A New Kind of Bad Television

I've been re-reading parts of Amanda Lotz's fantastic book "The Television Will Be Revolutionized". Written just 7 years ago about the state of television, it manages to be neither especially prescient nor obsolete despite how rapidly the world of TV is changing. I suppose this is because it clearly describes the relationships among content creation, funding, distribution, promotion, and consumption at one point in time. It doesn't get lost in "blue skies" rhetoric, as Lotz puts it, nor does it dwell on how great content is (another Golden Age of TV) or how consumers are finally in charge. While reading, I thought a bit more about web series and how and why so many of them suck.

Perhaps part of my reaction to these series is simply that they don't resonate with me, but neither do many shows on TV and I can still sense that there is some crucial difference between those shows and web series. I stated earlier that while some web series bear superficial similarities to professionally produced TV content (in production values), they lack a certain something(s): proper pacing, really good acting, good dialog, funny jokes. They remind me of the films I used to make as a 20-year-old film student. Part of me feels entitled to slag off others because I, too, produced content that I'm quite sure was utter crap and bilked others out of $ to help fund its creation. I guess you could argue that I'm just bitter that I wasn't more talented, but before judging me, assume that my argument is at least in part based on an intimate familiarity with the quality of amateur film/TV.  My films and other student films were "awful" in many of the same ways as some web series, only they lacked the polish and distribution and promotion channels of today's amateur TV.

That professional TV has a certain snap that web series don't is not surprising when you consider the fact that creators of professional TV are likely freakishly talented, the top .0001% of people who create content that is intended to appeal to others, and/or they have been at it for 10+ years. Part of the differences, I think, are due to the lack of experience of web series creators.

But the Lotz book, in particular the chapter on distribution, have me thinking about how crowd-sourced funding like Kickstarter yield a different kind of content than the kind of content that has gone through more traditional channels: pitched to execs, tested before small audiences, acceptable to advertisers, in competition with thousands of other ideas for shows.

Let's imagine a show creator who shoots a couple of short episodes of a show and puts them on YouTube. They get over 100,000 views. To finance the rest of the web series, the creator starts a Kickstarter and asks the people who like his videos on YouTube, directly, to help fund the creation of more episodes. These aren't family or friends, so they have no reason to pay hard-earned money to the creator other than wanting to see more of the content they like.

Part of the challenge of making good TV is maintaining a certain level of quality and novelty. Regardless of whether you're telling a serial story, creating a series of standalone episodes, or a reality show, you need to maintain a level of quality and novelty that keeps audiences coming back. This, it occurs to me now, is incredibly hard. Its something that those in the TV business, collectively as an industry with secrets of the trade and individually as showrunners with 10+ years experience, have gotten quite good at over the years. Nothing about the aforementioned Kickstarter scenario yields the kinds of shows that get audience's attention and keep it. Viewers who contribute to the Kickstarter may think that they'll enjoy the next episode(s) of the web series, but its hard to know that for sure, or keep it going indefinitely.

Its not as if I think that professional TV is necessarily all that great. As I said before, I'm aware of how commercial interests can yield lowest-common-denominator dreck that doesn't appeal to large swaths of viewers. But I'd argue that it's mostly an issue of the values conveyed in the work or perhaps a certain type of humor not synching up with would-be viewers. They all still have some mastery of pacing and rhythm that is hard to achieve and really hard to maintain year after year. Web series are likely better at appealing to niche values and esoteric senses of humor, but they're often bad in other ways.

Our Digital Prostheses

For the past few years I've been thinking and writing about a group of technologies that, it occurs to me now, may best be described as choice prostheses. This includes commitment technologies that restrict one's choice (e.g., Freedom, Leechblock, WasteNoTime, StayFocusd, SelfControl, etc.) as well as something like TweetDeck which organizes options. Often, these technologies are in the form of browser extensions, but not always. They are all designed to alter your media use experience, your management of abundant options, in some way. They occupy a layer in between content producers and consumers. They are like lenses, filtering relevant options from irrelevant ones, or immediately gratifying ones from necessary-but-boring ones.

Prostheses developers and users are, in some sense, in an arms race with content producers and aggregators who seek to maximize the amount of attention paid their content. The producers get better and better at hooking us and keeping us in their walled gardens. The most successful websites are not narratives you disappear into, but shopping malls where everything is free. When we think about the experience of using these sites, we see the discrete bits of the experience: the posts in our feed, the stories, the GIFs, the images we click on. What we don't see is the glue that holds the experiences together: the repeated act of selecting from many options, of entertainment foraging. The appeal of such experiences is manifold. We respond to novelty, and immediately gratifying fare (that which scratches us right where we itch at that moment). But I think we also respond to that act of foraging. It is not enough to simply be presented with something new and immediately gratifying. We desire to choose it for ourselves. I'm interested in the outcomes of these moments of choice, the extent to which they are made unconsciously and how they are influenced by the number and type of options and the timing of the decision. But I'm also struck by how much of our leisure time is taken up by these miniature moments of choice. 

The prostheses are what we use when we look at our media use habits and don't like what we see. If our habits are the product of our intuitive System 1 thinking interacting with choice environments designed to maximize time spent on websites, prostheses are a way to change the outcome, to bring our behavior in line with our intentions. 

Hey, let's put on a show!

It's the start of a new semester (or quarter, here at Drexel) and I'm excited to be co-teaching a class on the future(s) of television. We're skyping in a variety of guest speakers, including the producer of two web series. This got me thinking about the nature of web series. Do they have more in common with home-made YouTube videos or professionally produced TV content? Why do people make them? Why do people watch them?

After watching a few episodes of several different web series, I get the sense that they're somewhere in between a series of YouTube videos made in someone's back yard and a television series. This is true of how their produced, distributed, and promoted, but it also feels true (at least to me) of the finished product. Certainly, the look of some of these series is virtually indistinguishable from video content made for television in the traditional mode of production. The move away from expensive sets and toward more hand-held camera work made the aesthetic of "professional TV" easier to imitate. A generation of young people seem to have absorbed (either from film school or just watching tons of TV and film) how to compose a shot. I've watched a few minute-long promos for web series and they look like hip new shows on HBO or Fox. 

But the actual episodes lack something, and most of the ones I've watched lack the same things. The pacing seems slow. It seems slow when you compare it to professional TV and seems glacial when you compare it to YouTube clips or GIFs. I recall thinking during the early days of online video (2005-2011) that no one would ever watch a video longer than 3 minutes online. But I've seen the way college students have incorporated Netflixed 20-minute episodes of their favorite shows into their media diets, so I think that it's not an attention span issue. It's a pacing issue. In web series, more time elapses between jokes. The shots seem longer in duration. 

Also, the jokes seem, well, worse. I know this sounds like arbitrary, groundless criticism, and there's something weirdly personal about bad-mouthing a web series. You're not critiquing a millionaire. You're critiquing someone who bet their life savings on a passion project. Some of these shows are promoted and sometimes funded through word-of-mouth, and word-of-mouth often starts with friends, so in many cases, the audiences are pre-disposed to liking (or saying they like) the show. Early audiences for web series seem divided into two groups: anonymous, cynical "haters" who permeate every corner of online discourse and friends who don't want to see the creator of the show emotionally, professionally, and financially destroyed. 

Unlike professional TV, the content didn't have to pass before a group of experienced judges. People love pointing out how homogeneous TV content is due to the fact that it has to either please advertisers or garner big audiences to stay afloat. They like to point out the many times stuffy execs passed on shows that became hits. These are good points, but still, the system almost certainly weeded out scripts that were too slow-paced or unfunny to entertain people before the shows were actually produced. TV networks and advertisers were flawed proxies for audiences, but, I'd argue, not as flawed as a show's creators and their friends. The web series environment is not a good environment to produce the constructive feedback that is necessary to generate content that many people want to watch. 

Unless, of course, you look at it differently. Maybe making a web series is this generation's version of starting a band. You're making an artistic statement that resonates with your generation, not trying to create the next Two and a Half Men. A handful of successes give creators the impression that their shows can become hits. And getting a decent sized audience (let's say 100,000 viewers) is easier online than with TV because you're pulling from such a large pool of potential viewers (anyone with a broadband connection or a smartphone), much larger than any TV show creator had when they made their show. Get a few opinion leaders to post links to your show and you've got your audience. Keeping them is another matter. In the world of infinite content and distractions, I think it would benefit web series creators to make single-season shows that die before audiences have a chance to lose interest. 

But I think there's an allure to creating a show even if it doesn't become a hit, in the same way that there was an allure to being part of a band even if it never became really popular. People whom you don't know (potential boyfriends/girlfriends, really) get to see you do something interesting, funny, cool. And you get to express yourself and maybe hit it big. 

It's not a precise analogy. I doubt that web series creators will be seen as "cool" in the same way that people in a band are/were seen as cool. But if I were 16-27 and I wanted to do something that attracted the right kind of attention, I might get some people together and make a show.