CBS Wants Charlie Sheen Back!

Les Moonves wants Charlie Sheen back on Two and a Half Men. I knew it! Sheen still pulls in attention, ratings, and has enough Alpha credibility, still, through the sheer number of followers on Twitter and his sold out shows, that even manifest mental illness can't keep the potential audience away. Rumors have flown that Scot Baio, or Rob Lowe, would take over from Sheen. But like or not, on that particular show, Sheen is irreplaceable.

According to a source, Les Moonves was determined to bring the show back and was in discussions with Warner Bros. Television, which produces the show and which fired Sheen earlier this month, in an attempt to rebuild the numerous bridges burned between the ranting actor and the California-based program staff.

They included the "Men" co-creator and executive producer Chuck Lorre, who Sheen deemed a "contaminated little maggot" before hitting him with a $100 million lawsuit, and its staff, described by the former movie star as "trolls."

"Moonves wants to get the show back on the air. He's all for it," the insider said. "He says certain people need to forget anything and everything Charlie's done recently and just move on with the business at hand."

The source added, "The core issue is, as he put it, the volatile relationship between Charlie Sheen and Chuck Lorre. He believes that if CBS and Warner Bros. TV honchos can find a way to get Chuck and Charlie to speak again, cooler heads will prevail."

While Warner Bros TV may want to make Chuck Lorre happy, as he produces a number of their shows including "the Big Bang Theory," Les Moonves has to deliver ratings. His Monday night schedule looks like junk, on toast, without Charlie Sheen. Rob Lowe or Scott Baio are not going to deliver viewers like Sheen will, even if Sheen is half-crazed most of the time. CBS affiliates are on the warpath, demanding something be done. If Sheen can be propped up by cranes, pills, and on-set doctors, for another two years or so, he will be.

Don't be shocked if Warners and Chuck Lorre come to a parting of the ways. It has happened before. Lauren Graham, star of "Gilmore Girls" (yes, you are saying "who?") got the show-runner and creator (one Amy Sherman-Palladino) fired because she did not like the creative direction of the show (a romance between her character and a beta male character, one she thought "unworthy.") Kiefer Sutherland got "24" creator and producer Joel Surnow fired, out of PC creative concerns. [Surnow wanted more conservative themes, Sutherland is quite liberal.] On TV, stars generally rule. People don't tune into see producers. Replacing the actor who originally played "Darren" on "Bewitched" was nearly fifty years ago. In todays fragmented TV audience, a star is even more valuable.

Even if he's a walking time bomb. Which Sheen is, undoubtedly. Don't be surprised if Sheen ends up back on Two and A Half Men, and Lorre is given his walking papers. There's a lot of money involved, I don't see CBS continuing Two and A Half Men without Sheen. Warner Bros. TV must make Moonves happy. Moonves in turn must make shareholders, his bosses, and affiliates happy, which means ratings. Which means, Charlie Sheen. Sheen may be crazy. But he knows who has the most power, between him and Chuck Lorre. It's not Lorre.
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TV Gets Older As It Runs Out of Young People

The Wall Street Journal reports that broadcast TV is getting older. Well, of course. TV ran out of (White) young people. As America becomes a bifurcated nation, one of aging Whites with money, and young mostly Spanish speaking Hispanics without money, cultural changes are already transforming America. Rock music has died as a new and engaging creative force, largely because the 1980's was the last White cohort big enough to support innovation, coupled with the collapse of the Black family (and Church going thus choir training). FM radio such as Indie 103.1 is another example of not enough young White people to support what used to be a money-making institution. TV is getting older because its is running out of young, White people. And that will in the end, translate to a renewed cultural conservatism and set of attitudes, older people not being known for adventurism and open-ness to new experiences, risk taking, and thrill seeking.


The Journal notes:

In CBS's new cop show "Blue Bloods," Tom Selleck, at the age of 66, plays a New York police commissioner. Kathy Bates, at 62, snagged the lead role in NBC's legal series "Harry's Law." And 62-year-old rocker Steven Tyler is fast becoming the crowd's favorite judge on his first season on Fox's "American Idol."

Viewers 55-plus make up nearly 60% of the weekly audience for 'The Good Wife' on CBS; a 30-second ad recently cost $108,000.

Television is starting to act its age.

For decades the TV industry has operated on a currency of youth, creating shows that appeal to 18- to 49-year-olds, the age group advertisers traditionally consider most likely to buy new products, switch brands and spend on everything from cars to soft drinks. But as the nearly 80 million baby boomers continue to age out of the coveted demographic—the oldest boomers are turning 65 this year, the youngest 47—networks want to charge advertisers more to reach them. After all, these viewers still watch a disproportionate amount of TV, and they control half of all U.S. consumer spending.

From Ed O'Neill's patriarch on ABC's "Modern Family" to 51-year-old Hugh Laurie on Fox's "House," boomers' influence can be seen in programming. On "NCIS," TV's No. 1 drama with an average viewer age of 57, strapping young naval investigators turn to wise 59-year-old Mark Harmon for advice.

TV is just older. The accompanying graphic shows how key shows, have increased their average viewership age, over the years. While Friends and Seinfeld explored the idea of being young, single, and open to all sorts of relationships, or "Summer of George," in various comic formats, today's shows such as Blue Bloods are about the duties and responsibility of family. A remarkably conservative message, and one diametrically opposed to that of Friends or Seinfeld or much of anything else in the 1980s through the 2000's. The idea of family and duty, in the person of a patriarch, hasn't been seen on TV since the 1960's and Bonanza.

This change is being driven by economics:

Currently, networks still charge advertisers more for shows with younger viewers. A 30-second ad on "The Good Wife" cost, on average, $108,000 in the fourth quarter of 2010, or roughly $25 per thousand viewers, according to SQAD Inc., a Tarrytown, N.Y., media-research firm. In contrast, on a Wednesday night on top-rated "American Idol," where the average age is 44, Fox can charge $435,000 for 30 seconds—or about $46.75 per thousand viewers. "Glee," one of prime-time TV's youngest shows but whose audience is nowhere near that of "American Idol," gets $47 per thousand viewers.
…
The networks want marketers to ignore age and pay for viewers based on income and other factors—in effect paying more for affluent viewers who are 55-plus. CBS Entertainment President Nina Tassler says the network has always created shows that appeal to all ages. But "boomers have always been a priority customer for us," she adds.

"Rather than saying a 22-year-old is more valuable than a 58-year-old, we're saying, 'Look, the fact is an affluent 58-year-old is certainly more valuable than a 22-year-old who is just getting by,' " says David Poltrack, chief research officer at CBS Corp., parent of the CBS network.

Still, most marketers prefer to reach young consumers, whose buying preferences can make a product or service cool so that it eventually catches on with older buyers. "Young people are still prime targets for mortgages, car loans and investment advice," says Joe Abruzzo, head of research at Havas SA's MPG unit, with clients such as Dannon, Carnival Cruise Lines and Sears Holdings Corp. Networks are selling advertisers on older consumers "because that's what they can offer."

Pharmaceuticals, luxury-car makers and financial firms are on board. "This isn't a wave, it's a tsunami," says Jim Speros, chief marketing officer at Fidelity Personal and Workplace Investing, a unit of Fidelity Investments. "[Boomers] have to feel like they're seeing themselves in the [TV] spot."

Marketers are on the trailing edge of the change. Cruise ships are not filled with 20 somethings, they don't have the money. Neither are twenty somethings going to buy Viagra, or Diabetes drugs, or financial planning products, or retirement advice, or luxury cars, or much of anything in that class. The twenty-something will spend on electronic stuff, movies, and clothes, but his/her ability to do so is under tremendous pressure. The twenty something earns far less than a fifty-sixty something. Gas prices, food prices, and clothing prices can all constrain the twenty something's ability to spend on consumer goods beyond the basics in a way that older consumers with cushions are less constrained. Inflation and prices rises hurt all consumers, but the twenty something is hurt the most.

And … there just is not that many of them, counting Whites. Given that a good portion of the younger residents of the US are Hispanic, with far lower household income (and illegals live in gripping poverty), the growth of young Hispanic consumers is an economic dead zone. Consider an illegal alien, making around $3.50 an hour, the going wage rate in the LA area (minimum wage is $8 an hour). He will not pay taxes, but assuming he works 2080 hours a year (40 hours a week times 52 weeks) that is only $7,280. Assuming he works 80 hours a week, every week, that is still only $14,560. Out of that, he must pay his room/board, his meals, and very likely a crossing fee to coyotes, compounded continuously, with retaliation to his or her family should he fail to make scheduled payments. He or she also needs to send money home (most illegal alien workers tend to be male, however). That's not a lot of free cash.

What are the likely outcomes of a shift therefore, in TV and culture to an older, more affluent, and increasingly numerically inferior White group?

The first is the end of open-ness to Mexican culture. Punk and Pop bands in the 1980s, from Wall of Voodoo ("Mexican Radio") to X, the Blasters, Los Lobos, the Minutemen, all incorporated various Mexican themed sounds and songs. It is remarkable, with Mexico such a huge influence on America's future, and comprising essentially a great deal of America's population, how absent Mexican culture is in current American music, films, TV, and so on. Only in food, has Mexican influence been felt.

This is not surprising. Open-ness to another culture depends on not being threatened by it. With the population replacement/displacement characterized by defacto ethnic cleansing, no-go areas, Whites as minorities in their own nation, the ability to be open and accepting of other cultures, let alone the one doing the replacing, is pretty low. White elites that listen to NPR currently don't feel threatened, and find their "real enemies" are ordinary Whites in the suburbs. But culture is not made by NPR or PBS. Young White kids find themselves isolated and outnumbered, and so unlikely to adopt Mexican musical culture, or much of any other parts of Mexican culture. At any rate, there are not enough young White kids to provide an audience and the critical mass for experimentation followed by commercial break-throughs.

There is is no equivalent to a modern day Elvis, putting together the dance elements of Western Swing music, the soul-fulness of gospel, and the simplicity and emotional power of the blues. There are not enough White kids to supply a critical mass of young boys noodling around on their guitars in a garage, in off hours, and not enough White kids to provide the few that have anything new with an early, accepting audience (and early commercial success), and even less open-ness to borrow from other cultures when your own is under constant threat.

Instead, all musical innovation essentially stopped sometime in 1988. The model is now conservation of what exists, rather than creating something new. That cultural message, one that is accepted by both young and old, mostly, is of itself extremely conservative.

You can see this work itself out in what new electronic products generate buzz. Ipads are just another form of a computer. They might be cheaper, more mobile, and more handy for things on the go than older computers, but they are still just a computer. They aren't flying cars, or laser weapons, or teleportation devices, or invisibility cloaks, or anything like that. And the cultural content on them tends to be re-runs of the A-Team, from the 1980's, or other nostalgia fare. Aimed at wealthy boomers as much as young twenty somethings.

Economically, power is shifting, from companies catering to young people, Facebook and Twitter valuation bubbles aside, to those who create products aimed at the middle aged and middle class. With evolutionary changes not revolutionary changes in the offing. A better phone, not a flying car.

America has become, in one sense, a very conservative nation, culturally. And that change is driven by demographics. We just ran out of young White people, and that change is likely to work itself out in business, politics, and culture. Mostly in an aversion to change, risk, and all the brave new hype of a post-White America. The people who watch Kathy Bates and Tom Selleck are not interested in "Machete." If anything, they are focused on maintaining the character and aspect of America as it was in 1984 or so.
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The Future Lies In Your Hand: Phone TV vs 3-D TV

A recent series of Financial Times columns shows why 3-D TV will not be Hollywood's savior, and some combination of Kindle, Nook, Ipad, Ipod, Iphone, Netbook, or other cheap, flexible, and handy tablet sized device will be the consumption device of the future. This has profound implications for the type of media, with the possibility of all sorts of new content over-turning the Big Media stranglehold, and not incidentally refighting the culture wars. Think a lot more "Rifleman" type Westerns, instead of say, "Glee."


First, a Financial Times Panel tested 3-D TVs and the results were not pretty. Just as most 3-D films have flopped (there's only one Avatar), daily use of 3-D TV is not a happy experience. Glasses are required, and it can be a strain for some. The FT panel, including six kids, four girls and two boys, ages 2 to 10, with some grown-ups, found the extended use tiresome:

At the same time, even 3D-light can be a strain to watch for some. After an hour, at least one child had her plastic glasses off and was curled up in a ball, declaring that her eyes hurt.

By the time the children’s test session switched to Pain – a video game in which a rubbery adolescent thrill-jockey is launched from a slingshot against buildings, rubbish bins and other urban-landscape targets – the kids were happy to play in plain old 2D.

The 10-year-old Mhairi summed up: “It was fun – but it made me tired.”

The 3-D effect for the World Cup broadcasts was compared to cut-outs in dioramas, not a fully immersive effect.

Another Financial Times article notes that Sony has bet big on 3-D TV:

A nimbly-executed product launch is no guarantee that consumers will embrace Sony’s 3D world. A shaky US economy, the scarcity of original 3D content so far, and consumer discomfort with clunky 3D glasses have slowed initial sales of 3D TVs.

Research groups estimate that 3m-4m 3D sets will be shipped this year, equal to about 3 per cent of global high-definition TV sales and below some analysts’ and industry executives’ early predictions.

Sony's ambitions are quite large in this area, but history shows that consumers prefer convenience over high-quality of reproduction. While obviously, sound and color in theaters won over silent films and black and white movies, consumers were not required to invest in anything but a ticket. Perhaps only color television and High Definition (the latter still only at 80% penetration in the US market) mark consumer preference for higher quality media reproduction, over convenience. Every other major consumer decision has been in favor of convenience. From the victory of VHS over Betamax, and later VHS over LaserDiscs, to Walkmen and cassette tapes over LPs, then CDs over LPs and tapes, and finally MP3s over CDs, consumers have been choosing convenience and on-the-go music over high quality reproduction, and the same with video.


Do consumers have an extra $700 to spend for a 3-D TV? Likely, no, not most of them. They'll be hard-pressed with predicted $5 a gallon gas and many energy and commodity shortages to spend much beyond a price point of $100 or so. Perhaps even less, around $75.

And what sort of device would be sold at that price point? A massive, home-based theater system? Nope. Something cheap, fast, and very, very handy. A super-video Ipod, basically, that can also double as an e-reader, an e-magazine reader, and so on. A cheaper, more versatile Ipad, basically. Aimed at the mass market.

With the FCC imposing by regulation, net neutrality, price pressures will naturally inhibit streaming video over 3G, 4G, and Wifi/Wimax networks. This makes the model of "download and go" and playing the media, anywhere, anytime, more probable. The Ipod/Itunes model. People like having a massive library of music, it is quite likely they'll like a massive library, on the go, convenient no matter connections or not, of video.

We are likely to see an explosion, of cheap, more broadly appealing content, at the 99 cents model, set by Itunes and apps on Iphones. This can be singles, short stories, e-comic books, and "episodes" of serialized video content. And unlike the old style of top-down, 18-34 female oriented TV (and often, movie) content, the new media devices will be completely open to anyone. The Band "OK GO" detailed on the WSJ how they used the internet, YouTube, and personalized content to make a comfortable living without record label contracts. Various other artists are doing the same, selling everything from dinner with them to personal concerts to personalized swag and songs and so forth.

Consider this, in the new hard-stressed economic environment, most US consumers will be spending considerably less on media and entertainment. They'll want a personal, cheap device to keep (likely with their computer) a media library of songs, movies, TV shows (by any name), magazines, books, and so on, all there for consumption in a hand, personal, and affordable form. This will herald a big change in how media is made and distributed.

The current model requires expensive budgets, and has many gatekeepers. Movies are expensive gambles, and so too are TV shows, with production budgets at around $3-4 million per episode, at around $66-$88 million per year. Much of the latter only paying back if a show hits at syndication or foreign sales, both under severe price pressure.

By being able to charge, directly, consumers of serialized entertainment, the break-even rate at roughly 99 cents per download is only 3 to 4 million downloads. And of course, the more downloads beyond those levels, the higher the profits. By cutting out the TV Network and advertiser supported middle men, much lower levels of viewership can hit break-even points. And a limited, three episode run can be constructed, contingent on say, downloads covering costs and indicating future profits by demand.

What does this mean? Far fewer things like "Nurse Jackie" and a lot more entertainment versions of "Call of Duty: Black Ops." Because content creators won't get paid unless their content is popular. Unlike today, when stuff like "Kick Ass" or "Scott Pilgrim Versus the World" makes creators rich despite almost no real appeal to anyone. Yes this also means a lot more "Twilight" like stuff, with hunky bad boy supernatural or superpowered Alpha males, and loser beta males, to appeal to the female market. But it will be balanced by stuff that guys like. Can anyone imagine a network TV show that portrayed Cold War Black Ops heroically? Even "the Unit" had to play the anti-Government, soapy, female-drama relationships angles to get on the air.

And the ability to create e-comic books, or e-books without major publishers, means even more content oriented towards (the only underserved audience, men) is likely. Certainly, Amazon and Itunes are vying to become profitable portals for this content, each in their own way. Netflix is likely to be a player, with perhaps Redbox and a few others (MicroSoft?) as well. But the model established with consumers seems to be, purchase a cheap download, put it on your computer (and media player, phone, Ipad, tablet, etc.), and play the media anywhere.

The corollary to this, obviously, is that a new shift to 3-D content will not bail out Hollywood's content model. Instead, they will face constant erosion, not just from rampant piracy (made worse by recession), but viewer apathy. Hollywood has bet heavily that they can continue their current business model, where few movies or TV shows actually make money or find audiences, but content generally is subsidized by a few massive hits (and ancillary revenues, mostly from toys/merchandising) and repackaging old content in 3-D, the way old catalogs found value by making DVDs of TV shows and movies often decades old. Hollywood desperately hoped first Blu-Ray and then 3-D would prevent them from rethinking their business models and the lucrative role gatekeepers, and the entire infrastructure plays in creating and delivering content to consumers.

This seems unlikely to happen. Rather, it seems clear that democratization, and just as important, re-massification of serialized entertainment (TV) and movies is on offer with the transition to Ipad-style entertainment. Hollywood's creative people will have to emulate OK Go, rather than the current audience-unfriendly model. Direct engagement with fans, by producing content or goodies they pay for directly, will be the model. Perhaps some content will feature ads, or embedded product placement, at reduced cost. That too, will obviously will be aimed at a very broad audience, rather than a narrow one, in most cases.

It won't all be a land of milk and honey. Privacy issues and exposing user's data, including age, gender, location, politics, and sexual preferences, are going to be major issues for interactive content, they way they are now with Iphone and Google Android apps. Abuses will occur.

But the major shift in entertainment is consuming cheap content on the go, personalized. Not massive and expensive home entertainment systems consumers just cannot afford. THAT promises to be a big change certain to shake up Hollywood.
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The Myth of Cable Erosion

Broadcast Executives like to tell themselves a pretty fairy story. "Once upon a time in the magical kingdom of ABC, NBC, and CBS, all was right in the land. Until wicked, wicked, cable came along and destroyed viewership, fracturing it among a myriad of choices. Leaving the wise and good Network executives no choice but to offer Dancing the Stars and American Idol." This is of course, bunk. TVByTheNumbers.com (well worth your time), has excellent ratings data. Using Thursday, Sept. 23, 2010, the "Premier Night" for the broadcast networks, and the overnight ratings data supplied by TVByTheNumbers, I've put together the chart above. Now, its only one night. But it is premiere week, when most people watch, and clearly, cable does not matter. The "missing viewers" are not all strung out along a myriad of cable shows. They just aren't watching.


The relevant data (thanks TVByTheNumbers.com !) are here (for Broadcast Networks) and here (for cable). A few things stand out. MTV's Jersey Shore pulled 5.954 million viewers. College Football on ESPN had 3.52 million viewers (it started at 7:30 Eastern, 4:30 Pacific, I still put it in the 8 pm bucket), but othr than that, few shows pulled even 2 million viewers. "Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia," reputedly FX's big comedy "hit" (I use that term advisedly) did about the same as "the First 48" on AE or "Real Housewives of DC" on Bravo and less than Project Runway (3 million viewers) on Lifetime. Heck American Chopper on TLC had more viewers (2.225 million).

Methodology: shows on cable that ran long, I kept in the original East Coast time bucket (ala College Football on ESPN). I also average numbers, for the hour, in the case of half-hour comedies. So Big Bang Theory and Shit My Dad Says, for 8:00 and 8:30 PM, were averaged to get the hourly number. [Yes, it's called $#*! My Dad Says, CBS should have gone with the original title or another one, the fake-cursing is stupid.]

The biggest show of the night was "the Mentalist" with 15.33 million viewers, more than CSI at 14.57 or Grey's Anatomy at 14.04. After that it was Big Bang Theory and then Shit My Dad Says at 13.95 and 12.48 million viewers respectively. Vampire Diaries got 3.57 million viewers, Nikita only 3.22 million viewers, for the least amount of viewers, on what is supposedly the most watched TV night after Sunday. The Office got 8.4 million viewers, and Outsourced got 7.44 million right after it, nearly a million viewers less.

Again, Thursdays are the reportedly, second most watched night of TV after Sunday, and this was premiere week. The highest amount of viewers, between 9-10 PM, was only 54.381 million, including cable. That is less than the 60 million viewers the Beverly Hillbillies drew at their peak.

The CBS series starring Buddy Ebsen as the patriarch Jed drew up to 60 million viewers at its peak and ran until 1971.

Cable is not the problem. Indeed, the cancellation of Beverly Hillbillies and the "rural purge" conducted by CBS, more mindful of critics than profitability, in the early 1970's, seeking "young, hip, and urban" viewers even if it meant appreciably less of them, is the problem.

Click over on the source links at TVByTheNumbers.com. Hardly anyone really watches cable shows. Much of it, stuff not interesting to anyone. Jersey Shore is about the only show that actually draws any appreciable audience. The story of network Television is that of, really, American coffee roasters, or the Big Three Automakers. The coffee roasters, facing shortages of quality beans, substituted the low-quality robusta beans for high-quality Arabica. Result, generations of Americans ditched coffee, for sodas. Only the Starbucks revolution, using high-quality coffee and snob appeal, could partially reverse that trend. The Big Three, were even worse, offering cars of such poor quality that generations of Americans grew to prefer Toyota, or Honda, even though the quality gap has closed or even reversed (given Japanese over-expansion and poor quality on their own).

Bad TV drove away viewers. Yes, it is that simple.

Or to put it more elaborately, TV with little broad appeal pushed away older viewers, as youth was obsessively courted, in an aging nation with few youth having disposable income like the boom years of the postwar period. The baby boom of 1945-1965 was predicted to last forever. And it didn't. Further, men were pushed away, believing that women make 85% of all consumer purchases. Something that may have been true in 1955, but not today, with high rates of divorce, late forming families, chaotic cohabitation, and extended single-hood.

This was just stupid. There is a story at TVByTheNumbers.com (from the Hollywood Reporter) about an analyst valuing NBC at negative $600 million (-$600 million) and USA Network at $11.7 billion, SyFy at $6.3 billion, CNBC at $3.9 billion, MSNBC at $2.9 billion, Universal Studios at $4 billion, and finally Bravo at $2.6 billion.

It's just nuts. Think about it. What do the cable networks listed above do? How do they bring in cash? By viewers? Nope. The cable networks are in the business of extracting carriage fees, from satellite and cable providers. That's it. Even Jersey Shore is nowhere near say, the Mentalist, in numbers of viewers. The latter even outperformed 18-49 rating/share compared to Jersey Shore, 3.3/10 vs. 3.1/9. And that's the "class" of cable. The rest are eking out numbers in and around the one million viewer mark, or lower.

Making that business terribly vulnerable to people cutting the cord. No carriage fees, no revenue to NBC or now Comcast. Which is not putting more capital into faster cable networks, but rather, buying content and a broadcast network. The deal itself, to buy NBCU, is a massive vote of no confidence by Comcast itself in its core business.

Meanwhile, the business of broadcast networks is far less vulnerable. Viewers can get the signal for free (provided they have a converter box or a newer TV). Broadcast networks sell audiences to advertisers. That's a business model dating back to the 1920's and 1930's, and the old radio networks from which the television networks arose. Its pretty simple, like delivering good quality coffee at reasonable prices, or decent cars, both affordable and reliable. There is not anything mind-blowingly complex at stake.

IF Comcast can re-tool NBC's development system, and take the hits in making broadly appealing, all quadrant (young/old, male/female) oriented entertainment, creating a need for viewers to tune in, again and again and again, week after week, this might be a bet that pays off, not if but when cable fees collapse and people cut the cord. After all, it costs nothing to receive the broadcast signal. Comcast would have to endure several years of losses, though, in moving away from the highly segregated audience (basically younger women) that make up the, at most 54 million viewers at TV's broadcast/cable peak. In trying to attract more men, and older people, a goodly number of the current viewers will probably drift away, in the same way that remaking a restaurant chain known for high-end food into a broad middle market will have a period of losses, before the message is believed by the targets, and during which folks who liked it just fine without "them" hanging around, go elsewhere. Comcast may not have the stomach for it.

But its pretty clear that the valuations put on the cable networks are laughable. On the order of the $6.3 billion Guy Hands and Terra Firma paid for EMI. Like EMI, the business model (getting paid lots of money for being carried by cable/satellite providers) is falling to … consumer habits. In this case cutting the cord, in EMI's case, no longer buying much music (since so much of it was crap anyway). This makes the big bet that execs like Jeff Zucker put on cable as the winning hand, a losing proposition. Not even Comcast believes in cable anymore, otherwise they'd spend their money on it instead of NBCU.

Ironically, broadcast networks like NBC, or CBS, or ABC, or Fox, or even CW could be quite valuable. Why Warners has not simply dumped the Gossip Girl/Vampire Diaries dreck and used the network to run all DC superheroes, aimed at kids through adults, I'll never know. They own the characters. That's whole point of being a vertically integrated media company. Superman, Green Lantern, Power Girl, Hawkman, Dr. Fate, Captain Atom, Captain Marvel, W.I.L.D.C.A.T.S, Stormwatch, (and the rest of the Wildstorm characters), Icon, Static (and the rest of the Milestone universe) can be on TV, in movies, in games, on kids TV, in stores as toys, etc. Why wouldn't you do it? You own the characters! They don't make money for you sitting in moldy old comic books! Some are lame, some are classics, some are remembered still forty years on. Why not use them?

In the same way, with consumers under pressure, broadly appealing shows, creating "hooks" like the old radio and movie serials, can easily beat niche stuff. In terms of profitability. After all, the Superbowl hits 90-100 million viewers. Suppose you had a show that hit say, 75 million viewers per week. And other shows hitting around 40-50 million viewers, each week? How much money could you make? Lots. No, you can't have a Superbowl every week. But you can create emotionally hooking, broad based drama. Its been done before. Within living memory. On TV.

It's not as if cable is pulling in, even in aggregate, monster ratings. At best, cable takes off around 10% of people who might otherwise just watch network TV.

Broadcast TV is tremendously undervalued. Affiliate networks are not cheap, and providing entertainment that men and women, old and young, watch together, in the 40-75 million range is definitely possible, and very, very lucrative.

But, I think it is beyond the capacity of most creative people in Hollywood and definitely in TV. Supposedly, the best minds and most talented TV folks ever, have given us, Outsourced, the Event, and Undercovers. This is not even Supertrain or Pink Lady and Jeff level of bad. In some ways, it is far worse. At least Supertrain and Pink Lady and Jeff, along with Sheriff Lobo and BJ and the Bear, reflected an attempt to connect, however badly, with a broad spectrum of America, and entertain said spectrum. However badly it was done, it was still honest. This junk, and the rest, don't even bother to be broadly appealing. Its both elitist, and crap.

Elitist and crap. Its not cable erosion of audiences, or cheap reality shows, that make TV so bad. It is the writers, producers, and network execs who want both condescending moral lectures combined with niche appeal, all done badly.

The streaming revolution cannot get here soon enough.
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When Did TV Get Girly?

While there can be no question as to the female-orientation of today's broadcast TV, just examine the Emmy Nominations for "Glee,", the question arises, when did TV get so girly? The answer is, 1978.


Wikipedia has a fascinating set of pages detailing the television schedules for the broadcast networks going back to 1946! It can be seen here. In time for the new fall television season, it was time for a pro-forma approach to determine the number of hours devoted each broadcast day in prime-time to shows appealing to men and women. While a real analysis would require a different approach, detailing the actual hours, of male and female skewing programming, a pro-forma approach, using the published Fall schedules of the broadcast networks (excluding mid-season replacements and the Spring schedules) at least gives a sense of what the broadcast networks believed would be popular. Even if they did not in fact turn out to be popular.

This was how I constructed the chart above. Taking each Fall Season, I created a spreadsheet that broke down each season by Day, Male Hours, Female Hours, and total hours, and then summed up the pro-forma (what the season would have looked like had there been no cancellations or mid-season replacements) Fall Hours for that Season. Taking the years 1975-2009, produced the pro-forma chart. Comedies, unless they were uniquely male-skewing (such as "Married With Children" were put in the female bin). Shows that had no real data on how they skewed, were rated as male or female skewing according to IMDB.com or Wikipedia descriptions. Dramas that featured lone male protagonists, in competition with other men, or trying to achieve a goal, were rated as male-skewing. Those with extended families, more female characters, were rated female-skewing, in accordance with Ed Bernero's dramatic formula for male and female orientation. Thus, the "A-Team," "Miami Vice," "the Six Million Dollar Man," "the Rockford Files," the 1977 Patrick McGoohan series "Rafferty" (a fore-runner of "House M.D.") were all classified as male-skewing. While "Little House on the Prairie," "Medical Center," "Beacon Hill," "the Life and Times of Grizzly Adams," and "the Waltons" were all put in the female-skewing box.

A few oddities stand out. Monday Night Football, on ABC, kept Monday Nights more male-skewing, for years, as other networks sought to counter-program with shows such as "the Invisible Man" (1975, not the recent Sci-Fi series), "NBC Monday Night at the Movies" (I classified movies as male-skewing), and "the White Shadow." Counter-programming efforts on Mondays (to retain male viewers) seems to have ceased around 1994. Sundays remained the most male skewing night on TV, at, near, or slightly above parity with female skewing hours, until the 1998-1999 Television season, when the hours went from 7, and 11, for male and female skewing hours, in the prior season (1997-1998) to 5 and 13, respectively (no doubt influenced by WB adding three more female-skewing broadcasts that year). Even in 2009-2010, when the WB (and UPN, which did not broadcast as a network on Sundays) ceased operations, and the replacement CW broadcast ended, the near parity between male and female skewing shows on Sundays did not return. Fridays and Wednesdays, also competitive to male-dominated, remained fairly male-skewing through the late 1980's, when each day began to fluctuate between male and female skewing hours, settling in the early 2000's to near total domination of broadcast hours by female-skewing shows.

Beyond gender, looking at the schedules, its amazing to see considerable efforts put into Fridays and Saturdays, now considered dead zones (with only Fox showing first-run content, and at that, cheap reality shows like "America's Most Wanted" and "COPS" on Saturdays). Shows like "the Rockford Files," "the X-Files," "Early Edition," "Nash Bridges," "Miami Vice," "the Pretender," "Mary Tyler Moore Show," "the Bob Newhart Show," "Walker, Texas Ranger," "L.A. Law," and "Spenser: For Hire" ran on Fridays and Saturdays. Days now considered dumping grounds or places where no new content (only re-runs) are shown at all.

The state of Network TV is fragile. Much of the revenue the networks receive is from part-ownership or full ownership of Cable TV channels. Even channels not getting much viewership (AMC's "Mad Men" receives less than 2 million viewers for most of its episodes), get lucrative payments from cable and satellite operators, just for carrying the channel. Now that is under pressure, as the Financial Times reports.

The cash-strapped young are leading those shunning cable subscription. The sector lost more than 700,000 subscribers in the US in the second quarter of the year – its worst loss ever, according to SNL Kagan, a research company. This was partly because of competition from satellite operators and telecommunications groups such as Verizon. But new streaming or “over the top” services such as Hulu were also a factor, says Mariam Rondeli of SNL Kagan. “There’s definitely some substitution taking place.”

In a lasting, deep recession, as now seems inevitable, TV networks offering, free, over the air content, with no monthly payments needed, and convenience, simply turn on the TV, and set the VCR or DVD recorder or DVR to record the show, with a minimum of fuss and hassle, SHOULD be the winner over cable. But increasingly, the consumers TV wants the most (cash strapped, early adopter technology-friendly 18-34 consumers) are opting to watch on Hulu or Netflix or other streaming content websites:

Maddy Cross likes to watch television but like many American teenagers she does not bother to use a television set. The 18-year-old drama student will shortly leave her home in Santa Monica, California, to study at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. There was a time when a TV was an essential fixture in any student’s room but Maddy has no plans to take one with her

“I’m moving into a dorm and we decided there wasn’t any point in getting one,” she explains. “We can watch everything we want on our laptops using Netflix and Hulu, which means we don’t have to buy a TV or pay for cable.”

Needless to say, many 18-34 year old consumers dumping broadcast and cable TV viewing for online substitution, which is cheaper versus the monthly cable or satellite bill, means far fewer viewers for ads, creating a vicious circle for broadcast TV, which is already far older than executives would like. Older, more affluent consumers being of less interest to advertisers, who are convinced that brand preference and buying patterns are set in the ages of 12-30 or so.

In a study released by analyst Steve Sternberg, ABC's median viewership aged one year last season -- to 51. CBS also grew a year, to 55. NBC gained two years, to 49. And Fox stayed the same, a relatively nubile 44.

Compare this to a decade ago. ABC was 43, CBS was 52, NBC was 45 and Fox was only 35.
Only young-female targeted relative newcomer The CW has as median age under 40 -- 33 -- a figure its more or less maintained the past few years.
"Ten years ago, there was still a relatively wide age disparity among the then six broadcast networks," Sternberg noted.

Other points of interest:

-- Comedies tend to be the youngest-skewing shows. In the fall of 1999, there were 45 broadcast sitcoms. Last fall there were just 20.

-- Conversely, procedural dramas are among the oldest-skewing genres. A decade ago, there were only five. Last fall there were 20.

-- The oldest-skewing broadcast shows include: ABC's "Dancing With the Stars" (57), CBS' "The Good Wife" (58) and "NCIS" franchise (57).

-- Among the youngest: Fox's animated comedy block (30-32) and "Glee" (38), NBC's Thursday night comedy block (35-40).

Even with a price of "free," broadcast TV cannot woo viewers versus online, which has replaced cable as an opportunity and threat. Note that Hulu is part-owned by Fox, NBC-Universal, and of course, ABC. Will Comcast, once it takes control of NBC, pull the plug on its participation of Hulu? Will this simply shift viewers into more "guerrilla" forms of viewing TV content online (equivalent to the late 1990's Napster explosion before Itunes made MP3 downloads safe, legal, convenient, and cheap?)

Nevertheless, it is clear that since the late 1970's, TV has become dependent on female viewers. Outside of sports, mostly college and professional football, TV has nothing to offer male viewers.


HBO, and other premium channels, face a challenge. Netflix is offering streaming options, far more convenient, and cheaper, than HBO. Which according to the Financial Times story above, has approximately 30 million subscribers, Netflix rapidly challenging them (see accompanying chart from the FT story above). Indeed it is likely only a matter of time before Netflix, Apple, and other streaming content services start creating their own content, both to get it more cheaply, and to create more popular content. While people have proven they will pay for stuff like "the Sopranos," or even "Tru Blood," the entry of lean and hungry competitors like Comcast with NBC, or Netflix, or Apple, or any other number of competitors, seeking to maximize revenues, demands logically, more broadly appealing content. One aimed at men as much as women.

“Cable will go the way of the landline phone industry,” predicts Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Securities. “It is nothing more than an empty pipe which the internet will replace.”

Moreover, since Hollywood is basically integrated, with most studios supplying content to networks they own and operate, all money tends to flow and ebb together:

Netflix, by contrast, costs $9 a month and subscribers have access to thousands of hours of on-demand film and TV programmes. Mr Sarandos says he is prepared to “write big cheques” to strike fresh content deals with studios, producers and pay-TV companies, using the money saved on postage as customers shift from its DVD subscription service to streaming.
This is music to the ears of Hollywood studio executives worried about the decline of DVD sales, once the most profitable revenue stream but now in steep decline, falling from $14bn at its peak in the US in 2004 to $10.87bn in 2009 [emphasis added], according to Screen Digest, a research company.

With DVD revenue down, Blu-Ray no real replacement, cable service down, and pay/cable TV revenues down Hollywood has serious challenges:

In the second quarter of 2010 paid TV subscriptions fell for the first time ever, with cable taking the biggest hit, according to the research firm SNL Kagan.

A weak U.S. economy is the main reason the firm cited for the dip in subscriptions, as more consumers look for ways to cut down on monthly expenses. Last year's digital TV conversion may have also played a role in lower growth rates with some people canceling service after promotions on new digital TV packages ran out, the firm said.

The entire paid TV industry, which includes cable, satellite, and phone companies, lost 216,000 customers in the second quarter. A year ago, the industry gained 378,000 new customers, according to SNL Kagan. Six of the eight largest U.S. cable operators reported their worst quarterly video subscriber losses. In total, cable lost 711,000 subscribers in the quarter, the firm reported. Meanwhile, satellite providers DirecTV and Dish networks added about 81,000 new paid TV subscribers. And phone companies, Verizon Communications and AT&T also gained 414,000 new subscribers

To add to the mix, Google plans a pay-TV service:

Google’s YouTube video site is in negotiations with Hollywood’s leading movie studios to launch a global pay-per-view video service by the end of 2010, putting it head-to-head with Apple in the race to dominate the digital distribution of film and television content.

Google has been pitching to the studios on the international appeal of a streaming, on-demand movie service pegged to the world’s most popular search engine and YouTube, according to several people with knowledge of the situation.

Google will use its search technology and YouTube to direct viewers to the new service, which is likely to launch first in the US, with other countries added over time, the people added.

“Google and YouTube are a global phenomenon with a hell of a lot of eyeballs – more than any cable or satellite service,” said one executive with knowledge of the plans. “They’ve talked about how many people they could steer to this . . . it’s a huge number.”

Meanwhile, Hulu plans a $2 billion IPO, and Netflix, Amazon, and Apple are all offering or about to, streaming video showing movies at reduced rates (all around or about $5 for newer titles) at the same time as DVD release and cable pay-per-view. [Watch, clever hackers will battle studios and streaming content providers over copy protection and "ripping" streaming content to hard drives for viewing later, over and over again.] Obviously, TV series will be in the mix. It would not be hard, indeed, to envisage a landscape where serial entertainment is entirely streamed, and TV is merely the province for live sports events, American Idol, and the like.

Creating broadly popular, balanced programming appealing to both sexes, with dramatic elements that hook men (lone heroes overcoming obstacles to "do the right thing" and in competition with other guys) and women (families, relationships, etc.) ought to be the no-brainer. It is certainly a way to avoid cannibalizing existing revenue, in pay/cable TV, and over-the-air viewing. Over-the-air TV is free. Cost to consumers: zero, excluding a TV set which almost everyone has. This is so obvious a response to cash-strapped consumers, that Hollywood's integrated response: 3-D movies that mostly flop, betting everything on new technology (Blu-Ray, now streaming), can only be explained by a consistent failure by nearly all executives in understanding their customers and marketplace.

Since the late 1970's, advertisers, the people who pay TV networks for their content (it is not the audience) have abandoned men in search of ever more focused content towards women, believing that women make 80% of all consumer purchasing decisions. TV networks (really just divisions of integrated, massive media companies such as NBC-Universal, or ABC-Disney) responded by purchasing cable networks and reaping carrier fees by cable operators once cable and satellite TV offered competitive threats. Hulu and other streaming content operations (CBS has its own streaming content on its website) are merely a continuation of the cable strategy.

Yet it is likely that the wallet of consumers will finally bring a halt to the madness, decades long, of ignoring and abandoning the male viewer in TV and depending on advertisers paying a premium to reach young women 18-34.

At best, streaming operators such as Hulu are offering $9 a month charges. That's a fraction of the revenues accruing to cable channels owned by networks, for example ABC Family Channel, for subscriber access. The money generated by streaming content won't replace lower advertising money (as the prized 18-34 demographic downsizes) nor will it replace lost cable channel carriage fees. Meanwhile large fixed costs of maintaining both broadcast and cable channel networks remain.

A Republican led Congress, meanwhile, determined to punish a left-leaning Hollywood and make consumer friends, could mandate ala-carte pricing for cable channels. Pay only for what you need, which would kill many of the channels. Including LOGO, the various Lifetime channels, Oprah's new channel, BET, Bravo, TLC, and many others that very few watch. Perhaps Obama would veto it, but he might also sign it. It is a definite risk, and even a veto might draw a bipartisan over-ride on a "safe" issue designed to respond to consumer wallets being stressed by the recession.

Eventually what we will be seeing is broadcast/cable network combinations file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, as parent companies run out of cash to operate them. Even mega media companies cannot run huge operating deficits forever. Comcast-NBC is probably the most likely one, given the parent vulnerability to cancellation of cable service and "guerrilla" TV watching on the internet. Viacom/CBS is another, given the extraordinary dependence on the business acumen of Sumner Redstone, and the inevitable fall-out in the battle for corporate control when he is no longer active as the CEO and largest voting-rights shareholder. While Fox was able to run a deficit of over $1 billion for the first ten years of its existence, neither the WB nor UPN could exist on their own for longer than that, even in the relatively better economic climate of the late 1990's and early 2000's.

It is not inconceivable that neither NBC nor CBS would exist five years from now. In that case, the reason would be, what happened in 1978. When the broadcast networks decided they could get along without men. Its been a long run. But that bet seems to have run its course.
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James Bond vs. Today's Hollywood Spies: Where are the Heroes and Bad Guys?

A series of posts by Big Hollywood contributor Leo Grin on Ian Fleming and James Bond prompts the question. Where are the villains and heroes of today? When we have real life villains such as Dzhanet Abdurakhmanova and Umalat Magomedov, the curios absence of villains even remotely resembling the real-life jihadists afflicting the West, Russia, and China is pathetic. Even worse is the matching lack of real heroes. Only throwing off the PC blinders (and catering to a female-dominated PC dogma crowd) can popular culture both regain relevance and provide useful models for boys and men.


Leo Grin's post on how Ian Fleming created James Bond out of an homage to his father who died when he was a child, in World War One, and various men with whom he served in Naval Intelligence during World War Two, prompts the question. Who were the villains, and what was the nature of the hero? What was James Bond really about?

Look at the video below, of various Bond exploits set to the tune of Barry Gray's 007 music:



What is going on? An intrepid secret agent, infiltrates the enemy, and with the aid of gadgets galore causes havoc and escapes, as the Americans come in and blast the enemy apart.

This was not limited to James Bond, either. The clip from UFO (circa 1970) shows the British again fighting the Germans, only this time the Germans are aliens:



Even the Avengers fought WWII all over again:



Note the similarities, jazzy, brassy, opening score. Not much electric guitar (that's American). Various heroes, by turns brash or ruthless, with unconventional allies (often women), using the very latest gadgets to turn the tables and defeat a vastly overpowering enemy. One with more men, or better technology, always more resources and certainly more viciousness, defeated by the very odd-ball, weird, idiosyncratic and very English/British sort of "smallness," with roots in Victorian culture, and celebration of eccentricities. Older, dignified men whose authority is respected, send Steed, or Bond, or John Drake out on dangerous missions with only weird gadgets and beautiful women to accompany their fists and determination. Col Ed Stryker, of course ,runs a modern-day RAF against the Alien Luftwaffe. Even as late as 1970, the end of World War Two was only 25 years distant. Closer in time than the start of the Reagan Administration is to us today.

The national myth of Britain was that even though the Empire was lost after World War Two, by the exhausting effort, the bravery and sacrifice of tough and daring secret agents empowered by the most oddball but devious gadgets, concocted by eccentric geniuses, along with the help of the Americans, had won the day. Saving Western Civilization. From both the Nazi and Soviet tyranny. This is why Bond constantly outwits his enemies with ingenious, World War Two-like gadgets such as cars that convert to submarines, auto-gyros, miniature jets, knives popping out of attache cases, and so on. All while maintaining the composure of a proper English gentlemen.

Then there is John Steed, equally as polished. Fighting all sorts of "home front" enemies. If you prefer, there is also Patrick McGoohan, more clipped and cerebral, and very mocking and ironic, from "Danger Man":



There's even Michael Caine as Harry Palmer in the Ipcress File:



[There is a bit of the opening sequence on Youtube, as well, it cuts off right before the whole point -- after Palmer finds the jewelry left behind in the bed by his paramour, he also finds his gun and secretes it in his waistband. A wordless opener that tells the viewer all he needs to know about Palmer.]

The British Spy heroes might be total gentlemen (Bond, Steed), or cockneys (Palmer), or something in-between (McGoohan's John Drake), but regardless they were very, very British. In Palmer's case, too stubborn, insubordinate, and eccentric to be brain-washed by the Soviet agents.

And not only were the heroes, indeed very recognizable, "National Myth" heroes from World War Two revisited, the music itself was very similar, very British, as Grin notes here, always an element of jazz, lots of brass, a natural evolution from the beloved British military marching bands (itself a feature in the Ipcress File in one key scene).

Not only the heroes came from World War Two. The villains did as well. Particularly for the Bond villains, real organizations were used. SMERSH really existed. The sort of stateless, rootless, vaguely Central European, German, or Baltic villains such as Auric Goldfinger, or the German/Chinese Dr. No, or the classic Ernst Stavros Blofeld, all could have come out of the various hangers on to the Third Reich in Europe or elsewhere.

If Britain's spy heroes were re-fighting World War Two, at a time when most people well-remembered the fight, the villains were all of a type. Vaguely Nazis or allied with them, very little was needed to explain how the villains were evil, and needed to be fought. Needed a hero to oppose them.

Oppose them in a way that was totally opposite. Where the villains ruled by intimidation, fear, and ruthless killing of their subordinates and allies, the heroes willingly accepted orders from the older, fatherly men who sent them out to dangerous missions. Never questioning the rightfulness of being sent to stop the villain. Where the villains have weird, and repellent subordinates with fairly murderous characteristics, the hero's allies are usually beautiful women, and a gadgeteer providing all sorts of things giving him a critical edge. Of course, even the music makes that point, being jazzy and orchestral, the opposite of Teutonic Wagnerian Gotterdammerung, and different from American rock.

No one at the time, needed to know why James Bond had to stop Ernst Stavros Blofeld, or Auric Goldfinger, or Dr. No. They were Nazis, thinly disguised, or Soviet assassins, or both. Enemies that needed stopping.

Now, we have bland and boring, angsty heroes who reject responsibility (the Matt Damon Bourne series), numerous bad guy assassins (the Crank series) implausibly cast as heroes, or low level gangsters forced into some semblance of duty and responsibility (the Transporter Series). Even TV cannot experiment with any meaning to the heroes or depth and evil of the villains. NBC's "My Own Worst Enemy" was its own worst enemy, finding a quickly deserved cancellation, as audiences did not find the premise (a real spy creates a split personality ordinary man to have the ultimate cover) compelling enough. The hero was no hero, and the villains colorless PC bad guys. So too with "24's" Jack Bauer, hand-cuffed by the PC nature of the star demanding a more politically correct approach to villains (again the ultimate villains being boring, politically safe White guys in corporate boardrooms). Or "La Femme Nikita," or "Alias," or NBC's "Chuck," all with endless, soapy love triangles out of "Twilight" and the enemy defined as their own bosses or intelligence services. Endless and meaningless conspiracies, as society cannot define enemies abroad and without, and so must look for culturally safe ones within.

South Park shows there is a market for non-PC conformist humor, and indeed content. That market is mostly male, as women make up the customer base for PC Dogma. Refusing to look real enemies, real villains, and real threats square on, because it would threaten the whole PC agenda. Require a real sorting out of heroes and villains.

Culture is in creative crisis when it cannot even deal, even in disguised mode, with real threats. Due entirely to a blind adherence, religiously, to PC dogma.

TV and movies don't have to depict Muslim Jihadis straightforwardly as the enemy. Ernst Stavros Blofeld and Dr. No worked for SPECTRE, a fictional alliance of crime organizations and bosses, but the real enemy was the amalgamation of rootless, stateless criminals and assassins who helped first the Nazis, and then the Soviets, depending on who was winning. SPECTRE was not the bad guys, really. It was World War Two all over again. Indeed, the very stateless/rootless nature of the bad guys, who believe in nothing but power, was always contrasted by the very rooted in British eccentricity nature of the heroes.

Anyone could figure that a 30 year old jihadi like Magomedev, who apparently met then 16 year old Dzhanet Abdurakhmanova in an online chat room, and semi-abducted her, married her, and then left her a widow at age 17, is the true picture of a villain. The photo of Dzhanet Abdurakhmanova, blank face brandishing what looks like a Makarov, while Magomedev holds a Stechin pistol and and visibly controls her (neither by the way adhering to trigger discipline) is both chilling and evil. Pretty much everyone can figure that her path, and that of her evil husband, is one that should be stopped. Child marriage, likely forcible, the hijab and covering, brandishing weapons Crips/Bloods style, and blowing up innocent Muscovite commuters is something anyone can oppose. It is the ultimate enemy of safe, middle class life the way that the Nazis and Soviets and Japanese were in WWII.

World War Two, Nazis, Soviets, and their various collaborators, are too distant. The end of WWII was 65 years ago. It simply does not have emotional force, any more. Moreover, Western society faces new challenges. That of Jihad, of Islam, of people who figure if they kill enough Muscovites, or New Yorkers, or Beijingers, or Londoners, everyone will submit. Surrender. So that the surviving killers can rule, and for those who don't, well the killing is the point in the first place. Against these real villains, the phony PC villains of corporate executives, the "White Guys in Suits" do not cut it. White guys in corporate boardrooms are subject to massive PC, lawyers everywhere, and don't blow up subways.

All creative people need to do is be … creative. Don't call it jihad, and don't call the bad guys Muslims. Call them something else. Just have lots of covering for women, beards for men, fanatic prayers, suicide bombings, and terrorism.

After all, spy shows are cheap. ITV, not known for its big budgets, had many of them for years. Any quick look at the early Avengers or Danger Man or the Saint will not find massive budgets or highly professional stunts. Men like the action and adventure, and it is quite possible that female audiences hungering for something different than pouty, hunky metrosexuals would find the latter day equivalents to say, Patrick McGoohan, or Roger Moore, or Patrick McNee far more appealing than the glittery gay vampires of "Vampire Diaries" or the rich boy metrosexuals of "Gossip Girl."

Indeed, the shocking thing to comparing TV stars from the 1960's and 1970's, when there was still living memory of just what the sacrifice to win World War Two entailed, is just how masculine the actors appeared, versus the ones of today. McGoohan, Moore, McNee, all are far more masculine than say, Chace Crawford.

Westerns, of course, are not coming back. Ever tighter budgets, and loss of the ability to depict horsemanship and everything else means Hollywood today can't do what it did in 1957, even on TV. Private eye shows, don't seem to be coming back either, though periodic attempts to revive them have been tried. Cop shows are all procedural affairs, which as Ed Bernero points out, are made mostly for a female audience. But spy shows are cheap, and the villains of our time cry out for a creative disguise in an updated Goldfinger or Blofeld.

If Bernero is right, and he makes his living producing TV shows, so he should know what he's doing, the only issue is the largely female line executives at the Broadcast Networks, and likely, the gay executives. Disney is famous for its Princess Factory at the Disney Channel, which openly gay Rich Ross nurtured into a money-making machine. Just as well known, is the complete failure of Disney XD to draw boys. Who knew, that gay men just can't connect with the action and adventure that men and boys want?

NBC ought to be hungrier than most. Their ratings are in the toilet. All the other networks have established shows drawing younger women to hunky vampires, or Desperate Housewives, or multi-threaded soap operas. Simply offer real heroes, reflecting the odd, and unique attributes of Americana, and real villains. Variations of the jihadis who blow people up. Simply make them disguised. Snake worshippers, or black magic devotees, not the obvious Muslim jihadis. This puts CAIR off your back and still allows you to have women dressed in chadors, and guys in beards and skull caps.

This approach makes the writing simpler and easier. No angsty sub-plots, soap operas, or complex arc plotting. Just deadly and dangerous villains, who have to be stopped, and are, by unique and deeply American heroes. A focus on the action, not relationship angst and drama. Which often devolves into self-pity and maudlin sentiment. Keep it simple, and execute.

Up to a point, this is what Burn Notice on USA Network has done. Though even there, the enemies are the own intelligence service, rather than people blowing up innocent commuters. It is time for Hollywood to show some innovation. Otherwise someone else will do it for them. Sooner rather than later.
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Local TV News: Politically Correct and Feminized

A recent article in Tucker Carlson's new site, Dailycaller.com, sheds light on why LOCAL TV news is so politically correct: it is aimed exclusively at women. Hotair.com discusses the issue here. From a "well known news anchor from a Top 10 Local station" comes the unsurprising news that local news broadcasts are infested with perky twenty and thirtysomethings that know nothing but terminal political correctness, and practice it, both in hiring and producing newscasts. A near total reliance on women (almost exclusively White) ages 18-49 by local news as well as national broadcast and print media has been driving culture inexorably leftward and towards terminal PC stupidity. As a result, the media is ill-prepared for the backlash by men, and older women, who as the economy falls deeper into recession, become more important economically and politically. The stage is being set for a titanic political-cultural struggle between women ages 18-49, and everyone else, over the direction of the nation and its future.


The writer of the article, notes that:

For the better part of my adult life, I’ve worked as an anchor and reporter at CBS, NBC and ABC affiliated newsrooms across the country — often complaining about the nanny-state liberalism that infects so much of news coverage. Arguably, local news is a more insidious and destructive force than the widely accepted liberal bias of networks and other national components of mainstream media. After all, study after study has demonstrated that local news is more widely watched — and, more importantly, more trusted than other forms of mainstream media. There is a case to be made that the steady drumbeat of hyped-up threats — SUV’s that roll over, kitchen-counter bacteria, road rage, swine flu, amber alerts and the stations’ willingness to enlist governments and institutions to solve those “perceived” problems, actually drives a lot of bad and unnecessary public policy.

But it’s a formula that has worked as a cash cow for your local TV station. It is no accident that most local TV stations market themselves with nanny-state slogans: “Channel 2: Working for you!” or “ABC 6: On your side!” You might say those slogans are a subtler version of, “NBC 5: Making your boo-boos all better!”

How did it get that way?

…

Here’s the formula. Highly trained Anchorman (booming authoritative, focus-group-tested voice at the ready) or better yet, Anchorwoman (compassionate voice and pouty face, furrowed brow at the ready), reads the headline, tosses to reporter. Hyperventilating reporter further frightens with victim sound bite, followed by sound bite from plaintiff attorney (”This poor victim needs to be compensated.”). Followed by politician sound bite (”I’m introducing legislation …”) followed by reporter tag, which may or may not include response from big, bad, deep-pocketed corporation. Interestingly, that last component — the response from the corporate evildoers, often becomes, in my experience, a throwaway part of many stories — something along the lines of, “The XYZ company denies any wrongdoing.” Or even, “The XYZ company was unavailable for comment at news time.”

I’ve even noted a pattern among some media-savvy trial attorneys. Often, they’ll fax or e-mail a press release of a pending lawsuit or action to newsrooms on Friday afternoons — enough time for a reporter to get a camera crew, head to the law office, get the sound bite for the evening deadline, but not enough time for the deep-pocketed corporation, with it’s multi-layered media information office, often located in a distant city, to respond before deadline time. So, the story airs, unchallenged, with the charges stewing and brewing over the weekend. The corporation is sucker-punched, feeding frenzy gains steam, politicians take note. Damage is done, forcing corporation to consider out-of-court settlement, sparing them more bad publicity, but most importantly, sparing the plaintiff attorney all of that hard work of trial preparation, but with an easy payoff .

As one news director I worked for once said, “There are lots of things to be afraid of out there.” Indeed, cancer, household bacteria, child predators, hot weather, cold weather, tap water, electromagnetic fields, vaccinations, Chinese food, Mexican food, racism, fertilizers, homophobia, hate crimes, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

And, who is most likely to be afraid of these threats? Well, the mainstream media machine, cynically and manipulatively, believes it’s that key demographic group, women ages 18-49. They, according to consultants and marketing executives, control the household remote and make the buying decisions. No. One. Else. Matters.

Later, describing the terminal PC and "Diversity" that infests local anchors, from the careful collection of Asian, Latino, Black, and limiting of White Men (to a very small number), the author writes:

Today, many large media companies have written policies — NBC/ General Electric and Gannett to name two — whereby station managers and executives cannot be promoted unless they themselves promote minorities and women. And where do managers go to ensure their own advancement, while hiring the perfect rainbow of staffers? The NABJ. NAHJ. NLGJA. NAHJ. These are the minority journalists associations. Black, Hispanic, gay and lesbian, Native American, Asian American. And curiously, among them, objectivity seems to be secondary to their particular form of advocacy and their “progressive” mandates. Each, in furtherance of their own mission is quick to claim victim status if quotas are not met or if their ideals are not expressed through “advocacy” journalism.

Now, local news is a money-maker for affiliates. Women, certainly don't find the terminal PC and "diversity" repelling. On the contrary, female audiences respond highly to these attributes, and cannot get enough of it. Why is that?

The author writes that women's natural compassion and empathy are at play, but my view is different. Rather, it is the constant competition for status and position among women, and their disgust at most White men who are at best, equal in status, that drives the "diversity" and PC nonsense. That further, women unless constrained and invested in society by a pretty permanent marriage to beta males and with beta male children, will always run hard-left in every possible way to produce an "aristocracy of big men." Women's innate desire to be Princesses (or marry into aristocracy), visible as a hard-wired behavior by little girls playing princess, pushes them left into this behavior. You cannot, after all, sell a group something it does not really want. No matter how slick the salesman.

Women in today's post-Industrial society face a lot of status competition. Over clothes, social positioning, educational background, "ticket-punching," and the like. This is why women hated Sarah Palin, excepting older women largely outside status competition, and responded positively to Tina Fey's impersonations that presented the notion that Palin's failure to attend Harvard (instead of the University of Idaho and community colleges) meant she was "stupid." From "Mean Girls," to the professional workplace, female rivalry for status is non-stop and anxiety producing. Status including notably, the quality of man a woman attracts.

Women, as noted by essayist and PUA blogger Roissy in DC face a fairly ruthless competition for the top, most status-laden, Alpha male. Most attractive women can have sex with the Alpha male, but relatively few can get them to commit to a steady relationship. Certainly almost none in the thirties. Even among attractive, beautiful, intelligent women in their twenties, at the peak of their beauty, few can get marriage or faithful cohabitation from a dominant, attractive, powerful Alpha male with many options. Which is indeed, the most desirable man. Women can and do share, powerful and dominant men. Many of Tiger Woods mistresses were not porn stars or prostitutes (though some were), but waitresses, to wealthy and famous BBC Newsreaders. None felt a bit of shame "sharing" him with his wife and other mistresses.

But anxiety runs through women, in the fairly ruthless competition to land exclusively the Alpha male (the brass ring prize). Though many overestimate the duration and power of their beauty, nearly all recognize that it fails, and the undeniable decline in male attention, particularly by the most desirable of men, the Alpha Male, in women's thirties is fear-inducing event. No wonder women are filled with fear — their social anxiety over "getting" the Alpha male pre-disposes them to this condition. Moreover, women are filled with contempt and loathing for the men who provide competition for scarce jobs and status, and yet fail to become "Alpha" men — commanding, powerful presences. This is why women, from Sandra Tsing Loh, to writers in the New York Times to feminists at Double XX all complain about husbands not being "masculine enough" and instead, becoming "Kitchen Bitches." Men who cook, are "supplicating" (no "real man" would deign to do nice things for them regularly, since a desirable man has women throwing themselves at them all the time).

Women have a huge complaint with modern men: they are not masculine enough (i.e. not dominant, powerful, Alpha men), and worse they are in competition with them while expressing often "icky" (i.e. unwanted sexual/romantic attention). Attention that might dissuade the intentions or distract the attention of the Alpha Male. Modern women, most of them unmarried, have an objective: find and hold an Alpha Male. Successful romantic comedies aimed at women ("the Proposal," "The Ugly Truth," "27 Dresses," "My Big Fat Greek Wedding") paint a good picture of the Alpha Male, as does of course "Sex and the City." He must be attractive, powerful, socially dominating, and wealthy. He can be informal or formal, country or city, WASP or ethnic, but must meet these important criteria. Most of a modern woman's social life is spent rejecting or forestalling advances from unsuitable, provider-status at best Beta Males, and winkling out the comparative Alpha status of the putative Alpha males.

In this, PC and "diversity" plays a huge role. No wonder a female-dominated audience for local news gets a female dominated newscast with very limited amount of White males and lots of "diversity." With PC Dogma repeated endlessly. Women love princes, princesses, dynasties, fairy tales, and the like. Women also love authority from "fashionable" figures of glamor and wealth. This is a generalization of course, not all women have these values, or find the Kennedy political dynasty a tragic but "beautiful" story, or idolize fashionable NYC opinion setters. But, most do. Fashionable opinion detests Sarah Palin, and so do most women. See also here:

According to the poll, 51 percent of men see her in a positive light, with an nearly equal amount of women view Palin in a negative way.

"The gender gap on Palin is not simply a function of the fact that women tend to identify with the Democratic party more than men do," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "Even within GOP circles, Republican men like Palin more than Republican women do. John McCain put Palin on his ticket in 2008 to appeal to female voters, but it looks like men are a natural constituency for her."

Of course. Sarah Palin did not go to Harvard, did not marry a powerful, Alpha Male who intimidates other men or commands respect and adoration from powerful people, and did not abort her Down's syndrome baby. These are all actions that make most women 18-49 despise her (Palin does draw support from older women outside the status-struggle).

PC and Diversity are ways to first, winkle out who expresses orthodox, "correct" political opinions, and secondly to create such barriers that only the "most Alpha" of White males can surmount them. A world filled with politically correct, "diverse" folks with careful measurements of Asian, Latino, and Black female anchors and reporters, with minimal amounts of White men, is the ideal for most White women 18-49, and finds of course approval by non-Whites as well. A recent episode of the "Dog Whisperer" at advertising agency Chiat-Day, showed almost no White males, but lots of gay men of various non-White ethnic backgrounds, and many non-White women as well as White women. A multicultural, diverse paradise for women!

Naturally, the opinions, the nanny-state aspect of government (in response to anxiety driven by status competition, competition for Alpha males, and disgust over Beta male attention) find an appreciative audience in women. BUT … the economic decline, the low state of marriage, and the pressure on co-habitation by men taking the brunt (about 75% of all job losses since the start of the recession in 2007 have been men) of unemployment and underemployment means a big shift. More split-ups, particularly for fluid, fragile, and short-term oriented cohabitators. Far fewer marriages. Which means in turn a LOT more men living alone and making their own buying decisions.

Particularly as the web poses a threat to local news (why wait until 10-11 pm when you can get local news at any time), the ability of local TV news stations to extract local advertising dollars is probably on a par with that of newspapers to extract classified ad revenue in competition with Craigslist. Particularly since local advertisers are not interested in ideology, merely sales revenue, more split up couples or ones not forming in the first place means more men making buying decisions, reached more cheaply on the web, well the shift towards internet advertising is likely only to accelerate.

Which is likely to set up the template for the struggle for the culture and politics of America. On the web, for the most part, the highly trafficked sites are male-oriented (though not all conservative). Sites such as Drudgereport, or Instapundit, or Hotair, or Comic Bloc, or Ain't It Cool News, or Slashdot, might vary in politics, but are uniformly "male" in orientation. They are mostly written and controlled by men, for a male readership. One generally uninterested in careful "correct" opinions, celebrity-famous people worship, princess fantasies, dogma denying reality on threats and non-threats, and careful "diversity" with meticulous, ethnic/gender/sexual orientation balances designed to minimize the "threat" of nerdy White men.

Meanwhile, TV, print media, big media, and movies are undeniably feminine for the most part. With an equal part of "Access Hollywood" and "American Idol" to "the View" celebrity-fashion worship and local news threat-fear mongering, the battle lines are drawn. On the one side, women 18-49 with considerable demographic and monetary strength, wanting everything their own way, like an episode of "Gossip Girl" that never ends. On the other hand, older women, and White males, who find that marginalization of their concerns is a massive threat. Against this rough stalemate are the wild cards: continued economic recession, and extreme economic stress, threats of terrorism-Jihad that the female PC-driven consensus cannot deal with (and is notably and unavoidably incapable of dealing with), and new technology (internet, internet-enabled smartphones) favored by early adopter men.

Certainly there does not seem to be much in common across the gender lines between ages 18-49, nor does there seem to be compromise or peace any time soon. One side must win, and the other lose. For decades, technology and business have conspired to make men the losers. Events and trends may make that, however, a thing of the past.
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Feminized TV: How PC Kills Revenue

The plot should be a no-brainer. TV Broadcast networks, free to anyone with a TV antenna, ought to be reaping recessionary rewards as people cut the cable or satellite payments and surf online and over-the-air. But TV Broadcast networks are still losing viewers. Some of it is simply bad programming (NBC is reportedly thinking of yanking Jay Leno's 10 PM show off the air after the Winter Olympics), but a lot of it is the simple inability of the networks to make anything that is attractive to male viewers. Lost in all the hype about female decision-makers driving 80% of all consumer purchases is the fact that men make up close to 50% of the population. A recent interview with "Criminal Minds" showrunner Ed Bernero at Deadline Hollywood Daily illustrates why: despite men at the top of the Networks, nearly all the executive staff is female (or gay). Which means, PC kills revenue.


As always, read the whole thing. But several points are worth excerpting:

EB: Television viewership has been declining for about 10 years. The internet has been blamed. Everything has been blamed. Except for what I think the problem is: that the networks own the shows, and they completely think that they make them. They don’t any longer let the people who make shows just make them. The networks have notes about everything. They are intimately involved in every aspect of the process. And I think it’s hurt the process.
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DH: Network/studio idiocy is infamous. But if you can link it now to network ownership...

EB: That’s when the erosion of viewership began. I also think one of the things that’s really hurting us is political activism of any stripe. Michael Jordan had it exactly right, he was my idol -- when he was asked about a political question at one point and he said I’m not going to answer it, and they said why not, and he said: Because Republicans buy gym shoes too, right? That doesn’t exist anymore, that kind of smarts.

Any time someone says anything right, left, whatever, I think we lose viewers. And somewhere around the country somebody says, I’m not going to watch what Hollywood does anymore. I wish we would go back to just being entertainers. Anytime we sign a petition that says let’s ignore the fact that Roman Polanski raped a 13-year-old, we lose viewers. And I think that has reached a critical mass. We live in a very polarized country right now. So why would someone like Megan Fox want to diss middle America?

And it’s not just that they’re not going to watch her material, they’re not going to watch mine. There are people in Kansas who are going to say, you know what? Screw Hollywood. Because we are sort of thought of as this monolith, and I wish people would take that into account.
DH: That probably comes from the fact that you are from the middle. The Rust Belt.

EB: Yes, very much from the middle. I eternally fight internal battles about developing things that only appeal to the East Coast and the West Coast. For years I’ve been trying to do a Western, nobody’s interested in doing a Western, how can that be? Every time someone does a Western movie, people flock to it. It’s like, we’re continually programming to people who are least likely to watch us. People in Nebraska aren’t watching things on the computer, they’re watching television. Why aren’t we programming things for them? We only program things that appeal to New York and Los Angeles and in many ways spit on the rest of the country.

Berneros argument (again, read the whole thing) is that the relaxation of fin-syn rules (he notes he has been writing cop shows for about 12 years) has changed network relationships from simply buying shows from providers to owning them and making MBA weenies who know nothing about film or TV production into suddenly, film-makers. That moreover, politicizing things to make one feel better on the cocktail circuit is a disaster. As is the elitist view that only the viewpoints of LA and NYC matter, that the "stupid hicks in the middle of the country" will in fact watch anything the hip and cool people put on. Clearly, this is not the case, and the contempt for Middle America has hurt the networks.

But just as important, has been the process by which men have fled or been expelled from television, particularly broadcast television, which in turn has become a gay/female ghetto. More below:


ON TV CONTENT FOR MEN, WOMEN, AND THE NETWORKS

DH: When you look at the CBS lineup, I guess it’s the network that seems to have a lock on crime with the multiple CSI’s and Criminal Minds – but it’s controlled by two women, Nina Tassler and Nancy Tellem. And my understanding is that they are looking for more shows that have more female appeal. I just wondered what the deal is.

EB: That’s a point I’ve thought about a lot in developing over the last few years. Let’s see if I can say this without ending my development career. It’s very female, development. Development staffs are almost all female. It’s not that easy to get a male skewed show through development.

DH: Interesting.

EB: Most of the network television audience now is primarily women, but I think that’s because the shows are developed to appeal to women. I don’t know that there are too many shows that appeal to guys anymore. I’m not sure why that is, but I think that it may have something to do with the fact that most development staffs are women. I know it’s the case at CBS. I know it’s the case at ABC. Not that these are not brilliant women, but there’s a completely different sensibility in men and women, in what men watch and what women watch. Part of the erosion of network television is that men watch sports – there’s not that much on for them. There are not shows that have male themes. That’s all I want to say about that.

DH: And yet at CBS, besides the crime shows even the popular comedies are male-oriented, Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory.

EB: But Two and a Half Men is not male-oriented, it’s made to appeal to women. Charlie Sheen is playing a bad boy who can be changed…

DH: It’s got a lot of jokes that my husband likes.

EB: But it’s safe.

DH: What is male oriented?

EB: For example, almost all dramas are families, they are work families – ER is a good example, Criminal Minds is a good example. We have a character who is the mother, a character who is the father, a brother and a sister, we have the younger brother that everybody protects, we have the cute cousin…it’s very much a family, and I think that very much appeals to women.

You don’t see loners anymore, you don’t see a Mannix or a Rockford Files or something where it’s a tough guy standing against the world. It doesn’t appeal to women. Guys like a guy who stands up for right, and the Hawaii Five-0 that we were going to write, the issue was sort of like living up to your father, being a cop in a world where your father was a great cop, that’s really a male theme. Women don’t really compete with their mothers; men compete with their fathers. I know I had gotten into many conversations where people didn’t understand why it was important that the character be in competition with his father…men compete with their fathers.

DH: Men compete with everybody. Everything’s a competition.

EB: Right. Two and a Half Men is an example. Those two don’t really compete with each other. It’s not really two brothers living with each other, because two brothers living together don’t get along that well.

DH: Aren’t they like The Odd Couple?

EB: But The Odd Couple is different, because in the 1970s, the "Odd Couple" didn’t like each other. They competed with each other in ways that these two don’t. Because at the base of it all, they [Two and Half Men’s characters] really love each other.

DH: More like My Two Dads.

EB: It’s a subtle thing, but it’s very female-centered. Now, I don’t mean to say that I don’t love doing shows that women like – women like Criminal Minds, and women weren’t supposed to like this show. Our core audience is 35-40 year old women, who I think are an amazing audience. It didn’t surprise me at all, when you put on the show where those women are the primary targets of these monsters, and you put on a show where our team saves women from them every week, I don’t know how this couldn’t appeal to them.

DH: And women are very interested in character, as opposed to what you’re saying -- that sometimes men just like a straight-on hero who does it right.

EB: Yes, I think it’s extremely difficult to get a male themed show on television.

DH: The people who are running the networks are men, but the so-called creative executives, that whole level is mostly female.

EB: If you say this, make sure that you say that I’m not necessarily saying that’s bad…

DH: Just that it’s true.

EB: The TV audience is primarily female, so it’s not a bad thing…

DH: But if you have something that works on that male level, it’s hard to get it through.

EB: What gets made that’s considered for men – it’s really just T&A stuff. It’s not stuff than any guy I know really wants to watch, you know, the stuff with jiggling boobs and all that. Something with real sort of male themes and male strength and things I want to watch in a drama….

DH: The things men want to be respected for…

EB: Yeah, sort of the things that appeal to us, the things we compete for. Macho in a different sense, the kind of things that we think makes us a man. It doesn’t really exist right now. I really don’t want it to seem that I think it’s a problem that women are in development, I don’t think it’s as problem at all, I just think it’s an interesting time that we’re in. And maybe long overdue – maybe television for a long time was made for men and it’s long overdue.

DH: I’m hearing the hero thing, how important that is to men, it’s not just about being understood in a touchy-feely way.

EB: No, not at all, it’s more about being misunderstood, but doing right anyway -- it’s Rockford and Mannix and all that kind of thing. Those kinds of icons don’t exist anymore. But I also love Glee. I watch it with my wife; I loved Desperate Housewives in the first couple of years. It’s not bad, it’s just something that I notice. And I think specifically what happened with Hawaii Five-0.

Bernero, obvious does not want to burn the bridges with the women he has to sell to, year after year. However, he acknowledges that TV simply cannot touch on what men want to see. Which is not families, nor relationship dramas, or hunky gay vampires, nor hunky doctors. But rather, individualists who are somewhat loners, who do the right thing even if they don't get rewarded, because doing the right thing is in fact difficult and a test and proof, together, of their manliness. Together of course with competition, of winning and losing, and keeping score.

Two And A Half Men, is indeed all about how the Bad Boy Charlie Sheen, can be tamed and changed, and how the female audience can laugh at the Beta brother Jon Cryer, who is a loser because he is not a bad boy. While Hanes has dropped Charlie Sheen (very late) from its ads, it is unlikely CBS will drop Sheen. First, he's the show, and second, women forgive ANYTHING from a bad boy. Anything at all. Womens groups have not been picketing CBS to fire Charlie Sheen for allegedly putting a knife to his wife's throat. They are unlikely to do so as they are unlikely to call for Roman Polanski's arrest. Women love the bad boys, Sheen's alleged actions only make him more of a bad boy. Presumably to be tamed by the "special" woman.

Meanwhile Cryer's character, is there so obviously for women to laugh at.

What is interesting is how Bernero essentially cops to CBS and other networks "Prime Time Crime Time" being oriented towards women. A "family" filled with relationship issues, in the workplace (I have never had any workplace be a "family" —I either produced revenue to more than cover my full cost of employment or I was gone, and I suspect most folks have the same experience), with emphasis on relationships within the family and romance for the lead female character. Absent the criminals, it might as well describe Hospital Soaps such as "Mercy" or "Grey's Anatomy."

This is why you don't see either a very male-oriented "A-Team" on television, or at least broadcast television, or private eyes who used to dominate TV: Mannix, Rockford Files, "Simon and Simon," or heck "Jake and the Fatman," and "Riptide." It is worth noting that "Jake and the Fatman" ran until 1992. Back in the 1950's through the 1970's, private eyes and fairly "loner" types such "Wild Wild West" (can anyone imagine such a show today?) or "Rockford Files" which ran through 1980.

With the loss of these shows, has come the loss of the male audience. Which means lower ratings, and lower advertising dollars, no matter how much spin on female-driven purchases marketers put forward.

PC kills. Sure it is "nice to have" all these "diverse" staff, with White males being at the top and the rest female or gay. [A recent episode of "Dog Whisperer" at Chiat/Day was revealing —nearly all the staff was either female (and many of them non-White) or gay. How that enables them to understand and sell to the White middle class particularly White men is a mystery to me. But perhaps nearly 60 years of go-go post-War prosperity made advertising fat and happy, instead of lean and hungry.]

Contrary to Bernero, the idea that it is "time" to have TV all-female, all-gay has real consequences. For NBC, it means money left on the table, that go to Video Games and cable outlets like USA, and to a lesser extent F/X. White women alone are not enough to drive profitable ratings. There simply are not enough of them. The small size of the Black Middle Class (approximately 5% of the total population, or 40% of the 12.5% of the Black population) makes them irrelevant. Hispanics prefer to watch Spanish-language TV. An all female and all gay development staff cannot produce shows that reach men, for the most part, and won't stick with the few that have potential (NBC's late, lamented "Life," with perhaps one of the most masculine, and self-contained loner types shown in decades). Reaching for more women as CBS plans to do, means fighting with ABC, NBC, FOX, and CW for the declining pool of White women (and a few "fabulous" gay men). This undoubtedly suits the prejudices and whims of the female development staff, and is "easy" in that it does not stretch the limits of their imaginations, but it will not fix the problem.

Bernero is undoubtedly correct that fin-syn rules, allowing networks to own shows, and thus making development execs who know MBA spreadsheets or (perhaps, given the revelations in business and politics regarding personal relationships between bosses, certain intimate knowledge of their bosses) into pseudo-showrunners, based on things that have nothing to do with making successful TV shows, has been hurtful to the ability to make shows viewers want to see. So too, anti-Middle Class, Coastal Elitism and politicking of any sort.

But as documented extensively on Whiskey's Place, viewer declines began decades ago, in the 1980's, before Cable TV, before Satellite TV, before the internet, before bit-torrent sharing of TV shows, before fin-syn. Before even, FOX Broadcasting. In the era of rabbit ears and only three networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC. The decline began, when men fled TV. Slowly, as more and more shows became female-oriented soap operas. More rapidly, as the development executives became more and more female (and gay). Finally, the last of the old-line TV shows were canceled or concluded in the early 1990's, and TV became a female and gay ghetto.

If TV remains merely a female-gay ghetto, then viewers will never return. Because the missing viewers are men. Video games, and specialized niche networks programming to men, such as Spike-TV and USA Network, will continue to grow in profits, with little competition from Hollywood and the major media companies.

The danger for Hollywood, and networks generally, is that TV's "proven" format of serial dramas, and comedies, can be easily adapted on the internet, with devices that free people from watching broadcast TV. Contrary to Bernero, a lot of TV (including undoubtedly, Criminal Minds) is consumed online or through a computer. Flo TV promises TV on the go, anywhere and everywhere. Apple is promising a tablet device that can provide both an e-reader and mobile TV, connected through Wi-Fi. Various cell phone companies are experimenting with mobile TV, including NFL games. While I will address this issue (portability and convenience versus an "immersive" but expensive experience) in a future post on Avatar (and why the movie is both more and less than it seems), the sum experience of consumer preference has been for convenience and portability at an affordable price over high quality and an expensive, immersive experience.

Consumers preferred cheap walkmen from Sony in favor of expensive home stereos. Later, they preferred a lesser audio experience with sampled MP3s in a convenient, portable form in the Ipod to the high quality of CDs. Apple already offers Itunes downloads for various TV and movies, some of them free, as does Amazon's Un-box, and streaming video at both Youtube and Hulu has generated millions of viewers. When given a choice between cheap, portable, and convenient, and a "family gathering" of the type Bernero mentions, consumers tend to choose cheap and portable and convenient. Moreover, declining marriage rates and very likely, in the recession, declining co-habitation rates, means more individual watching, alone, instead of gathered around the family TV set.

The future is likely to consist of cheap, networked devices playing streaming media, with ads, anywhere and anytime. Providers from Apple, Google and its partners, Flo-TV, and more, are going to be hungry for content. Content that appeals to at least half the gadget buyers, men. Content that can be provided, theoretically, from anywhere: New Zealand, with low production costs, or Canada, or Australia, or even somewhere outside Hollywood in the US. By independent producers, who keep costs low and stories tightly focused on the audience, be it male or female.

And what are we likely to see on these mobile, networked devices? Why, private eyes, and loner-type cops, and maybe even Western tough guys. Made cheaply, rapidly, for a voracious market. Supported by advertising dollars, often with in-show ads or with commercials that cannot be skipped (Apple has a patent for just such a technology). Men generally tend to be the early adopters, and they are unlikely to be consumers of say, "Cold Case" with a hefty dose of feminized PC moralizing by women and authority figures, or the mocking of doofus guys like "Two And A Half Men."

The threat, is then that networks could cease to exist as both advertisers and viewers move to mobile devices, that serve men as well as women. Unthinkable? That is what Detroit thought, with the introduction of cheap and reliable Japanese cars, at the end of the 1970's. I suspect the changes to network TV will be far more rapid. Because the "diverse" and politically correct staffs at broadcast networks will simply order the band to play louder as the ship sinks.

PC kills revenue. Among other things.
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