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Sep
25

Pam Am, The Playboy Club And The Death Of Creativity In Television

By | Blog, Culture, TV/Entertainment

Pan Am PosterTwo new television programs getting big pushes this fall are ABC’s Pan Am and NBC’s The Playboy Club. ABC especially is promoting the hell out of Pan Am. Both these shows are period pieces and direct, shameless rip-offs of AMC’s Mad Men.

Mad Men was a breakthrough when it came out. A beautiful period piece set in the world of Advertising in the 50′s and 60′s. The writing is superior and the attention to detail in the show is remarkable. What is sad is once something becomes very popular, people in TV rush to copy it. So it’s no surprise to see these two new shows. Frankly I wonder what took them so long. There is such a void of creativity in television, truly great shows only come around once and awhile and most of what is out there are rip offs. CSI became popular and what did they do, replicate it several times. Same for Law and Order.

I guess it’s been this way for quite awhile though. Television goes through phases. For one period, everything is a cop drama, than a hospital one. Lately, the traditional cop drama has morphed into more of a psychic cop drama like Medium.

I predict both The Playboy Club and Pan Am will be failures. People do see through this pretty well and neither bring anything original or interesting to the party. None of the actual creativity comes from the major networks anyway. Virtually everything that is decent now comes from networks like AMC, FX, and HBO.

For the record, here are the only shows I watch these days that I think are worth watching.

Breaking Bad – I came late to this show but I’m hooked now

The Walking Dead – I have read the comic and it’s awesome. I was very worried they would mess it up, but so far the show is great.

Sons of Anarchy – How can you not love crusty Ron Perman as the head of a rough and tumble motorcycle gang?

The Daily Show – When the actual news is so insane you want to tear your hair out, this is the only thing that may keep you from completely loosing it.

I’m sure there are some shows I have missed but with three kids, I only have time for so much. Add your favorites in the comments below.

 

Jan
04

Heroes the Most Pirated TV Show

By | Blog, Technology, TV/Entertainment

Heroes (TV series)
Image via Wikipedia

This news, that Heroes is the most pirated television show, is very disappointing to me for many reasons. It violates my personal primary rule for downloading. I will only download content if I cannot legitimately find it online for a fair price. I am happy to pay for content and/or watch ads and I do so all the time via iTunes and Hulu.com. If you do not make your content available to me online I feel like I am forced to get it another way. I guess I held out hope that many people felt this way. But Heroes is available on Hulu as well as NBC.com. In fact, I would argue it’s a hell of a lot easier to watch shows this way than try to download them via BitTorrent.

Those of us that argue for a digital future need to understand and respect that some kind of business model must follow. Likely, it will not be the same model that exists today, but producing television costs money and many people need to be compensated. Either the audience needs to pay for the content outright or watch some kind of advertising. I don’t know nor care at this point what model wins out but what I do know is that if shows are pirated and people are not compensated, the digital future will not happen. When networks make shows available online as NBC, ABC and others have done we need to reward that behavior as much as possible. If we can work with the entertainment industry and stop spitting in their faces, together we can carve out a future where everyone wins.

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Dec
03

Comcast takes control of NBC, promises not to crush Hulu 'like a bug' — Engadget

By | Blog, Culture

via engadget.com

Despite what Comcast says, I don’t like this deal, not a bit. Here is the key point:

“NBC has been careful not to put too much cable content on the Internet. We think that’s a smart strategy…

It’s simple logic. Comcast, under their current business model, has little to gain from pushing Internet TV forward. They will do enough to prevent people from freaking out but they will hold things at bay. I think a distributor like Comcast owning the content is a conflict of interest and not at all consumer friendly. This is good for nobody but Comcast.

Posted via web from David Jacobs’s Connected World

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