TV execs are feeling panicked. The recent Emmy awards were the lowest rated ones ever, and the ratings from returning shows are substantially down from last year.
For ratings, some blame last year’s writer’s strike. For the Emmys, various other scapegoats are gored. The show was bad. (It was.) They are starting to lose upwards of half their potential audience because people are tired of stars–i.e., basically people who make millions because they are pretty–lecturing them on politics. (True.) But that misses the real reason, and the reasons behind low ratings for the Oscars and TV ratings in general.
The real answer is that TV is no longer a mass medium. And it’s going to continue to diminish in that regard. There are zillions more entertainment options now than before, and even for those who still watch TV, there are DVDs (what I watch a bulk of stuff on) and Tivo, neither of which show up on traditional ratings.
Thirty years ago, the nominees for best dramatic series where The Rockford Files (winner), Family, Lou Grant, Quincy M.E., and Columbo. Every one of those shows, even Family, undoubtedly drew more viewers than the highest rated network TV show now. After all, there were only three networks back then, and no video games, home video, Internet, etc.
Here were the nominees this year: Boston Legal, Damages, Dexter, House, Lost, Mad Men. Only two of those are hits, and that’s only by today’s massively reduced standards. Three of them–including this year’s winner–are cable shows, and as hard as it is for the editors of Entertainment Weekly to understand, not everybody has cable or is even aware of what are basically boutique shows like this. They get a lot of media coverage, but a woman just came into the library the other day and was bewildered when this year’s winner, Mad Men, was mentioned. She’d never heard of it. Changes are there are a couple of other shows on that list she’s never heard of either.
Same for movies:
Oscar Best Picture Nominees 1978: The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, Heaven Can Wait, Midnight Express, An Unmarried Woman.
Oscar Best Picture Nominees 2008: Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood.
Notice that 1978 as a particularly arty year, lacking then recent blockbuster nominees like Rocky or Star Wars or Jaws. Even so, all those movies were better attended and far more part of a national conversation than any one of this year’s nominees. A couple at least were big hits.
Perhaps all of the 2008 nominees were great films. Maybe, but not one of them was seen by many people who don’t consider themselves arthouse-type people. I doubt the best attended of this year’s nominees was seen by as many people as the least seen of 2007’s. Sometimes we get bigger nominees these days, like Titantic and Gladiator, but they are few on the ground. In the ’70s, it was all Patton and Airport and Love Story and MASH and The French Connection and Fiddler on the Roof and The Godfather and Caberet and The Sting and The Exorcist…and that’s just 1970 through ’73.
For the 2000s, if you pull the three consectutive Lord of the Rings movies, than popularly seen films are sparse indeed. Look at 2005: Crash, Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Good Night and Good Luck, and Munich. Brokeback easily made the most at about $83 million, which given ticket prices these days still means a fairly small number of attendees.
Again, this doesn’t mean they were good films (although many were in fact a tad pretentious). However, it does show that there is a general disconnect now between what the critics like and what the audiences like. I guess you can just blame this on degraded audience tastes, but really, is Hollywood offering films anymore like The Godfather and The French Connection?
Meanwhile, this still leaves the question of where TV goes as the current, advertiser supported model dies. DVD at least directly makes money (although you can’t predict how much, really, and first you have to produce a show and sink upwards of fifty to a hundred million dollars into a season of it), but Tivo knocks out commercials and doesn’t offer any financial recompense in return.
The tale continues.
