On The Lot: No Accounting for Taste

Though it comes across as more awkward than compelling, On The Lot continues to offer an intriguing view of audience fragmentation and demographic appeal. It occurs to me that the show is as much a study of whether or not the viewers of the show prefer a certain genre or a certain aesthetic rather than a competition to see who is the most talented.

This stands in stark contrast to American Idol, in which genre isn't as much of a variable, and the variations in style between singers are limited. One could say that Chris Daughtry and Taylor Hicks had very distinct styles and that they chose songs from very different genres (Nickleback-esque "rock" vs. Doobie Bros Blue Eyed soul). Still, I never got the feeling that contestants won or lost based on the appeal of their chosen genre or stylistic influences. I do, however, get that feeling with On The Lot.

You have one contestant, Jason Epperson, who makes films with a certain down market appeal - a rather obvious physical comedy that may or may not have been making fun of 'tards and a drug story cum heavy-handed Christian allegory. Then you have Jess Brillhart - an NYU film school grad whose first two films have an arty bend to them. Are we to believe that the audience will be adept at comparing apples to oranges, determining which filmmaker is better at their given nitch?

Even when all contestants are assigned a particular genre for a given week (e.g. horror or comedy), their writing choices betray their cultural perspective (urban, Southern, feminist, sci-fi dork, sappy romantic, arty weirdo) in a way that AI contestants' song or style choices do not. I get the sense that the range of AI contestants' cultural appeal is limited to white/non-white and gender demographic distinctions (and maybe pop rock vs. R&B vs. country, though the audience seems to lean heavily towards adult contempo R&B). In the end, I feel as though On the Lot viewers are more apt to vote according to their cultural perspective than AI viewers. So far, AI has had a fairly diverse group of winners (white man, white woman, black woman, black man if you count Ruben, country, R&B, pop rock). People keep watching because the record shows that their group (or the representative of their race/gender/taste) has a legitimate shot at winning. If you're group isn't represented in the winner's circle (or at least later rounds), there's not much point in participating - an example of voter disenfranchisement if there ever was one.

Still, I like to think that many of the AI voters vote based on one undefinable characteristic: chops. If you're black/white/country/R&B/man/woman, it doesn't really matter as long as you can carry a tune. I just can't imagine that the audience for On the Lot cares more about these filmmakers' abilities to tell comprehensible stories from a unique perspective more than they care about which filmmakers' cultural backgrounds and sensibilities jibe with their own. It would be interesting if a few of the filmmakers began to understand this and started to adapt their work to the tastes of the voting public.

As it happened, I think the filmmaker with the narrowest cultural appeal (arty Jess) made the worst film this week, while down-market Jason's effort was passable. I'd like to say that Jason's success will prove my theory of demographics over style and substance, but I'm not sure its that clear cut. Just have to keep watching.

Thanks a Lot

The first ep of Fox's new reality series On The Lot started off virtually indistinguishable from pilots of other competition reality shows - "confessional" interviews, meltdowns, triumphs, and tragedies. Things got a bit more interesting in the second episode. The format is true to the American/Pop Idol template, but its clear that there will be more controversial debates than the ones over song choice and pitchiness.

The first controversy: is this guy's film exploiting the mentally challenged? Hopefully the judges' comments (and the obvious discrepency between their perception and the will of the audience) will ignite the honest conversation we need to have about laughing at freaks (explored in depth in this earlier post). Its too simplistic to say that the Hollywood judges are too politically correct for the masses, but I can't help but wonder what the discrepancy between the judges' and the audience's opinions (not to mention that the judges harp on the fact that there aren't enough female directors in Hollywood, and the voting audience doesn't seem to care) says about who is really offended by anything on television.

Isn't there something vaguely paternalistic about the news media determining what is offensive and what isn't offensive? How many careers would've bit the dust over the past year if it had been put to a vote? The new visibility of the lives of the famous makes every little slip up a career-ender, but there are two things that might counter that: the ever-shrinking duration of the news cycle, and the democratizing effect on what is deemed offensive. There's an entire generation growing up thinking that they can get away with broadcasting racist rants online. We can keep them off TV, but when you can reach billions of people online, who needs TV? Is it any wonder that one of the most enduring TV comedies of the internet era is one of its most uniformly offensive? To quote Mr. Politically Correct himself (Kramer): "People, they want to watch freaks!"

Between the fact that the key demographic is an audience weened on YouTube video shorts that tend to be more sensational and offensive than anything on TV, and the fact that a vicious "vote for the worst" campaign could do serious damage in light of the low ratings, we might see films that give new meaning to the term "lowest common denominator." Would Spielberg have to give the Fred Durst of filmmaking a development deal at Dreamworks? Considering the fact that the real Fred Durst already has such a deal, it doesn't seem too far-fetched.

Somethings - television and music - seem ideally suited to the pseudo-democratic system that American Idol employs. Other endeavors - fashion and interior design - are not, and so we defer to a panel of experts. Where does film fit into this? On The Lot is taking place at a time where film, once a populist medium, is becoming a more and more elite medium, with internet taking the bottom rung on the ladder and TV moving up a notch. Filmmakers, like fashion designers, are the tastemakers. Its an expensive, top-down medium.

Speaking of beloved mentally challenged characters, this guy always seemed a little slow to me. And he's a professor!