The Duplex by Glenn McCoy for August 03, 2010
August 02, 2010
August 04, 2010
Transcript:
Man: You're gonna love this flick! I cried like a baby when the hero died. Eno: Great! Thanks a lot, bozo! You just ruined it for the rest of us in line!! woman: Ruined what? Eno: This guy just said the hero in this movie dies. Voice: Great! Thanks!
More From The Duplex
“Is that why most went to cable? ”
Uh,… No.
The highest-rated shows on cable still have miniscule audiences compared to the broadcast networks. For the week of July 19 (which is simply the stat which I could find), the top-rated cable show (Rizzoli & Isles.of which I’ve never even heard) had 7.7 million viewers. That wouldn’t even put it in the top 10 of network shows. If you go down to No. 3 cable show (“Burn Notice”), you’re not even in the top 20 on the networks. (And bear in mind that, when you include cable, you’ve got DOZENS of cahnnels competing for share, not just four.)
During whatever week it was, I’m sure more people watched “The World According to Jim” than watched the series finale of “The Sopranos”.
Cable drew viewers from the networks, but it did it by fragmenting the audience, not by consistently offering better stuff. Yeah, if “Arrested Development” drew the same numbers on, say, Showtime that it did on Fox it would have been considred a huge hit and wouldn’t have been cancelled. But it’s still the lowest common denominator that draws the highest audience share.
Cable gets the critical love, cable gets the awards, the networks get the audiences.
In DIckens’ era (well, a few years after), there were a lot of really bad Foreign Legion novels that burned up the best-sellers’ lists. They’re all forgotten now, as Danielle Steele and John Grisham will be forgotten 100 years hence (maybe people will still be reading Dave Wallace and William Vollmann, but only time will tell. Maybe Steven King will be read like H.P. Lovecraft is read now). 90% of everything is [crud]. This has ALWAYS been true. Of the 10% that ISN’T [crud], half of it is going to be embraced by audiences, and half is going to be rejected in favor of the familiar [crud].