Precious little TV these days is “Must See” because…
(Note: this post builds on my recent “How too much cognitive information leads to eventness” discussion, although the earlier post is not required reading for this one .)
I’m a second generation Los Angeleno and being to the mannered born I was interested but not hugely surprised to learn in Brian Lowry’s Friday Daily Variety column that the City of Angels leads the country in DVR penetration and therefore in on-demand consumption of media. L.A. has a 27% penetration whereas the rest of the country is at 17%. Lowry, who I respect and have enjoyed meeting at conferences, sees a possibly utopian future for media and advertising in this as Nielsen Media Research can newly measure time-shifted viewing of, say, “How I Met Your Mother” that winds up tripling the live audience.
While the total size of audience might go up, I suspect that this is only a transient phenomenon and that it will do little to halt the inexorable dwindling of mass culture audiences. For the moment, it may bring comfort to national advertisers — and therefore to TV producers — that there are more folks out there watching the programs and skipping the ads than we originally thought, but that solace is thin.
New forms of media always pressure the old media to find their truest selves. Movies pushed theater away from naturalism toward a focus on the interplay between actors onstage. Television pushed movies away from character pieces toward spectacle. What DVRs like TiVo and its lesser cousins push broadcast TV and all other forms of video toward is finding a way to create appointment television that is more attractive to viewers than the seductive infinity of on-demand content. It’s a tough challenge and focusing only on the content of the show in question is a big mistake. (For a glimpse of how this works take a careful look at Henry Jenkins’ chapter on American Idol in Convergence Culture.)
I have a handful of shows that I like, but there’s only one show that I MUST see and that’s “Entourage.” Why? Because I watch it with my wife Kathi. I travel for business a lot, and when I’m home I focus on the kids, but for 30 minutes each week we stop all the clocks and turn off the telephone to watch this paltry little squirmer together. Doing so makes it eventful. The show itself is only half the equation: it’s the total experience of the show plus the context in which I watch it that matters.
Sporting events are inherently eventful, and one senior marketing official observed to me that he spends a huge amount of money advertising in sports because he thinks they are “TiVo proof.”
But WHY are college football games, baseball games and the like TiVo proof? What is it about the ephemeral suspense of the outcome that cannot withstand delayed viewing? For my father-in-law and brother-in-law it’s all about the network of other guys watching the game at the same time, jumping on their phones and jabbering away then hanging up, then calling again… replicating in part the dynamic of being in the stadium. But even if you don’t plan to call anybody, the tingly feeling that you might, that at any moment you can call or be called or that disaster or triumph is hanging around the next play… that swelling feeling of being there, of presence, contingency and — you guessed it — eventness keeps you from changing the channel whether you’re watching the Super Bowl or Olympic ice skating or a low-speed chase happening right this very moment on the local news.
That feeling is what smart TV execs should be trying to define, bottle and sell with their programming, whether it’s comedy, drama, reality TV or a test pattern.
One window into how this works is plenitude, or, to put it another way, a cognitive experience that is overdetermined but not overwhelming. Watching a live sporting event an engaged viewer jumps back and forth among watching the game itself, comparing a play in this game to other plays in other games, trading observations with the other folks watching the game, keeping the kids at bay, fending off the non-game related phone call that comes during the big play… it’s a form of cognitive juggling: WHERE do I focus my attention and for how long? Do I switch focus NOW or wait a moment? Two people can watch the same game and have distinct experiences because of the different trajectories they take through the different things they can focus on.
An overwhelming experience is one where you can’t take in enough information to make sense of what’s going on. That’s not what I’m talking about here. An overdetermined experience — and one that is eventful — is one where at the end you have a generally complete sense of what happened but you still didn’t catch everything. This happened to my wife and I watching “Knocked Up” in the theater a few weeks ago. Midway through, when we missed some presumably hysterical line because we were still laughing at something ELSE, Kathi turned to me and said, “we are SO buying this DVD.”
But I suspect that watching that DVD will only be fun if we manage to do it together.
Comments are closed.