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Interesting television

<![CDATA[Were I to write a television show, it would be about the same characters each week, but they would all have different histories in each episode. Sometimes the hero would be the villain or the daughter the father, and characters would develop over time based on the decisions they made in these different roles. Like […]

<![CDATA[Were I to write a television show, it would be about the same characters each week, but they would all have different histories in each episode. Sometimes the hero would be the villain or the daughter the father, and characters would develop over time based on the decisions they made in these different roles. Like Julio Cortåzar‘s Hopscotch, a book whose chapters can be read in any order. It took a long time after the “invention” of the novel by Cervantes for writers to really experiment with the form. Reality TV may be all the rage, but it’s not really any kind of art; someday, TV could be more frequently artful, but by then I’d imagine it will be written and produced like small theatre today.]]>

3 replies on “Interesting television”

Mitch – Thanks for giving my TV-jaded mind a jog. I’m an editor, currently working on a new, high-profile show for Discovery, combining docu looks at people with CG looks inside the human body. Everyone claims to want something new, something that you haven’t seen before. But executive reactions all point to yet another “reality”, youth-oriented, joking, MTV-style treatment (whatever that is). They’ve lost their way. Was it Fred Friendly who said “imitation is the sincerest form of television”?
Anyway, after 20 years of this I welcome some kind of RSS, BitTorrent enabled quirky approach to small theatre P2P TV. Thanks for the jolt.
Dave
FYI – In this comments window, under Previous Comments, I’m seeing this:
MT::App::Comments=HASH(0x1824b8) Use of uninitialized value in sprintf at /Users/adminimonster/Sites/mt/lib/MT/Template/Context.pm line 1187.
Got a glitch?

Dave — Thanks, JoltsRUs. The question, I think, is what happens when those network execs aren’t the ones in charge. And the way to do that is to blow out the economics that lets those guys hold the reins on production.
Peter Shaplen, who worked with me at ON24, has been running the national pool for the Scott Peterson trial and found that by applying the kind of low-cost production process we built there he could change the economics of national news coverage. Suddenly, he’s getting calls from all over the country asking how he is doing it without demanding the time of two or three full-time court personnel.
We’ll be all smallTV someday, when there are no channel constraints because everything is multicast. I think World Series of Poker, for example, is an exemplar of small production that, because the economics made it possible to reach an audience, created a small media phenomenon that may feed a long-term obsession with an annual poker tournament that apparently attracted only a few hundred players and participants during its first 30 years.
I think the glitch was because there were no prior comments…. I need to upgrade to MT 3.1