Reinventing Television
Posted on October 29, 2006
Filed Under Channels and Content |
An old WIRED News article on how TV is evolving is back in the public space and it gives me an opportunity to revisit a few arguments. Wired also have a small summary of what they call TV 2.0 here. The basic argument is that Comedy Central’s The Daily Show leads the way - as many people watch it on download as do on cable and its popularity across both channels has made it a hit with advertisers too.
That argument relies on a comment that I am tired of seeing and which I think does an injustice to the discussion on where all media are headed. Here goes: “the audience for The Daily Show has grown almost threefold to 1.4 million viewers a night. It boasts a legion of young, smart fans who are among the most demographically desirable audiences in the industry.”
That demographic. How comes advertisers are fixated with it? They’ve got disposable income? The biggest growing audience segment is the post-40 year old woman. Baby boomers whose husbands have keeled over with a heart attack or who’ve decided liberation, I’ll get divorced. Or couples in the fifties too. Glorious age. These, by the way, are people who’ve lived their whole lives with change and they want more.
I’m one of them - the male type. We will change television because we’re so damn sick of what the TV industry has done with it. We want to connect with people, we want meaningful debate, we want our comedy to be funny, dark, sinister, disruptive. We want it a bit of the Misrule about it. The kids today watch what we watched. They listen to the Beatles, play heavy metal and download old Monty Python clips. Akimbo’s biggest seller is Fawlty Towers. The theatres in London and New York are full of people watching Spamalot.
We and the young are as one. Except, while we’re at it, stop trying to sell hair gel to my sons. I’m sick of buying hair gel. And deodarant. I’m paying so much in gel and Lynx I’ve had to give up the yoga class.
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