tv makes you smarter?
April 25, 2005
On Jan. 24, the Fox network showed an episode of its hit drama ''24,'' the real-time thriller known for its cliffhanger tension and often- gruesome violence. Over the preceding weeks, a number of public controversies had erupted around ''24,'' mostly focused on its portrait of Muslim terrorists and its penchant for torture scenes. The episode that was shown on the 24th only fanned the flames higher: in one scene, a terrorist enlists a hit man to kill his child for not fully supporting the jihadist cause; in another scene, the secretary of defense authorizes the torture of his son to uncover evidence of a terrorist plot.
But the explicit violence and the post-9/11 terrorist anxiety are not the only elements of ''24'' that would have been unthinkable on prime-time network television 20 years ago. Alongside the notable change in content lies an equally notable change in form. During its 44 minutes -- a real-time hour, minus 16 minutes for commercials -- the episode connects the lives of 21 distinct characters, each with a clearly defined ''story arc,'' as the Hollywood jargon has it: a defined personality with motivations and obstacles and specific relationships with other characters. Nine primary narrative threads wind their way through those 44 minutes, each drawing extensively upon events and information revealed in earlier episodes. Draw a map of all those intersecting plots and personalities, and you get structure that -- where formal complexity is concerned -- more closely resembles ''Middlemarch'' than a hit TV drama of years past like ''Bonanza.''
For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ''masses'' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that ''24'' episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of ''24,'' you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ''24,'' you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion -- video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms -- turn out to be nutritional after all....
So the reason, therefore, that people appear to be more absorbed in current television shows than they might have been in the past is that such attention is required to understand what's going on.
Even the junk -- bad sitcoms, game shows, reality television programming, etc. -- winds up being more difficult to follow, engages different parts of the brain than old-style shows, and thus winds up helping with the development of some areas of the brain.
Is television more complex simply because society is more complex, and thus people simply expect their entertainment to be more complex as well? After all, many people like watching shows such as 24 and Alias because they're escapist fare; you'd think people would actively resist watchihg shows that made them think unless somehow, they'd been led to expect that sort of mental activity almost all the time.
Posted by iain at 12:53 PM
monday nights on espn
April 19, 2005
How odd...
"Monday Night Football," the second-longest-running program on prime- time broadcast television, will leave ABC for ESPN at the start of the 2006 season in an eight-year deal worth a reported $1.1 billion a year.
"Certainly this is a milestone in the history of sports TV," George Bodenheimer, the president of both ESPN and ABC Sports, said in a conference call.
The NFL's Sunday night games will also migrate, going from ESPN to NBC, a network that has been without NFL football since 1997. The six-year contract will also get the network the rights to Super Bowls in 2009 and 2012....
Football certainly seems resistant to the rollback in rights fees that have affected much of the rest of sports these days.
That said, you wonder what Disney hopes to gain with this shift. Certainly it will be good for ESPN; it will also be bad for ABC. MNF content was sort of a no-brainer (literally, to judge by some of the matchups that got foisted onto the program in recent years). While ABC had to program primetime around MNF, they didn't have to program that two hour block itself. Granted, in recent years, finding a compatible and durable programming partner had become increasingly difficult.
The other puzzling thing is the move of Sunday night football to NBC. Many were predicting that the NFL would sell the rights to itself, seeing as its new NFL Network has what you might call a signal lack of real content. It would be a good way to pull viewers to a channel that otherwise seems to be languishing a bit. (And which is going to be largely ignored nine months a year anyway -- really, what on earth was the NFL thinking? They're going to have to pull Arena Football away from NBC and NFL Europe from ... whoever televises that -- to a largely unwatching audience -- in order to have enough content more of the year.)
With the shift of Sunday Night Football to NBC, it does seem likely that the writing is on the wall for Crossing Jordan and its other Sunday night broadcast partners. (Currently, "The Contender" but heaven only knows what normally leads into the show. Which is, of course, precisely NBC's problem.) They may look to shift Crossing Jordan to another weak night -- early Wednesdays may not be entirely unlikely -- but on the whole, one suspects that the show is likely gone. And, depending on the start time, it's likely to have an interesting cascading effect across most networks' primetime shows. "Extreme Makeover: Home edition" is a stereotypical "guy" show; how many viewers will desert it for the more traditional, if less inspirational, football? And how many of Desperate Housewives' viewers come from EMHE? If it starts in the early primetime spot, football won't do The Simpsons' any favors.
The results of this round of football tango will be interesting, indeed.
Posted by iain at 03:36 PM
on the radio! woa-oa-oah! on the ... radio?
April 18, 2005
Despite her recent setback in court -- the court declined to relax the terms of her probation, finding that there was no constitutional right to produce a television program, and house arrest is meant to cause difficulty and hardship -- The Martha is not letting that little problem stop her, not one bit.
Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. said on Monday it plans this year to launch a radio channel with Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc., with active involvement from lifestyle maven Martha Stewart.
Martha Stewart Omnimedia Vice Chairman Charles Koppelman said the four-year exclusive agreement with Sirius would be worth $30 million to his company. Sirius, which has been recruiting top personalities to compete with bigger rival XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc., said it expects to boost subscriber growth and advertising revenue by attracting women to the channel. "It will have a great appeal to women, who are completely underserved by terrestrial radio," said Sirius Chief Executive Mel Karmazin, who added that the channel could be a strong advertising vehicle for Sirius. [...] Stewart, the style guru who built Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia on tips for gracious living, is under house arrest following a conviction last year of lying to investigators over a suspicious stock sale.
Yet she remains popular: Two of her Martha Stewart magazines last week won their first National Magazine awards, and she is set to star in two new television shows -- a daytime lifestyle TV program and a spinoff of the popular Donald Trump reality show "The Apprentice."[...]
What I wonder is not how much time The Martha will have to devote to this programming, but how well it will work. If you think about it, the sort of things she does are peculiarly visual. Yes, her magazine has loads of text describing various things, but it's also copiously illustrated with step-by-step instructions and images paired together. How well will it translate, for example, when she's describing some hideously complicated recipe, and you're having to figure out from the radio description exactly what is going on? "What does she mean, beat it past soft peaks but not quite to stiff peaks? Spread the mix over what again? with what? how? huh?"
Moreover, think about her advertiser profile, and the sort of things she does on her show outside the kitchen. A lot of it consists of showing the viewer this beautiful thing or that stunning item that she's found/made. Yes, she does a lot of interviews on her shows, but they're almost always interviews of people with things to show, or who are there to demonstrate the making of one thing or another.
Somehow, The Martha on the radio just doesn't seem a perfect fit. It may not be a good thing.
(Oh, please. Like you didn't expect that to pop up somewhere?)
Posted by iain at 11:30 AM
cookie monster crumbles? oh, no!
April 15, 2005
Is nothing sacred, people? Nothing at all? Not even a furry blue cookie eating puppet?
Something must be wrong in the land of Muppets.
First, PBS announced that "Sesame Street" would kick off its 36th season this week with a multiyear story arc about healthy habits. No problem there; childhood obesity rates are soaring. Then I learned of changes that turned my "Sesame Street" world upside-down.
My beloved blue, furry monster %u2013 who sang "C is for cookie, that's good enough for me" %u2013 is now advocating eating healthy. There's even a new song %u2013 "A Cookie Is a Sometimes Food," in which Cookie Monster learns there are "anytime" foods and "sometimes" foods.
"SACRILEGE!" I CRIED. "That's akin to Oscar the Grouch being nice and clean." (Co-workers gave me strange looks. But I didn't care.)
Being a journalist, I did the only thing I knew how to do. I investigated why "Sesame Street" gave Cookie Monster a health makeover....
To be sure, their reasons for reforming Cookie Monster's wanton ways are understandable. Even laudable.
But still. I was in the first generation of people at whom Sesame Street was aimed, and I just don't remember being driven to eat cookies by the fact that Cookie Monster was doing it. Perhaps my memory is faulty. It may well be that if I asked my family about it, they would collectively roll their eyes and say, "Oh, geez, you were SUCH a fiend after Sesame Street was on! We had to hide every cookie in the house!" But I don't think so.
Ah, well. Everything must change, I suppose.
But it would be nice if some things didn't.
Posted by iain at 01:50 PM
the power of television, of all things
April 14, 2005
Apparently, there's some use for "Will and Grace" after all. Who knew?
University of Minnesota communications researchers have found that watching TV shows with gay characters tends to reduce anti-gay sentiment.
In three studies, researchers measured feelings toward gays before and after college students watched episodes of the Bravo program "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," the NBC sitcom "Will & Grace" and the HBO drama "Six Feet Under." In all three instances, exposure to sympathetic portrayals of gays appeared to show a statistically significant reduction in prejudice toward gay men, the university reported.
Hundreds of studies have supported what is known as the "contact hypothesis," which suggests that direct contact between majority and minority groups helps lessen prejudice.
The new studies led the researchers, communications professors Edward Schiappa and Dean Hewes and graduate student Peter Gregg, to develop what they call the "parasocial contact hypothesis," which suggests that a similar reduction in prejudice can be achieved by watching members of the minority groups on TV or in films.
Two of the studies have been published in the journal Communication Monographs. The third study, involving "Will & Grace," has not been published.
Eric Black
I suppose that shouldn't be surprising, overall.
That said, I wonder if they might also lead to people having the wrong idea about us. For example, those oft-cited studies about the utter fabulosity of gays, our excessive amounts of disposable income, and so on, most of which are likely subject to some fairly impressive social desirability and response bias -- that is, all the data come from people who are comfortable with telling anonymous pollsters that they're gay, how they manage their income, and so on. But that's rather beside this particular point, which is that it does some good to have positive (relatively speaking) and/or realistic portrayals of minorities on television.
Posted by iain at 01:20 PM