Your Fall TV Preview, 2003
by licensed television critic Farrell ChildeIt's time again for the new television season, so we here at NEW IMPROVED HEAD have decided to give you a preview of what you're going to be seeing.
What you're going to be seeing this season is stuff that's cheap. Really, really cheap
The tremendous recent increase in the number of television channels has not been accompanied by a tremendous increase in the number of quality programs available. That's why over the past five or six years television has been swamped with cooking shows, reality shows, stand-up comedy shows, travel shows, and in general with shows starring people you've never heard of before. That's also why cash-strapped broadcasters have been allowed to run as much paid programming as they want, thus giving you the pleasure of paying money for cable channels which then offer you a choice of watching half-hour commercials for exercise machines, real estate courses, pots and pans, and on and on.
That's also why American television has been copying European television. European television networks have always had less money than American networks, so they've had to come up with ideas for cheap television that the Americans are now copying.
Canadian television copies American television, so we're getting there last. This week marked the climax of the first series of Canadian Idol, the local franchise of the jumped-up karaoke competition which has been wowing them round the world, which tells you something about the global extent of boredom.
Television ratings continue to drop. About the only people left watching are people who are either bored or exhausted. As I wrote four years ago in a similar preview, on nights when you're so tired from work that you don't have the energy to get off the couch, the television is your friend and companion. The bored part of the audience is probably disproportionately young. Young people often don't have money, so they're stuck with the TV. That accounts for the popularity of the less adult series.
However, even the exhausted and bored communities are finding alternatives to television, such as the internet. That means ratings will continue to drop, programs will get cheaper and less entertaining, ratings will drop again, and so on.
Where will it all end? I don't know. We can only hope that it does. Perhaps technological change will make quality television cheaper to produce and television will offer us a choice of many entertaining and thought-provoking shows. Or perhaps television will die out completely, leaving unemployed news anchors to wander the streets begging for handouts so they can buy a can of hairspray. As long as I know that shows like Canadian Idol will eventually disappear I can live in hope.
Your Fall TV Preview, 2003 © Coolth, 2003
September 17, 2003
