look at the viewership declines, going from 60 million for the Beverly Hillbillies, appealing to young/old, men/women, to 20 million for the A-Team in 1983, before the internet or Fox or CW or Cable, it's the same thing as the LA Times and FM radio. All entering declines because of demographic declines of core readers, alienating best viewers/readers/listeners, the internet accelerating but not causing the declines.
NJArtist -- good point. That Smallville survived at all though is probably because it's Superman in all but name. Trading on 75 years or so of male comic book geekery. I've heard many complaints about Smallville this season.
Ovid -- The problem is the passing of entrepreneurial first Generation immigrant Jews, such as Louis B. Mayer, famously born on the Fourth of July, or Siegel and Schuster, creators of Superman, or Jack Kirby, creator of Captain America, and Mega Corps which are owned mostly by a broad spectrum of shareholders, many of them institutional.
There are still Jews around, most of them are deeply SWPL-ized producers looking for their next gig. For example, Ben Silverman, out of Reville Entertainment, is the son of a noted Hollywood Music composer, Tufts Grad, and has moved from job to job, including William Morris.
If you own something, it's yours, like MGM with Mayer, you want to make as much money as possible by grabbing the broadest audience as possible. Even musicals in MGM's day were accessible to men, and enjoyed by them. Despite many gays involved in the creation of musicals, they were not the gay-female ghetto that say "Wicked" is today. Or "Rent" if you prefer.
Second, Third, Fourth generation Jews are no different from Catholics, Protestants, and Atheists in being thoroughly yuppified, and it's not recent either -- read Dirk Benedict's post at Big Hollywood or the notes in the Wiki Entry for the A-Team. In both shows, Harvard MBAs, tony WASPs demanded "female-friendly" storylines, characters, and so on. They did not like the Cigars, the boys-club attitudes of the characters, the womanizing aspects, and so on. There ARE prominent Jews who are thoroughly SWPL Yuppified by Harvard/Yale and Ivy/near-Ivy league schools. "Furious D" who posts on his own blog identified the problem -- classic agency problem. No one "owns and runs" the media giants, so profit is not the goal, rather maximizing the careers of the agents hired to run it.
As a practical matter, the sheer numbers of WASPs in lower production roles and writing positions overwhelms that of Jews. Think Joss Whedon, or JJ Abrams, sons of writer/producers. Or take the "Harvard Mafia" that runs both SNL and the Simpsons.
Ironically, you'll find the heaviest concentration of Jews in acting, many of them moderate to conservative: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Zachary Levi, Amanda Bynes, and Michelle Trachtenberg. Levi for example took considerable flack for appearing in "American Carol" with noted Jewish conservative David Zucker.
There is no "conspiracy" to depict White guys as the font of all evil, this was the natural outcome of self-seeking agents hired to run media giants and appealing to second/third generation creators (like Whedon/Abrams) who are deeply socially isolated, contemptous of most ordinary people, and pandering to a mostly female/yuppie audience because it's easy and comfortable and there's no emphasis on profits.
Or put it this way -- if Louis B. Mayer were back running Sony/MGM, you'd have patriotic stuff all the time, with Joe Average as the hero, nothing hip or edgy in sight.
Zachary Levi isn't Jewish.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zachary_Levi
Hey Whiskey -
what are the ratings on DISC Channel's "Deadliest Catch"? That show skews definately male and has been on for what - like six seasons now?
- boarwild
Peter wrote:
"ironrailsironweights said...
Men are watching sports, using the Internet, and playing video games. Women do the latter two things, of course, but probably not to nearly the same extent as men.
And I second "Anonymous'" prior comment: commercials make TV almost unwatchable. I have absolutely no tolerance for them."
Peter I may not agree with you on the centrality of GNP to the harmony of the universe, but you and I are in the same book, page, paragraph, and sentence here. TV is awful (other than stuff like the Discovery, History, Learning, Foxnews, ESPN, and Nature channels). I mean, other than a few football games, Sportscenter highlights, and Documenturary
programs, I have no use for TV at all, and haven't in years.
We have more educated people than before (amongst whites anyway). Its hard for me to believe very many of them are interested in seeing politically-correct dishonestly even in broadcast-TV-fairly-highbrowed stuff like Law&Order. I just can't stand it. The commercials, like one commenter stated previously, are grating and the volume is turned up.
If I'd had the net growing up, I wouldn't even have watched that first season of Miami Vice when I was a lad. I go to YouTube for many of the documenturaries that I watch now. If Im interested in a subject, I see if there is a doc on YouTube about it. TV may never again, even if we get to have 400 million people, the audience it once had. Real life beats a screen every time.
OT: Scientists create test-tube sperm
"If the finding is confirmed, a single male embryo could, in theory, yield a stem-cell line which when stored could provide an unlimited supply of sperm. Once the stem-cell line was established, there would be no further reproductive need for men."
Woo-hoo! :-D
(Not really. I love you guys!)
I posted it in the previous thread, but it bears repeating for numbers of men vs women shopping (both total numbers and dollar amounts) in various kinds of stores:
http://industry.bnet.com/retail/10002753/retailers-take-note-shopping-becomes-a-guy-thing/
I'm still sticking with the Alchian theorem. That American Idol is the most successful show on the air seems to vindicate the strategy of targeting women. Peter Brimelow famously (at least in the steveosphere) refuted the Boston Fed study on "redlining" by pointing out that with the disparate rates of acceptance the default rates between races were equal, whereas they'd be expected to be lower among minorities if they were irrationally discriminated against. Subsequent events have vindicated his analysis. If you were correct the most male-friendly shows should be doing the best rather than American Idol.
Since women have more agreeable personalities, I would actually expect "edgy" material to appeal to them less. American Idol is certainly not edgy or hip. South Park would qualify as edgy, although it's old enough now that it isn't hip anymore.
My standard for not female skewing is a "male" show like the A-Team, i.e. few female roles, not much concern for relationships, other things women viewers like to see
That's a pretty lousy standard. A show that tried to appeal equally to both men and women logically have things that appeal to women. It would be better if we coded shows by their actual viewership, perhaps relative to the average.
Steve Sailer explained why both Law & Order and Sherlock Holmes switched from realistic criminals to upper-class ones here. The Bonfire of the Vanities similarly discussed "the chow" vs "the Great White Defendant". This is nothing new.
the ex-husbands of the script writers
What portion of the writers are women? What portion of them have divorced?
But also because women find most "beta" males tedious
Yeah, back in the days of ancient greece where women were relegated to a corner of the house, entertainment focused on the common man, right? Exciting, dangerous men have long received more attention.
More mature, complex, and intelligent characters would be created
I don't watch tv, but is that what's normally found on SpikeTV these days?
The female viewership, not the male viewership, is fragmented
That seems to conflict with the Chris Anderson post you linked to.
Battlestar Galactica
Isn't that a show for nerds?
Eliza Dushku's scenes in skimpy costumes, even if the audience could care less
Because young women in skimpy clothes don't appeal to men?
Finally, some off-topic stuff. Agnostic has recently called foul on stuff you've written about demographics & entertainment. The Audacious Epigone has another post (sorry if I linked to this one before) responding to what you've written on female promiscuity, and also your complaints about sample sizes in the GSS. We're both in agreement that the topics should be looked into more.
I stand corrected, Levi is not Jewish, however McCain/Republican donor Adam Sandler is.
Deadliest Catch's most recent ratings are here. I suspect that the overall numbers were not good, since they don't give millions of viewers.
TGGP -- I think you misunderstand both my argument and Idol's success. The latter is a success, but LESS THAN THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES of forty years ago. At best, Idol gets half the viewers that Jed Clampett got in the 1960's.
Idol is the highest rated show on TV because it appeals to women young and old. Tweeners and women in their fifties and sixties. There was indeed some concern that it skewed "too old" but quantity as Stalin observed, has it's own quality.
If TV were more than a female/gay ghetto, there would be shows like the A-Team, appealing to men only, and some shows appealing to women only, each probably equally rated, but monster hits with 100 million viewers that appealed to BOTH and both young and old.
It's my view that the true power of the internet is to offer content that is consistently "four quadrants" i.e. young/old, male/female appealing, that makes a lot of money, by bypassing current distribution channels. Distribution and marketing often exceeding the cost of content creation.
By "Edgy" I mean the stuff that appeals to women, such as "Dexter" (serial killer as hero) or Nip/Tuck. They certainly are not male-skewing shows, nor is "Breaking Bad" or the usual hip/edgy/trendy stuff aimed squarely at women (and young women) viewers.
You can argue the methodology all you want, I wanted something quick and dirty. If you have a better classification, the effort required to get demo ratings reports being too tedious and often futile, with some shows being canceled (such as Without A Trace) I'm all for it.
More mature and complex characters would be required for four-quadrant shows. It would be neither the cartoons of Sex and the City or the A-Team or Spike TV.
Sailer fails to note that Law and Orderen have been ratings failures for years. The original recipe has been moved to a half season. On Friday. Though he did note that nearly all the show writers were divorced women.
And yes, entertainment has been male oriented until recently. Most novels were written for and by men, women's concerns were only addressed by Austen. While radio soaps were female oriented, the comedy stuff and various other things were male oriented, as were the Three Stooges shorts, Western and other serials, and the plethora of male-oriented shows like Wanted: Dead or Alive, Have Gun, Will Travel, Maverick, and so on during the 1950's. This was true up through the 1970's with shows like Rockford Files, Vega$, etc. Perhaps even the 1980's -- Riptide, Equalizer, Miami Vice.
There are almost no male friendly shows on TV now, and men seem to have abandoned TV in droves. Even the few male-friendly ones struggle with male perceptions that TV is not for them.
Battlestar Galactica's remake is oriented towards women. Much of the fanbase are women. Eliza Dushku is competing against pr0n. So far a feminist cliche with two million viewers or so the first season finale (lowest ever) and skimpy clothes has not proven a ratings success.
Re female promiscuity, yes it has increased. I'll address that in a later post suffice it to say there is an ample bit of evidence.
Let me add that Agnostic is as usual, dead wrong. He has missed an important point: not enough White Teens post 1980's to either create or sustain musical innovation.
Whiskey, what would you say about the phenomenon of feminized men accelerating the shift of TV shows to a more female-oriented mindset? My theory is that part of this shift (turning every TV show into a quasi soap opera) is the tolerance of it from today's modern effeminate men. In the past I don't think men would have put up with it as much and gotten board and started throwing footballs around in the room or something. I think there is a definite percentage of guys with a "feminine mindset" who have been indoctrinated with it as a result of growing up under single mothers and matriarchally-dominated households. In other words, the average male mind is more female than in the past.
I think this is an additional factor worth considering. I for one can't stand most TV shows and all the soap opera drama that's in them. Give me some epic space battles for god's sake! There seem to be other guys around me, though, who don't share this aversion.
Jewish media dominance was not always synonymous with anti-Christian/anti-male/anti-American overtones. Think of, for example, classic
1940's Christmas songs & musicals - most of which were written by Jews.
If you're thinking of White Christmas or Easter Parade and their ilk, what's most often striking about such things is how the Jewish songwriters remove Christian imagery entirely, replacing it with fuzzy, sentimental pablum about snow and millinery. It may not seem like much, but the slippery slope never does, at first.
Second, Third, Fourth generation Jews are no different from Catholics, Protestants, and Atheists in being thoroughly yuppified.
Such claims must be taken with a pinch of salt, but even yuppified Jews generally seem to maintain their ethnic sensibilities.
No one "owns and runs" the media giants, so profit is not the goal, rather maximizing the careers of the agents hired to run it.
Joel Stein would seem to disagree with you:
"I don't care if Americans think we're running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them."
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-stein19-2008dec19,0,4676183.column
whiskey, great stuff.
wouldn't you say shows such as weeds and dexter (showtime), mad men (amc), and the wire, oz, sopranos (although completed) (hbo) are mostly male dominated?
however i have one nitpick, and that's the readability: you use it's many times where it calls for the possessive, its.
that is all.
The History Channel is being ruined by the introduction of shows like "The Ghost Hunters", "Monster Quest", "Ice Road Truckers", and that similar show on logging. There are also these very stupid shows on extraterrestrials. I don't watch it half as much as I did 2 years ago.
BSG - I'm watching the entire series on DVD, and I can't get my wife to watch it, even though I've told her it is soap opera-like. I have to admit a major part of the show for me is all the good-looking women. That, The dark ambience of the inside of the Galactica, and the shoot-em-up parts are what keep me interested.
Mostly, I'm on the Web now.
Templar -- Are you referring to such songs as "God Bless America" and "Yankee Doodle Dandy" written by that most Jewish of the Tin Pan Alley composers, Irving Berlin? Or the fuzzy, non-Christian imagery of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, written by decidedly un-Jewish Gene Autry?
Most of the patriotic songs from Tin Pan Alley came from guys like Berlin. Post-Christian imagery in Holiday songs was nothing new either, not even the Cowboy could put it in. Given how secular America became starting in the 1920s.
Klein can think whatever he likes, as a practical matter no Network or Studio head stays on for long, most of the power resides not in transient execs looking for their next job but second-third generation producers. Someone like Abrams, or Whedon, or Judd Apatow or even McG has far more power than Ben Silverman, who is basically a glorified salesman. Heck even Ashton Kutcher as a producer has more power.
As far as retaining ethnic identity when Yuppified, that's a laugh. Speilberg can't even make the story of the Munich Massacre without a heavy dose of SWPL moral equivalence, and Palestinian sympathy. When the man who made Schindler's List can't even back the Jews over the guys who slaughtered them AGAIN in Munich, I rest my case.
Are you referring to such songs as "God Bless America" and "Yankee Doodle Dandy" written by that most Jewish of the Tin Pan Alley composers, Irving Berlin? Or the fuzzy, non-Christian imagery of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, written by decidedly un-Jewish Gene Autry?
No, I'm not. I don't what could have suggested that I was.
Klein can think whatever he likes, as a practical matter no Network or Studio head stays on for long, most of the power resides not in transient execs looking for their next job but second-third generation producers.
Moment magazine headline, August, 1996: "Jews Run Hollywood".
Subtitle: "So What?"
As far as retaining ethnic identity when Yuppified, that's a laugh.
Again, such assertions can only be taken with a grain of salt.
Speilberg can't even make the story of the Munich Massacre without a heavy dose of SWPL moral equivalence, and Palestinian sympathy.
He can, however, introduce a somewhat gratuitous Waffen-SS/Nazi subplot into Saving Private Ryan, and excise any reference to Jewish collaborators or the suffering of non-Jews in Schindler's List to the point where a Polish journalist can note "It's not an anti-Polish film: Poland basically does not exist in it", and if I recall correctly, Spielberg, like Dustin Hoffman and most likely many other mostly secular Jews, has noted that he's experienced a strong desire to reconnect with his religious roots as he's gotten older.
I can't really fault Spielberg for brooding some over the Israeli response to the Munich attacks, however, given Israel's rather callously cavalier attitude to, well, anything that gets in their way, including the sovereignty of foreign nations, the trustworthiness of Canadian passports and the Americans' attempts to ensure that their classified information remains as such.
After giving it more thought, I've concluded that contrary to the original assertion only a relatively small number of cable/satellite channels are truly female-oriented. More channels are either male-oriented or generally neutral. Keep in mind I'm talking about the more common channels included on standard cable or satellite channels, not the more specialized and rarely watched ones.
The women's channels consist of two groups: general-purpose channels which explicitly target women (Oxygen, WE, Lifetime, and their offshoots), and home/family oriented channels (HGTV, Style, TLC, Food Network to some extent). I'm not including the home-shopping channels as I believe they pay cable and satellite operators to carry them and aren't measured by rating services. USA Network and TNT are the closest cable/satellite equivalents to broadcast networks and therefore probably end up with mostly women.
On the other side, there are many channels which attract largely male audiences - ESPN and its offshoots, the regional sports channels, Spike, Sci-Fi, Discovery, History Channel, National Geographic Channel, Comedy Central. In addition, I've heard that news and business channels (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Bloomberg, etc.) appeal more to men than to women. Finally, certain channels such as Bravo, A&E, AMC and TCM probably shift between men and women depending on what they're showing at any particular time.
Peter
Whiskey,
Both here and at Sailer's blog you've implicitly connected WASPs and Harvard. According to Ron Unz (writing in the WSJ in the 90s) one quarter to one third of Harvard's student body is Jewish. Other ethnic minorities such as Asians are also highly overrepresented - though the Asians are not common in the entertainment industry. Harvard was founded, built, and sustained by WASPs but where are they now? Compared to their percentage of the population they appear to be thin on the ground there in Cambridge. What evidence do you have that WASPs are still prominent there and for that matter in Hollywood? The latter would be particularly surprising given traditional WASP indifference (and even contempt) toward Hollywood.
The Sci-Fi channel (which is now "Syfy" making the demise final) is no longer a "male" channel. The new Battlestar series is a prime example of this. I wrote a lot more about this on my blog.
Comparing the ratings of a modern television program with one from forty years ago is silly. If you want to find the effects of a single factor you try to make all else equal. After forty years, all else is sure as hell not equal. If your theory is that t.v shows are getting low ratings because producers stupidly fail to promote shows that appeal to men, you need to compare the ratings of shows which are similar in respects other than their appeal to men.
By "Edgy" I mean the stuff that appeals to women
By that standard, American Idol is edgy while Sam Peckinpah is not.
They certainly are not male-skewing shows
I don't know anything about Nip/Tuck or Breaking Bad, but the only people I know who watch Dexter or BSG are guys. Not only is that anecdotal evidence but I'm a programmer, so the set of people I know is heavily skewed male.
the effort required to get demo ratings reports being too tedious and often futile
You're right about that. Nielsen collects data broken down by different demographic groups, but it seems they don't make that available for free. I know they aren't the only ones doing media research, but I can't actually name anyone else.
Sailer fails to note that Law and Orderen have been ratings failures for years
Huh, I thought they kept making spin-offs precisely because it had been such a perennially successful show. I know I've seen data showing it to be one of the few shows in the top ten for both white and black viewers. But both my recollections and Steve's post are years old. I looked up the show on imdb to see who the screenwriters are. The male names seem to outnumber the female ones by a decent margin. According to this, women make up about 22% of the screenwriter's guild and get paid at about 80% of the rate of males:
http://www.screenwriter.com/insider/CSlocum.html
I agree that female promiscuity is a good deal higher than it was 50s. What we don't accept is your claim that 50+ partners is at all common.
Agnostic answered your point (you can check the comments to his post again). The 80s out-teened the 60s, and immigration had yet to make the composition that much less white.
I watched Munich and I think it's clear that the movie backs the Israelis. There is some moral equivalence, which particularly reflected in the main protagonist (based on the guy who supposedly took part and then wrote a book about it) I don't find realistic, but it's mostly just an attempt to come off as nuanced.
Anon -- yeah that's my writing habit.
Second Anon -- your complaints about the UFO stuff is not uncommon. I've seen others complain that Cable Nets are going to un-niche and "broad" to gain viewers.
Templar -- the real power players in Hollywood are the writer/producers. Who do you think has more power: JJ Abrams or Ben Silverman?
Producing careers can last decades, a guy like Spelling can work in the 1960's-2000's. Most network heads are lucky to serve five years, a guy like Tartikoff had an unusually long run. Same with studio heads. Meanwhile writer/producers are creating project after project, which means real power and patronage. Most of those guys are Ivy League WASPs. Put it this way: who has the most power at the CIA -- Leon Panetta or the guys who were there before him and will be there long after him? Same thing.
Your complaints about non-Jews suffering in the Holocaust ought to be directed one Adolf Hitler. The movie was about Schindler and the Jews he saved.
As for Israelis not caring about diplomatic niceties, since most of these nations had either looked the other way to curry favor or gain respite from PLO/Arab attacks, it's entirely justifiable. The Soviets did much the same after suffering the same stuff on their diplomats, and one can hardly blame them.
You must admit that the failure to portray positively the striking back at PLO terrorists who slaughtered innocent Israelis because they were Jews in the German city most closely associated with Adolf Hitler's rise makes a mockery of Spielberg's claims to reconnect, about on the level of Madonna's British accent or Kaballah.
Peter/Iron --
It's now "Sy-Fy" and is being oriented towards women: here.
"The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular,” said TV historian Tim Brooks, who helped launch Sci Fi Channel when he worked at USA Network."
National Geographic has lots of female-oriented stuff like the Mark Burnett (Survivor) produced "Expedition Africa." CNN/MSNBC skew female, Fox skews male. Bravo for a while was the "Gay Network" running "Project Runway" and "Queer Eye" so it's unlikely to skew male, a quick perusal of the ads running on A&E (and the programming) suggest that it's pretty much female: Dog the Bounty Hunter, the Cleaner, Hammertime, the First 48 (true crime and reality stuff skews female).
So, no, most cable stuff is devoted to women. This is particularly true when you toss out sports/home shopping, which do not run either reality or scripted entertainment and are obvious plays for men and women (and roughly balance each other out in terms of channels, though with a slight edge for men-sports in total availability).
Matra -- See my post in reply to Templar. Having dealt (somewhat peripherally on the IT end) with a few Hollywood projects, WASPs entered Hollywood as producers, and sometimes agents, because there was a lot of money in it, and it ran on connections. See here which Steve Sailer at his site has also blogged about. You also get people like JJ Abrams who as the children of producers and so on get sent to Ivies or near Ivies (in Abrams case, Sarah Lawrence). Which is not exactly Yeshiva University. Hollywood is a place where people move from project to project, and thus runs on personal connections. No greater personal connections exist on a broad network base than that of the Ivies. It is in fact why people go there (as Sailer has noted). Not because you get a great education better than other colleges, but because of the social network.
TGGP -- Why is it silly? The Superbowl, with about 100 million viewers year in and out, gets about the same population adjusted ratings as the Beverly Hillbillies. Total TV viewing is down, quite a bit for men.
Edgy means female-friendly Alpha stuff (guy is socially dominant, all other factors irrelevant), with breaking social taboos and such. Examples would be the rape by the lead character in "Rescue Me" of his ex-wife, and his frequent crying jags about how he's victimized by memories of 9/11. That's female-friendly, and male poison. As for Dexter and Battlestar Galactica, I invite you to go onto TWOP and look at the discussions there. It's rare you will find any men there. Or look here. Careful math HERE gives AT LEAST 53% female viewers for Battlestar Galactica that week, note they don't give girls 17 and under (they probably did poorly in that demo, hence no reporting, but they got at least SOME I'll bet).
Office/cube type guys can be the worst, in wanting what Sailer called (accurately IMHO) the fantasy of kick-ass babes who are not interested in girly things like relationships, family, and shopping. Instead "explosions." The history of trying to game this by getting a "Frankenstein" approach of feminist, ass-kicking women and female-oriented angsty Alphas (compare/contrast the characters on the remake of Battlestar Galactica with either uber-masculine Michael Mann's TV series Miami Vice or Dirk Benedict's Battlestar Galactica) has been dismal: Dollhouse, late run Buffy (which at it's peak only pulled in 5 million viewers compared to 8 to 11 million for Smallville at it's peak), Sarah Connor Chronicles, and so on. Women have more and better choices about hunky guys and empowered women, and guys seem to have written off TV. The film "Wanted" tanked badly after it's initial weekend, same problem.
Law and Order Trial by Jury was cancelled after one year, Law and Order CI runs often on USA to fill space in NBC's family of cable outlets, Wolfe has some special relationship with NBC (power of producers again) and want's to break Gunsmoke's longevity record. Ratings have been down for years, there was speculation that it would be canceled, it's now running half-seasons. TVbytheNumbers.com is probably your best aggregate source for ratings. I've used them in other posts to pull out data. You have to yank out demo press release by press release, but it's better than nothing.
I'll have to check Agnostic -- but my point WAS that there were more teens in the 1980s, and afterwards music fell off the cliff. He has not read my post.
The reason it's silly to compare the two over forty decades is because you want ceteris paribus. With such large differences there are innumerable factors that could plausibly explain any differences and so there's no way you can attribute it to a single one. Your theory is that the people whose job it is to get the best ratings among desired demographic groups are pursuing a flawed strategy. If you want to do a quick & dirty check on that you have to compare ratings for shows that are the same in EVERY POSSIBLE WAY EXCEPT the strategy. Now I used hyperbolic language that's impossible to actually fulfill (we can't do controlled experiments, after all, at least until we get hired to replace them!). So you have to look for "natural experiments" which approximate a controlled experiment as closely as possible. At minimum that means we need the same population of potential viewers, which can't be the case four decades apart.
WASPs are a rapidly declining segment of the populace and equating Ivy League with WASP is laughable. You certainly haven't presented any evidence that they outnumber, say, Catholics in Hollywood. The article you linked to on the Simpsons highlights Mike Reiss. Not a WASP surname.
I actually would have expected crime shows to skew male, Dog the Bounty Hunter in particular. He's a famously un-p.c redneck. I don't think women are particularly fond of David Allen Coe. Additionally, while I'm of below-average authority on aesthetic judgment, the dude and his wife are both pug-ugly.
Careful math HERE gives AT LEAST 53% female viewers for Battlestar Galactica that week
No, careful math does not.
1,576,000 Adults 18-49
592,000 Women 18-49 (37.6%)
1,726,000 Adults 25-54
646,000 Women 25-54 (37.4%)
Office/cube type guys can be the worst, in wanting what Sailer called (accurately IMHO) the fantasy of kick-ass babes who are not interested in girly things like relationships, family, and shopping.
Exactly. Who do you think was buying Tomb Raider?
Agnostic's post discussed the decline of musicals and the 80s compared to the 60s. He also agrees that things went off the cliff in the 90s (I have a low opinion of the 80s and can't agree), but says if your theory is right the 80s should have been a peak. You yourself have written about how the culture of the 60s was so enduring because it was the last youth bulge, agnostic's point is that the 80s actually was.
Oops, I said Ghosthunters was on The History Channel, when it's on "Syfy". Same thing, though, two channels being ruined by crap like that.
So BSG is almost 2 to 1 male over female viewers? I can easily believe that.
Whiskey are you also Testing99? Agnostic, I think it was, said this on his blog. Why not post always under the same name?
Great post.
"sitting through commercials feels like it's sucking the life out of me."
I only watch shows on DVR now.
What significance would you attribute to MTV in draining the male TV viewership? MTV has a reputation as the most youth-based television station, yet their shows have devolved into almost all female skewed programming since the late 90's. Instead of Beavis and Butthead, Headbanger's Ball, Tom Green Show, and Yo MTV raps, MTV puts on crappy dating shows, The Hills, all this PC garbage with their think.com campaign, and TRL became the most notable supporter of bubblegum pop in the late 90's. The Real World has become the most intensely gay show on TV and the most transparently "diverse" one too (so much so that on the Hollywood season a cast member insulted another cast member by calling him the "token black guy").
Males are told this TV best represents their youth culture, but see it's at odds with their actual experience. This may turn them off to TV altogether (in addition to all the great evidence you provide).
interesting discussion. I will take issue with this, though:
"Most novels were written for and by men, women's concerns were only addressed by Austen."
this is really not true at all. Novels, from their origins in the 18th C, always had a large female audience. Richardson's "Pamela" and "Clarissa" are basically instruction books for middle-class women, Fanny Burney, Maria Edgworth, were major figures. All the Gothic horror stuff was female-skewed--Austen's "Northanger Abbey" is a parody of a young woman obsessed with those books.
same for the 19th century too--Dickens, George Eliot, and on and on are not "male" oriented in the least. Even Walter Scott, beloved by everyone from Robt. E. Lee downward, is larded with chivalry and romance.
It's arguable the novel has always been female-skewed, and the rise of the Alpha Male writers--Faulkner, Hemingway, Mailer, Bellow, etc--is a bit of a historical anomaly. One that's completely over now..
also, the Irish Catholic George M. Cohan wrote "Yankee Doodle Dandy," not I. Berlin.
jp
Whiskey,
I sent a friend a copy of this post and he sent me this back:
"The US economy is a consumer-driven economy. American consumer products companies no longer know how to appeal to the 40% of their market composed of straight males because their in-house advertising departments seem to be dominated by people for whom straight males are a threat, i.e., women and gay males. How that came to be is not pertinent. What is pertinent is that the people who make the advertising buys for American consumer products companies are now entrenched and, since they are not straight males, can't be fired without violating lots of state and federal employment laws.
The only people who can be lawfully discriminated against in employment are straight white males, so they are. This is particularly true in the advertising business and Hollywood.
And the ensuing inability of American consumer products companies to appeal to 40% of their market will reduce economic growth, as the US economy is consumer driven."
Who do you think has more power: JJ Abrams or Ben Silverman?
That's something of a moot point, given both are Jews.
Producing careers can last decades, a guy like Spelling can work in the 1960's-2000's.
Aaron Spelling, another very influential Hollywood Jew.
Most of those guys are Ivy League WASPs.
I'm not seeing it, quite frankly.
Put it this way: who has the most power at the CIA -- Leon Panetta or the guys who were there before him and will be there long after him?
Put it another way: It doesn't matter who has the most power in the CIA when the CIA is beholden to a government in thrall to Jewish/Israeli interests, as the recent Israeli espionage farce should have made rather obvious.
Your complaints about non-Jews suffering in the Holocaust ought to be directed one Adolf Hitler.
Why, exactly?
The movie was about Schindler and the Jews he saved.
Rather mendaciously. As I said, there's little to no indication that anyone besides Jews suffered and died in the concentration camp systems in most dramatizations. Not a good thing when the majority of the American population seemingly receives the bulk of its historical awareness from Hollywood.
As for Israelis not caring about diplomatic niceties, since most of these nations had either looked the other way to curry favor or gain respite from PLO/Arab attacks, it's entirely justifiable. The Soviets did much the same after suffering the same stuff on their diplomats, and one can hardly blame them.
By that logic, the U.S. government should be issuing posthumous pardons to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. After all, "one can hardly blame" the Soviet Union for not wanting to be at the atomic mercy of the United States.
You must admit that the failure to portray positively the striking back at PLO terrorists who slaughtered innocent Israelis because they were Jews in the German city most closely associated with Adolf Hitler's rise makes a mockery of Spielberg's claims to reconnect, about on the level of Madonna's British accent or Kaballah.
Hardly. It would flagrantly unreasonable to blame Spielberg for having mixed emotions over the ongoing strife between Jews and Muslims in the Holy Land, particularly given the habitual claims of Judaism to moral highground in any and all matters, reinforced as they are with well-worn tales of victimization, which must seem rather ironic at times.
The new MLB network just had the largest (number of homes) cable opening in history. Surely that has to be not only male oriented, but white male oriented.
Whiskey,
There is zero evidence to suggest that WASPs have any influence in either Harvard or Hollywood. You have not responded to my questions on this matter. The reality is that Hollywood is dominated by Jews and to a lesser extent other Ellis Island immigrant malcontents. Harvard is up to one third Jewish even though Jews are only 1 to 2% of the US population. They are the Establishment.
You make good points about single white female influence but then come across like Woody Allen and Norman Lear on WASPs.
TGGP --
What exactly are the changes from 1968 to 1983? That's ONLY 15 years, and yet you have a decline from 60 million viewers, to 20 million, with no internet, no cable, no Fox, pretty much the same society it was fifteen years ago. You totally miss my point -- this change (men abandoning TV, along with older viewers btw) has been going on for a LONG time. It's accelerating now. But began earlier. Yes of course they are pursuing a flawed strategy, they have for DECADES. They've been buoyed by rising incomes among Yuppies, the Brandon Tartikoff strategy, which has led them into a dead end the way say, Newspapers, Magazines, much of FM radio, and the music business has failed. People fail all the time. Failure is generally the natural order of things: GM, Chrysler, are two good examples. Plenty of smart people there. Their companies total failures, for the same reasons.
WASPs are White Anglo Saxon Protestant. They make up as of 2000 the vast majority of the population, around 75% or so for Whites, and 53% Protestant. Jews are 1.3%. Catholics 24% or so.
Dog and other "relationship" shows appeal to women. See "John and Kate Plus 8" ... the reality shows that appeal to men generally involve dangerous stuff like Deadliest Catch or Ice Road Truckers.
I stand corrected on the female demos, my eyes misread 18-49 as 18-24. That still gives nearly 40% female, and the relatively low numbers overall show that a Frankstein approach has not worked. The Tomb Raider game sold well to guys, the movie sequel, not so much. Dollhouse, Sarah Connor, Battlestar, etc. have not gained a lot of viewers. Even the Sopranos were able to pull at time 11 million viewers, on something that only a third of households (HBO) have.
Agnostic and I agree that the 1980's were the last actual youth bulge, we disagree on WHY things went off the cliff. While the 1980's were the last youth culture bulge demographically, they had the same vernacular musically as the 1960's. The same chord progressions, same instruments, same musical references, which was pretty remarkable. The 1960's were as distant to the 1980's as the Roaring Twenties and Flappers were to the 1940's, yet the music was VERY different, and we still have the same basic styles of music (and in some cases bands) today that we had forty years ago, it's as if the music and attitudes of the 1920's lingered on in the 1960's.
I posted at Sailers as Testing99 years ago, and still do, so people know what I posted in the past, on his site. I chose this name later, for this blog. Shrug. I'm the same person. Testing99 sounds dumb for a blog name.
----------
Don Quixote was published in 1604, it's generally accepted as the first novel. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe in 1719 is considered the first English language novel. Gulliver's Travels has also been in the running. Most of the novels in the late 18th and 19th Century were by men: Twain, Jack London, Anatole France, Stendhal, the Dumas father and sons, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, and so on.
Agreed Anon that your friend is absolute correct. Advertising, dominated by people who do see Straight Males as a threat, is a huge problem. This is particularly so since most companies don't make their ads and are dependent on agencies like Ogilvy and Maher to create their spots. It's quite striking to "hear" how "male" the ads created locally for very little are on AM talk radio. To someone inured to the feminized world of TV advertising, it's shocking. And yes this means that companies will be punished and rewarded to the degree that they throw off PC by scrapping for every dollar. Much of PC has been enabled by constantly rising consumer spending, which is in the dumps probably for decades.
Templar -- How is Abrams Jewish? I see no reference to it in his wiki entry. As noted above actor Zachary Levi has a name that sounds Jewish (but he isn't), producer Jerry Bruckheimer sounds like a Jewish name (but isn't according to his wiki), while producer Michael Bay has a name that doesn't sound Jewish (but he is).
Most producers are not Jewish, and hold the keys to power. Studio heads are looking for their next job, and have to curry favor with the next producers. If you like, substitute Ron Moore (ex-Catholic according to his Wiki) for JJ Abrams. Both wield more power in Hollywood by virtue of their social network and patronage than Ben Silverman or whoever is running Sony this week for Sir Howard Stringer (also not a Jew). Heck Mark Burnett has more power in Hollywood than Ben Silverman. [Note, Burnett is not a Jew either.]
The CIA is beholden to itself, only. It's time to grow up and accept human nature. The CIA is (note the Wiki entry below) hostile to Jews and Israel, and has been so from the beginning. Truman had to over-ride State and CIA objections to recognize Israel (CIA being staffed by many who look forward to working for the Saudis and other Gulf states).
Schindler's List was about a man, Oscar Schindler, who saved a bunch of Jews. There were no others in his camps. It was both historically accurate, and dramatically correct to depict this. The movie was long enough as it was.
If one does not follow the rules of war, you can hardly quibble. Nation after nation in Europe offered Palestinian terrorists safe harbor, in open violation of their own laws, in a corrupt bargain, to gain peace at home. You might as well complain about Adolf Eichman's capture (note how the CIA protected him at length).
Spielberg's inability to sympathize with the Israelis who were faced with modern-day Eichmans (Eichman was protected by the Argentines, as was Mengele) and his rather stupid implication (shot of the Twin Towers) that the US created bin Laden was the biggest piece of moral relativism, and also undermines completely your thesis that "Jews" promote "Jewish interests" when Spielberg cannot even take the side of his co-religionists or co-ethnics over those who slaughtered them. After all, the story of Munich was a bunch of (polygamist) kill-crazy Palestinians who murdered in cold blood during the Olympics Israeli athletes who had nothing to do Palestinian demands. Symbolically, in the German city most associated with Hitler.
Speilberg is proof positive that the powers of Yuppie SWPL is far more powerful than any putative Jewish Identity. He can't even take his own side in a fight. So much for your theories.
I Think The Online Media To Watch TV Show is Really Good. I always watch NBC Heroes Episodes Online.
Heroes had the biggest plummet of any show in TV history. They should replace "jumping the shark" with some shit they did on Heroes.
The first season was absolutely incredible, everything since has been tiresome and downright boring.
>It's quite striking to "hear"
>how "male" the ads created
>locally for very little are on AM
>talk radio. To someone inured to
>the feminized world of TV
>advertising, it's shocking.
That's because AM talk radio -- political, shock and sports -- is one of only three places that modern media caters to straight males.
The other two are video games and porn.
Successful advertisers in those three markets have no choice but to cater to straight males.
Broadcast TV sports has gone to things like women's voleyball and women's figure skating because that is where men and women can agree to watch the same sport due to the "Hot chicks in skimpy outfits effect."
>And yes this means that companies
>will be punished and rewarded to
>the degree that they throw off PC
>by scrapping for every dollar.
>Much of PC has been enabled by
>constantly rising consumer
>spending, which is in the dumps
>probably for decades.
The problem with this thought is the US Federal discrimination laws in general, and disparate impact doctrine in particular, are bughouse nuts.
Big companies cannot get rid of whole advertising & marketing departments filled with creative gays and (generally hot looking i the marketing department) SWPL women in their corporations without major litigation issues.
See this:
> "In June, lawyer Alfred Rava
>announced a $500,000 settlement
>of his lawsuit against the
>Oakland A's baseball team
>for "discriminating" illegally
>against men when it gave away
>7,500 floppy hats to the first
> women through the turnstiles on
>a 2004 Mother's Day breast-cancer-
>awareness promotion. Rava may get
>about half ('attorney's fees'),
>and any man who swears he was
>among the first 7,500 fans through
> the gates that day, and who
>wanted a hat, will get $50 cash
>plus other premiums." - American
>Bar Association Journal, 6-18-09
Those companies would need to do that at a minimum to get creative straight, and mainly white, men in to run advertising campaigns aimed at straight men because neither gays nor SWPL females know jack about or care to learn what straight men really want, need and desire.
The best they could do is to outsource their whole corporate marketing and advertising operation to specialist "straight male only" advertising firms based totally outside the USA and AFAIK, there are none.
Matra -- the list of gays in Hollywood, here is as prominent as that of Jews. Famously, Michael Ovitz charged a "Gay Mafia" ran Hollywood, and many actors and actresses have complained about Gay Casting Directors (anonymously) preference for boyish men and stick figure women hurting casting opportunities.
The reality is that power resides in producers, most of whom are not Jews but Protestants or Catholics or Gays.
The most powerful, but least respected, man in Hollywood is likely Michael Bay. His films are reminiscent of Howard Hawks or John Ford in structure (they are admittedly not particularly well crafted) and are as mainstream as you can get. His films make an astonishing amount of money (which gives him power but not respect -- Gus Van Zandt or Woody Allen probably have more respect in Hollywood).
One -- You are correct. Heroes lost a lot of it's audience, and it never came back. Stupid soap-opera relationship stuff and a dragging out plotline, along with the usual "White Male Businessman" villain killed it.
What exactly are the changes from 1968 to 1983?
A decade and a half isn't forty years (which is what I thought we were discussing, though I typoed "forty decades" which would be long indeed!), but it's still significant. The passage of time is correlated with so many things that most explanations of why correlation is not causation will use two variables correlated with time (pirates vs global warming, for instance). There are simply so many things correlated with the passage of time that you can't pick out one factor. It's extra surprising that you are now using 1983 as an example since the A-Team was even more male oriented than the Beverly Hillbillies!
Failure is generally the natural order of things: GM, Chrysler, are two good examples
Let me guess, because they ignored straight white males?
Dog and other "relationship" shows appeal to women. See "John and Kate Plus 8" ... the reality shows that appeal to men generally involve dangerous stuff like Deadliest Catch or Ice Road Truckers.
It's a bounty-hunter show! Did Jon or Kate ever get locked up by the Federales when they were doing their jobs?
I stand corrected on the female demos, my eyes misread 18-49 as 18-24
I still don't see how you arrived at your number. And 63% male is an even larger margin than your believed 53% female, so to the extent that you could have used BSG to support your argument with your incorrect numbers, it now undermines it even more.
the relatively low numbers overall show that a Frankstein approach has not worked
I thought BSG was one of sci-fi's most successful shows.
it's as if the music and attitudes of the 1920's lingered on in the 1960's
Exactly agnostic's point. You can't explain it through a shortage of white teens, because there was none.
Don Quixote was published in 1604, it's generally accepted as the first novel
No, Tale of Genji is. Jaquez Barzun doesn't even consider Don Quixote to be a novel, and he's not alone among literary critics. Just nitpicking though. If you read From Dawn to Decadence, he goes heavily into gender issues as they relate to literature (among other things). I'm a complete philistine, so it wasn't my cup of tea.
I looked up Abrams at ancestry.com. The first result is Ashkenazi jewish. Googling "J. J. Abrams" with "religion" brought me here, which claims he's of the Jewish faith. Doing the same for Bruckheimer, brought me here, which also lists his religion as Jewish. The New York Times said his parents were Jewish.
Most producers are not Jewish
Cite?
Spielberg's inability to sympathize with the Israelis
Not what I got from the movie.
implication (shot of the Twin Towers) that the US created bin Laden
That's quite an inference you leapt to!
(polygamist)
I was not aware any of them had multiple wives, or what relevance it would be if they did. Some googling showed that in 1995 only 3.5% of married unions in Palestine were polygamous.
SWPL
Actually, I agree with Sailer that Spielberg is one of the most admirably conservative directors around. His films promote traditional bourgeois norms. The Indiana Jones series and Saving Private Ryan hark back to the good old days when men were men, and all that jazz.
The reality is that power resides in producers, most of whom are not Jews but Protestants or Catholics or Gays.
Again, cite?
What pisses me off most is that male characters even in action shows have become complete and utter pussies.
No more "I'll take care of this mess" masculine heroes who do their jobs without moaning and bitching, who seem to have a lot of fun doing it, and who are unabashedly male.
Nowadays the hero of course has to be tortured about the things he does, with constant emotional drama and bitchfits about how the whole situation was thrust upon him and if it were up to him he'd rather be man-childing it up with his similarly stunted and girlish friends.
And of course their interactions with women are even more egregious. Not one iota of testosterone to be found. Passive, emotional, meek, pathetic, and infinitely forgiving. The woman has to assume the active role in the relationship because the guy would rather sit around and talk about his feelings.
Every now and then it seems like a male character might grow a pair, but then some shrike has to come along and bitch him out about it because being decisive and manly is unacceptable.
The most egregious example of this is "Chuck," which for some reason won't die despite being unpopular. It is excruciatingly painful to watch. All men who are presented as "likable" are complete and utter wimps. The guys who do seem to be "men's men" are presented as aggressive, doltish oafs. The women, of course, kick ass (100 pound size 0 runway model taking down dozens of thugs and foreign agents in hand-to-hand combat? Run of the mill) and are the most decisive characters in the series. Not that their manly demeanor is derided. Indeed, the show serves mainly as a platform to glorify them.
Off topic:
I believe a lot of people here also frequent Roissy and thus are familar with "game".
If anyone is interested, I've posted a comprehensive post about Game and high IQ.
Game and High IQ
The women, of course, kick ass (100 pound size 0 runway model taking down dozens of thugs and foreign agents in hand-to-hand combat? Run of the mill)
Steve Sailer has said that the "butt kickin' babe" is actually a male fantasy of sorts. Young males in particular get a thrill out of seeing a size 0 runway model knocking thugs into the stratosphere. Most women see this stereotype at totally unrealistic and don't particularly enjoy it.
Peter
Iron -- agreed, and the sort of "Frankstein" approach to cobble together disparate aspects -- male oriented "kick-ass women" and feminism have largely failed to find an audience. Even hearkening back to my earlier post on "Kick Ass Women and Smart Guys," most of those shows failed in one way or another: Eleventh Hour was cancelled, Dollhouse renewed by with less than two million watching the finale (clearly Whedon's habit of hiring Fox execs as producers has paid off), Chuck renewed only for 13 episodes and pushed back to Spring 2010, and so on. Meanwhile the excessive relationship stuff on the soap opera end (see Heroes) is repellent to action-oriented male audience. Only a very few guys will watch variants of Buffy, since it seems to satisfy neither men nor women fully.
TGGP -- My point was (if you read through the post) that the abandonment of men (and also older people) by TV and vice-versa is a long process, one that began prior to the internet, in the same way the that LAT peaked in circulation in 1988 and declined thereafter. Core human behavior probably has not changed that much, in what people like to see on TV and movie screens at least, as shown by the continued popularity of shows like "Get Smart" or "Beverly Hillbillies" in endless re-runs. Even by 1983, BEFORE cable and the internet, audiences had fled TV in significant numbers.
I find it puzzling that people who generally agree that the political class, the business leadership class, and the academic class have produced failure after failure argue magically that Hollywood alone has found success after success, even with Paramount considering merging with another studio. Hollywood has seen declining ticket sales, declining DVD sales, lack of embrace of Blu-Ray, and declining pre-sales for indie films. Banderas says it's hard to finance indie films, and the WSJ had an article detailing the mechanics -- foreign distributors are going out of business, pressed by Piracy, even Johnny Depp in a movie won't get pre-sales for indie financing, and this is beginning to bleed over into bigger budget mainstream films. Hollywood depends on about 50% of it's revenues for films coming from abroad, so that's a huge threat to their income. Hollywood is no more adept than Detroit, which saw since the 1970's the threat from Toyota and Honda building smaller cars at higher quality and could not execute, relying on big budget "blockbusters" like trucks and SUVs. In Hollywood's case, declining consumer income plus piracy = considerable loss of profits, plus entry of new strategic competitors using the internet to bypass traditional, high-capital cost distribution networks.
Dog spends as much time arguing with his wife as the Teutels spend amongst themselves squabbling over nothing. Men generally don't like that sort of thing. Women seem to enjoy that drama as demos for reality shows that feature that stuff (Survivor, etc) show.
BSG is still close to 40% female (very different from the A-Team's numbers I suspect), and the numbers are low relative to say far more male-skewing Tony Soprano who is roughly analogous (cable, "edgy" subject matter, dark tone, etc.). A few million vs. Soprano's high-point of around 11 million, and that is with Sci-Fi/Syfy being basic cable vs. HBO with only 33% market penetration, a number remarkably stable btw. BSG IS Sci-Fi/Syfy's most successful show, and that's still a failure compared even to the Sopranos. Much less American Idol. Which itself is only two of the four quandrants (female young-old). [TV clearly has an image problem among men.]
There was indeed a shortage of teens to break the "bulge in the python," or more precisely even MORE teens to create pressure to create their own music AND culture that differed from that of 1968. It's not JUST musical innovation within rock (where the 1980's beat the 1960's and then collapsed into nothingness with the collapse of White teen numbers in the 1990s). It's that 60 year old men and 20 year old men dress the same outside work, listen to the same style of music, eat the same food, hold the same social attitudes, and so on.
Oh please, no one besides terminally PC folk have ever even heard of Tales of Genji, and it's generally accepted that Don Quixote is the first published novel. I can guarantee you that no one in say, Austen's time had heard of the former but most had at least heard and were familiar with the plot of the latter. Given Japan's near total isolation from the West until the Black Fleet of Commodore Perry. I shouldn't have to tell you this.
Shrug. I saw nothing of religion in either Abrams or Bruckheimer's wiki entry, presumably created by their staff. The Twin Towers thing was noted by most conservative reviewers, including John Nolte at Big Hollywood, Mark Steyn, and so on. Ali Hassan Salameh, "the Red Prince" was assassinated in 1979, in Beirut, as he was traveling from one wife's house to another's (he had at the time IIRC from the accounts, two wives, making him a polygamist). There were several others in the Munich massacre planning who were polygamists. Making them very different and alien from Western eyes. Spielberg played that down because he could not take his own side in a fight. Gaza is ruled by Hamas, and polygamy is quite high there, given the religious orientation and big-man gangsterism of that group. I suspect given the historic importance of Islamists in Palestine, polygamy particularly amongst the gangster types infesting the terrorist groups is quite high, particularly compared to poor cannon fodder types.
Which Spielberg? The one from Munich who sympathizes with PLO terrorists subverting the cause of Palestinian nationalism to indulge in pointless killings of innocent Jews? Or the Spielberg of say, the first few Indiana Jones movies? He couldn't even find WWII worth winning, with "saving Ryan" being the "only good thing to come out of the War" which was pathetically SWPL. Moral equivalence, moral relativism, inability to take any stand, or offend Hollywood's moronic 1968 era NPR sensibilities, out of Yale and Harvard, are all part and parcel of Spielberg now. Heck, a hack like Bay makes movies that more people enjoy, if only for the fact that the Bay movies embrace Americana far more than Spielberg's Hollywood bubble stuff does. Spielberg has not had a major hit not coasting on past work (Indy IV) in years. Even that was critically panned and spawned "nuke the fridge" type cliches.
See my link on AfterElton, with all the listed gay producers/writers. There are at least as many if not considerably more Gay producer/writers than those of Jews. While I haven't done so, it's my sense of looking at producers that most will be like Ron Moore, or J. Michael Stracinsky, or Darren Starr, or Marc Cherry, or the guys from Big Love, or Mark Burnett, or Simon Cowell, than say Joel Surnow or David Mamet.
That is to say, Catholic or Protestant or Gay, vs. Jewish. Heck Surnow could not even keep conservative themes on his own show and got kicked out of "24" because Kiefer Sutherland and the liberal writers had more clout and connections. Sutherland being not only Donald Sutherland's son, but Tommy Douglas's grandson. Douglas was most decidedly not Jewish but quite liberal.
It's telling that both Mamet and Surnow faced constant battles with the networks siding with writers (and in Surnow's case the star) who wanted far more liberal, leftist viewpoints of what Mamet termed "National Palestinian Radio" which is itself an indication that most cultural institutions are far beyond the control of Jews, in fact reflect (a deep hostility to Israel and sympathy for that of Muslim terrorists) interests opposite of what would be considered that of most Jews. Just as telling, the SWPL yuppification of most Jews who voted something like 70% for Obama despite Wright, Farrakhan, Khalidi, Powers, Rice, and others who were not shy about expressing their hatred for Jews and Israel in equal measure.
Yes, the decline is a long process. A process that you try to attribute to a strategy that doesn't appeal to men, and you can't make that case based on the Beverly Hillbillies vs the A-Team.
I find it puzzling that people who generally agree that the political class, the business leadership class, and the academic class have produced failure after failure argue magically that Hollywood alone has found success after success
I don't argue that. I think businesses make money by selling people what they want, politicians get re-elected by saying what people want and academics get tenure by appealing to their committees. Like I said, I take the Alchian theorem in its hardcore form (moreso than he himself, unfortunately Matthew Mueller's post on that is no longer on the net). $20 bills don't stay on the sidewalk and people in the movie industry know a hell of a lot more about movies than any of us.
hard to finance indie films
Isn't that the way indie films are supposed to be? Indie films by big studios with famous stars is what's odd.
Hollywood is no more adept than Detroit
G.M is bankrupt, Hollywood isn't.
declining consumer income
Perhaps temporarily, over the long run we all keep getting richer.
I've never actually watched a complete episode of Dog's show, so all I know is some generalities. Fact remains that it's about a dangerous profession, just what you claim appeals to men rather than women.
BSG IS Sci-Fi/Syfy's most successful show
I believe the limeys call that an "own goal". Ceteris paribus works even better within a single channel, and the Sci-Fi network is known for being relatively male-skewed, so if BSG ends up being their most succesful show it would seem to reflect well on their strategy. The Sopranoes (whose male/female numbers I'd like to see rather than relying on your often-wrong assumptions) does make for a better comparison than the A-Team or Beverly Hillbillies, but you also acknowledge that the fact that it's on HBO rather than Sci-Fi makes a significant difference. You assume that it's a handicap, but HBO has long been known for high quality originals. Sci-fi is notorious for its cheesy original movies.
There was indeed a shortage of teens
How can our largest teen cohort make a shortage?
I wasn't claiming people in Victorian England were familiar with Tale of Genji, just that it's generally accepted as the first novel nowadays. Don Quixote would certainly have been much better known, but many don't consider it a novel. None of this matters for the broader discussion, I was just being pedantic.
I saw nothing of religion in either Abrams or Bruckheimer's wiki entry
You were making an argument from ignorance.
polygamy is quite high there
Give me some numbers. The numbers I gave applied to all of the West Bank + Gaza Strip, and my guess would be that if polygamy was (as the source claimed) higher among villages/rural areas it would then be lower in the strip. Admittedly, those numbers were from 1997. If polygamy has greatly increased in Gaza since then, I would be surprised.
I didn't get the impression that Spielberg sympathized with the Munich attackers. I didn't get the impression that saving private ryan was the only good thing that came out of the war. Neither did my grandfather (no liberal, he often argued with his own father for crossing over to vote for FDR when the depression hit), who served in WW2 and liked the movie.
Spielberg is massively successful. Three times he's broken box office records for highest-grossing film. I bet Michael Bay himself would tell you that he doesn't match up to Spielberg, not only artistically but commercially.
itself an indication that most cultural institutions are far beyond the control of Jews
most Jews who voted something like 70% for Obama
The latter statement seems to contradict the former.
Wikipedia has categories for Jewish directors and LGBT (only four letters!) we could compare, but you seem to be focusing on producers. They have a big list of producers here. You also suggested that those awful network suits really call the shots (permitting screenwriters to push liberalism), in which case Joel Stein's article seems relevant.
When a show such as BSG has 40% female viewers, does this take into account that probably most of these are watching along with their husbands -- and that it was the husband's decision to turn to that show?
I'd be surprized if many single women turn to BSG.
It's that 60 year old men and 20 year old men dress the same outside work, listen to the same style of music, eat the same food, hold the same social attitudes, and so on.
Sorry Whiskey (BTW: you may want to change your name as the parent company - Deaego(sp?) - of Johny Walker and other brands - 23% of Scottish whiskey - is moving the industry to Red China -- what a perversion!) but 60 year olds would have grown up wearing khakis until the 1960s when Levis became mainstream: for us khakis are kids clothes. Today's 20 year olds are wearing khakis having worn jeans as kids. Aside from the fact that I switched to country music in 1963, today's kids music is unbearable - the only 57 and up people I know who listen to the stuff are aging party girls from the 70s: I know because I mistakenly dated one.
When a show such as BSG has 40% female viewers, does this take into account that probably most of these are watching along with their husbands -- and that it was the husband's decision to turn to that show?
It would seem as if the "accompanying one's spouse" explanation is a much bigger factor with respect to in-person events (men at the ballet, women at the ball game) than to television. People have no real reason to watch a show in which they have no interest merely because their spouses are watching. Most households have more than one television and in any event there are other things to occupy peoples' attention.
Could it come down to how the ratings services measure TV watching? Do they count everyone in the household as watching even if only one member is actually paying attention?
Peter
What's all the fuss about the new BSG being for guys or girls and the numbers to prove or disprove it anyway?
A single look suffices to realize that a lot of it has been targeted at a female audience. Whether or not it succeeds at attracting them is irrelevant.
Compared to the old BSG, the new one is just one long cringe-fest.
Sure, the old one was cheesy, but it was fun that any guy could get into. The new one is a sad display of "men" who make choirboys look like Rambo.
And I'm not even going to get into the women of the show who drip enough testosterone to make a locker room smell like a massage parlor.
Monday Night Football (MNF) is a live television broadcast of the National Football League. I like sports tv show. And it is one of the my favorite tv shows. You have explained well about this tv show. that is great that here is good quality TV Downloads stuffs.
The "fuss" about BSG is that I am questioning how successful the producers' strategy of attracting women *is*. I think not very. If a woman sits down to watch TV by herself, she has many other shows that would be more female-oriented.
Sure, I have more than one TV, but we only have one in the comfortable TV room. Besides, we often want to watch something together for the companionship.
Whiskey, I went to see the latest Harry Potter offering with my two boys yesterday and was shocked at disconnect between reality, expectation and hype. The movie is not merely bad, I can take bad movies, it represents something of a giant fraud. My boys both despised it, asking me at times when it was going to be over, while I told them to hang on. Surely it will save itself somehow and pull it together as all the other Potter films did. But that never happened. The film is easily the worst of the Potter series and to the degree that it's a franchise breaker for me and my boys. We're not the Potter fans we were before.
But you might never have an inkling of this, as we didn't, when you see the raves this film has gotten. It has been nearly universally acclaimed as the best one yet by a mile. Elements of your philosophy explain why this is so:
The film is a giant, estrogen soaked chick-flick consumed with teenage love pangs and soap opera. It's devoid any attempt at building suspense, or clever plot twists. The action scenes are so minimal in this turgid, slow moving melodrama that Harry Potter himself almost doesn't figure in them at all. His two cohorts, Ron and Hermione, are totally absent for all the action. Their famous three way comeraderie and derring-do picked up and moved entirely over into the realm of who's kissing who.
Harry has become somewhat of an aloof, arrogant jerk who keeps reminding everybody he's the Chosen One, which drives the girls crazy, meanwhile doing nothing very substantive. In the final epic battle scene, he just stands there watching and does zippy. He's not easy to like, but you're expected to like him anyhow.
At the end of the film Harry vows to carry on alone, but Hermione declares with an unchallenged judgement you just have to accept that he somehow "needs" her and Ron going forward. It's not clear why this is so, because it wasn't the case for the entire film. In fact, Harry himself wasn't that necessary for the entire film.
This film is a betrayal of the old sense of childhood adventure films, Harry Potter's stock and trade, at the altar of female dominated relationship dramas. Even the magic of Hogwarts has gone, the place is no longer "alive" and bustling. Harry and Ron in fact take pains to stand aside and watch the younger kids wandering down the halls between classes while keeping to themselves during meals. No effort is made to provide leadership, direction, or team building at all to the younger sorts on campus.
This film offers nothing, nothing at all, to your average boy or father. It's a two hour ordeal instead - and at least High School Musical announced honestly what it was (and did the love panged drama AND action better than Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince). So, the film is frankly a rip off. The wizard boy's adventures got feminized away, as in my 12 year old's money quote after the film, "Can you imagine that? Harry Potter, the wizard, whose film has no magic?"
What a disgraceful shame. Pox on that Harry Potter crew!
Gaza is poorer than the West Bank, and almost always has been, the urbanization being a structural, use-of-space building response to the high population and high density. The people who fled to it were either coastal urban dwellers of Southern Mandate Palestine who lost everything, or peasants pushed into the Strip, with relatively fewer skills and cultural assets, in a place where NO real development took place from 1922-67 except the building of police stations and the railway station. It is not "urban" in the sense of educated, non-traditional, cosmopolitan, except in the office buildings and the villas inhabited by the elite. So it's not surprising that Islamism and polygamy are rampant.
Hey testing99, this article from MSN.com says that men are the new face of unemployment.
So it's not surprising that Islamism and polygamy are rampant.
No one has yet posted ANY EVIDENCE that there is more polygamy in the Gaza strip than the West Bank. At best you should have written "It would not be surprising".
http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/IMG/pdf/12-SOCIETY-LIVING.pdf
Eh, PCBS cites 3% polygamous marriage in West Bank, 4.4% in Gaza, consistent with Egypt and Jordan.
I see you guys like to argue minutiae on the web.
Kudos to Eurosabra for providing some numbers. My guess about the West Bank vs Gaza was wrong. Whether 4.4% is "rampant" is rather subjective though.
What you call minutiae, I call facts. People who don't care about facts are bullshitters.
Well whiskey I myself don't watch t.v anymore. Its just a bore to me now. I used to watch all those idiot mind/time consuming shows on VH1 and MTV, but not anymore. It does have some effect as far as keeping up with the "pop culture" topics that women oh-so speak "passionately" about.
I'm just hitting the gym more, working more, sarging more, and surfing the internet more.
Times are just changing.
I'm thinking it is a really good thing that TV is not catering to males. It presents a totally unrealistic view of what money can buy. The ads telling you to buy this to make yourself better. Buy this to make yourself happy. Buy this and you will be popular. None of the adds are saying save your money so that you can be free to buy whatever you want. It is only after giving up TV that you can focus on so many other real things. Or heck workout your brain on a blog. To sit there and get bombarded with whatever the message is for the day is counterproductive to coming up with your owns solutions to what you want out of life.
Whiskey/ Testing 99 - I am one of those who has learned from your analyses, especially your comments at Steve Sailer. Thanks.
I think I get what you are arguing against - but what are you arguing *for*?
What kind of social system would you prefer to replace the current one?
My own analysis would suggest that the only social system that could probably deliver the kind of outcomes you implicitly seem to favour would be a religious and patriachal system - somewhat like the US Mormons.
That is, indeed, perhaps the most sustainable social system on offer in the US today - but I get the feeling that you are personally not religious, and that you would not favour a system of sex only within a context of monogamous marriage.
Or am I wrong?
Leaving in SF surrounded by wackos from the decaying white western civilization, finding this blog is very comforting. Please update it more often.
A.M. from San Francisco, MIT PhD in Physics.
TGGP -- Look at my latest post, I show how much audience Broadcasters leave on the table. Suffice it to say, I am skeptical that the current (White) teen cohort is our "largest" and I've seen no data to suggest that.
If you include Hispanic teens, well that's another story. They don't watch English language broadcasts, that's for sure, much less cable.
BSG is Syfy's biggest show. That's pretty pathetic compared to say, the 37 million American Idol gets.
Producers call the shots, network suits are pretty irrelevant, as the firing of Ben Silverman attests. Back to producing.
Munich was morally equivalent, never showing the horror of the Munich Massacre (which served no useful purpose whatsoever) and inviting sympathy for the attackers, contempt and anger for their pursuers. With a clear moral equivalence of 9/11 and the Mossad operation to pursue the Munich masterminds. "The only good thing to come of this whole war" was saving Private Ryan. I stand by my statement that Spielberg cannot take his own side in a fight. Be it America in WWII or killing masterminds behind those who slaughter Jews for merely being Jewish.
Yes polygamy is high in Gaza. It's run by fundamentalists, what do you expect, Christian monogamy? It's the duty of every Muslim man to take four wives if he can.
Cowboy, I'll have a post up soon on the feminization of fantasy, it's quite surprising. Suffice it to say both Twilight and Harry Potter are now mostly female oriented and fans are comprised mostly of women.
TGGP -- Actual real data on Gaza is next to impossible to get. China is notorious for it's phony stats, and most Arab nations are worse. Gaza, run by Hamas, is probably far more polygamous due to it's rural and conservative nature. More along the lines of say, Pakistan or Afghanistan, which it resembles in tribal poverty and Islamism.
Peter -- I don't know how the Nielsen rating service counts viewers in the same household at the same time. My assumption is that after switching away from diaries in 2004, they go with punch in meters. But I could be wrong.
Rob -- I think you are right, women seem to prefer traditional female oriented shows, but even there, the biggest rated of them all (American Idol) does poorly against the total 18-49 population. See my latest post for details.
BGC -- I would like to something akin to the Mormons. You are right I am not particularly religious. What the Mormons do right IMHO is provide a non-state, community oriented social network, that provides assistance and guidance for people in navigating life. Newly married Mormons for example are paired up with older couples who mentor husband and wife on the difficulties and rewards of navigating through marriage as opposed to consumerist disposability.
Much of what went wrong in America is the social mobility, which in itself was good, destroyed social networks and formal (benevolent societies such as existed in pre-Integration New Orleans) institutions that used to buffer people against the blows of life, and cannot be done by the State (and in fact should not). The State, and social workers, cannot and will not be able to mentor newlyweds in navigating marriage, provide social pressure for families to stay together, and put a lid on consumerism.
Pre-integration New Orleans was a rough and often tough place. Both the autobiography of Louis Armstrong (he wrote it himself, you can see no professional author had a hand in it) and the newly available Library of Congress recordings of Jelly Roll Morton (shamefully used by August Wilson) point out how tough and rough it was. But as bad as it was, it was far less primally violent than today's New Orleans, bereft of any social institutions and mentoring neighbors and friends.
I think there is much to recommend in such a system. One that creates a nuclear family, and social network around said family.
Ronduck -- Yes thanks I saw it. Will have something on the mancession soon. Suffice it to say, it won't be pretty.
Anon -- yes clearly BSG was intended for women. Syfy's rebranding to appeal to women is a clear play for the Twilight audience. Aka the "Twitards" as they've been dubbed.
guys, the USA DID create Bin Laden. Look it up.
Versus? (Re-labeled Outdoor Life Network) Also SPEED? Don't get much more male oriented than stock car racing and bull riding.
But it's Slim Pickens, to coin a phrase.
I really liked the first season of Dexter, but it's time to kill him off already. Two seasons was stretching it. And I never got past that episode of the first season of 24 when the female agent shot the guy she'd been investigating out of some jealous rage.
Yeah, that was believable.
I am skeptical that the current (White) teen cohort is our "largest" and I've seen no data to suggest that.
It isn't the current cohort that's largest. Reread Agnostic's post, he's talking about an earlier one.
They don't watch English language broadcasts, that's for sure, much less cable.
Language acquisition is the one area where current Hispanic immigrants assimilate just fine over generations. Shouldn't be too surprising if you've read Judith Harris. I don't have numbers on what hispanic teens watch though.
BSG is Syfy's biggest show. That's pretty pathetic compared to say, the 37 million American Idol gets.
They've always been behind network tv, and the successful show you're comparing it to has a much more female dominated viewership!
"The only good thing to come of this whole war"
I googled that quote and there were no results.
Yes polygamy is high in Gaza. It's run by fundamentalists, what do you expect, Christian monogamy?
If polygamous marriages are 4.4%, then by far the modal marriage is monogamous.
Actual real data on Gaza is next to impossible to get
Without actually having better data, the most sensible thing to me is to take the data we do have and widen the confidence interval, rather than guessing it must be wrong in a specific direction.
I love how you seem to be fighting for TV to acknowledge men's stupidity. Do you hate men that much?
Seriously, your post is basically saying that the reason why network TV is suffering is because the shows are too focused on relationships and a multicultural world, and not enough on things going 'splodey or being shot in the face. Really? That's what men want? Um, OK. Except that the world consists of relationships and people of all sorts of people. To have it only reflect the 'splodey, shoot-em-up side would be like doing Hamlet with only the duel scene.
Then again, you probably wouldn't mind that. Hamlet is SUCH a chick play. Cause the guy, you know, THINKS about stuff.
Honestly, your post made me feel sorry for men. The fact that you're whining about how little action and adventure there is for them on television only highlights how useless and powerless they must feel. How threatened by women having a say in ANYTHING. And that you're fighting for the right for men to remain simplistic? Sad, sad, sad. Because men are becoming more "female-minded" for a reason. Because they're LEARNING. Because they now KNOW BETTER. They're learning to DEAL with women instead of brushing them aside the way they have been for MOST OF RECORDED HISTORY. This is a good thing.
Lastly, you assume that women DON'T like action, adventure, or violence in their television, and that is flat out NOT TRUE. Women love BSG as much for the viper piloting and the fistfights as they do for the "soap opera drama." (and I love how EVERYTHING is soap opera drama to you the SECOND anyone says ANYTHING about their feelings. Adama being upset over his BEST FRIEND OF HOWEVER MANY LONG YEARS being a Cylon. God, what a waste of time, right? THAT should never be explored!) And by the way, I have lots of male friends and I've been to a lot of conventions. PLENTY of guys were watching Battlestar, and are watching shows like Chuck, and anything done by JJ Abrams (Lost, the new Star Trek movie, etc) or Joss Whedon. Plenty of men are watching True Blood.
The MAIN reason TV ratings are down is because we live in an "On Demand" culture where we can watch shows on DVD, watch them on demand, DVR shows, or watch them on Hulu. Lots more people are waiting for an entire season of a show to be on DVD before they even look at it. The days of "appointment television" have come to an end. And if you can't see the problem for what it is, as opposed to placing the blame on quality content that doesn't sit well with your "1950s version of Manhood" tastes, than you know absolutely nothing about television.
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