You have a lot of time to think when you’re sick. I didn’t actually watch much television, but it occurred to me that if I wanted to, I could watch soap operas all day. With the exception of one misguided summer when I was, like, 11, I’ve never actually watch daytime soaps.
In this frenetic, multifarious media landscape, and with more families where both parents work, I wondered about the longterm prospects for these shows. Who’s watching them? I guess there’s always the young and the old, and TiVo for keeners. Plus, TV has experienced an extraordinary leap in quality (in every respect–storyline, acting, budgets, HD video, and so forth), where-as I gather the soaps have remained the same.
I went looking for an article on the state of the daytime soaps. I found this New York magazine piece, which blames reality TV for the soaps’ decline:
The villain in this piece is the reality show. When veteran soap-opera producer Mary-Ellis Bunim created The Real World for MTV in 1992, soap opera’s exclusive grip on emotionally manipulative programming began to loosen. “They’re closer cousins than most people realize,” says TV historian Ron Simon. “If you look at the Internet chat boards for soaps and reality shows, the audiences are asking the same question, ‘Why is the character doing this?’ They’re both a way to measure your own life.”
How far have soap opera ratings fallen? This Wikipedia article has the answer. In 1998, the top show, “The Young And The Restless”, averaged 7 million viewers viewing households a day. Today, it receives just 3.6 million households. That’s a serious drop. And what’s particularly interesting is that the numbers have been in slow decline from the very beginning. In 1952, “Search For Tomorrow” averaged 16.1 million households, at a time when the US had roughly half the population it has today.
Apparently one way soaps have cut costs is by firing a lot of costly veteran actors. That seems to make sense. If this trend continues, I wonder how many daytime soaps will be around in 2018?
I didn’t watch Saturday Night Live last night, but I did watch the amusing pre-credits sketch today (courtesy of Backseat Cuddler). Here it is, in case you missed it:
If you pay close attention to the background of the bit with Governor Palin and Lorne Michaels, you’ll spot Abraham Lincoln and a llama. Or possibly an alpaca–I can never tell the difference. I captured a screenshot as Ms. Palin and Alec Baldwin move out of the frame (click it for larger version):
Apparently this is just a random llama (and dead president), applied for absurd comic effect. Strong work, SNL.
I just sent this note to a minor television celebrity, concerning her apparently insecure website:
Hi, I randomly visited your site after watching an episode of [your show]. I was clicking around a bit, and discovered that your gallery section permits access to what’s called the ‘admin’ section of your site. Or, at least that’s how it looks to my (only semi-informed) eyes.
That means that a naughty person could upload any photos they want to that section, change the password or otherwise mess with the site. You should send this email to your web designer or administrator who can verify my suspicions, and close this security hole.
Best of luck, and I enjoyed your work on [the former show]. Cheers. DB.
I didn’t actually try to upload a photo, but it sure looks like I can. It also looks like I can change the admin password. But I’m certainly no system administrator, so I could be wrong.
There’s an email address on her site. What are they odds that anybody actually checks it? She’s not a household name, but you might recognize her as that actress with a small role on that popular show.
While in Calgary, Julie visited Knifewear. They’re a knife shop. In fact, they’re a knife shop that only sells Japanese knives. Talk about specialization, eh? She bought this knife:
According to the accompanying documentation, it’s an ‘Ohishi Tsuchime’. That doesn’t return any results in Google, so maybe it’s spelled incorrectly?
In any case, it’s hand-forged in Seki, Japan from VG-10 high carbon stainless teel and laiminated on each side with 15 layers of stainless Damascus steel. The unique Tsuchime style–the dimpling on the back side of the blade–is from it being hand-hammered. Apparently that prevents food from sticking to the blade. The handle is made from rugged mahogany with “a full tang and welded bolster”, whatever that means.
It wasn’t cheap, but apparently it’ll last the rest of our lives. How many purchases can you say that about?
I know I’ve been on a bit of a West Wing kick, but I can’t mention fancy knives without citing another of my favourite episodes: ‘Shibboleth‘:
I grabbed a couple of West Wing DVDs to watch on my way to and from Toronto. On my way back, I watched the excellent episode from season two, “Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail”. It’s the second time the show’s creators deploy the Big Block of Cheese Day dramatic device, in which White House senior staff meet with fringe groups that otherwise wouldn’t get their attention. In this scene, C.J. and Josh learn about alternative map projections:
Both the comedic writing and acting are so tight and underplayed–it’s terrific work all around.
I’m not sure how I decided to watch Generation Kill. Maybe I was looking for something to download while Julie was away (and thus something she’d be uninterested in watching). In any case, I’m glad I did.
“Generation Kill” is a riveting 7-part HBO mini-series about a Marine platoon engaged in the early days of the invasion of Iraq. It’s written by the creators of “The Wire”, a show I continue to not watch, and based on a book by Evan Wright. Having seen a couple episodes of “The Wire”, I believe that “Generation Kill” is made in a very similar, naturalistic style. Alessandra Stanley agrees:
The script is faithful to Mr. Wright’s account, respectful of the soldiers he befriended and as opaque and ascetic as “The Wire,” an opus that forced viewers to parse multiple plots and a huge cast of characters without directions or subtitles.
The dialogue is remarkable–it’s all either military jargon or epithets. But it’s also remarkably real. The characters sound like young men in difficult circumstances, compensating for fears and anxieties with their training and a lot of gay jokes.
The show strikes me as quite Shakespearean. There’s a massive, entirely male cast, plenty of ribald humour and plots which are sometimes hard to track or make sense of. The show feels particularly Henry V when senior officers gather to listen to a raspy monologue by Lieutenant Colonel Stephen ‘Godfather’ Ferrando.
Like the best war movies, the battle scenes are rare but intense. Tom Shales calls it the Platoon of the Iraq War:
At the very least, “Generation Kill” — as written mostly by executive producers David Simon and Ed Burns of “The Wire” fame (Wright co-wrote some episodes) — qualifies as the “Platoon” of the Iraq war: an often poignant, sometimes shattering and occasionally criminally funny account of men trapped on a battlefield of confusion, uncertainty and cross-purposes. Wright and the filmmakers know it is not enough to say that war is hell or that war is evil. The point here also seems to be that war is stupid, this one more so than many others, and that the higher one goes in the hierarchy of command, the stupider the commanders tend to be.
That’s not entirely accurate, because Platoon relies on the conventional plot structure of the Hollywood movie. “Generation Kill” trades standard plotting for remarkable verisimilitude. The Marines drive, sit around and wait, drive some more, grouse and, on occasion, shoot at people. It all feels tremendously accurate.
I’m not sure I could watch 22 episodes of “Generation Kill”–the monotony would get a little trying–but I’ve been riveted by the mini-series thus far.
Via Reddit, I read this Variety article (written in a peculiar style) discussing a study released by Magna Global. It reveals that, for the first time, the average age of a TV viewer has reached fifty:
Fueling the graying of the networks: the rapid aging of ABC, NBC and Fox. The three nets continue to grow older, while CBS — the oldest-skewing network — has remained fairly steady…
For the just-completed 2007-08 TV season, CBS was oldest in live viewing with a median age of 54. ABC clocked in at 50, followed by NBC (49), Fox (44), CW (34) and Univision (34). When live-plus-7 DVR viewing is factored in, the nets (except CW and Univision) drop by a year — which still reps the oldest median age ever for the nets.
Don’t confuse Fox with the Fox News Channel like I did. At 65 years old, the latter’s daytime and primetime programming has the oldest average viewer among the cable networks. I’d expect that for the Hallmark Network, but that seems pretty old for Fox News (and I have no way of appraising the legitimacy of the study).
The writing seems to be on the wall for live television. As producers and advertisers react to this, expect some creative and hyper-irritating new advertising strategies.
Last week I had a very forgettable meal at Kelsey’s (Caution! Cheers theme music ahead!), a restaurant at the Calgary airport. It’s apparently a chain of restaurants with over 100 locations in Western and Central Canada.
The entire place has this weird, indirect connection to the TV show Cheers. The Kelsey’s logo is similar to the Cheers branding. The restaurant is apparently named after Kelsey Grammer, the actor who played the stuffy Frasier Crane. And the interior of the restaurant was all brass taps and wood panelling, with the walls were covered in cheesy 8 x 10 photos of celebrities (notably, there were no photos of the cast of Cheers). Plus, of course, when you visit the website, it plays the theme song from Cheers.
Here’s what’s weird: I can’t find any direction connection between the restaurant chain and Kelsey Grammer or Cheers. It’s like they manufactured a Cheers-like franchise brand without ever actually acknowledging what they were doing. Does anybody know the back story of this chain?
UPDATE: Hurray for crowd-sourcing. We have more information. As Jason writes in the comments below, he emailed Kelsey’s to enquire about the origin of the name:
Paul Jeffery was the founder of Kelsey’s Restaurants International Inc. and the first restaurant opened in Oakville Ontario, in 1978. Currently we have 125 stores across Canada and 1 in the US in New York. The name Kelsey’s comes from the fact that our founder Paul Jeffery and his brother frequented a roadhouse on Kelsey Rd in Barrington, Illinois while traveling in the U.S.A - hence the name Kelsey’s.
Andrea writes with links to several trademark filings for Kelsey’s. The most germane one is from 1993, where they seemed to adopt a logo similar to the Cheers brand. Andrea points out that 1993 is also the year that Cheers ended and Frasier began.
Today I happened to see the video for the catchy Sara Bareilles tune “Love Song”. I first heard this song about a year ago, but apparently it just went huge on the Tube o’ You.
I was struck by how much of the video was shot in the style of the average YouTube video. Ms. Bareilles is centered in the frame, looking directly into the camera, and the shot is basically just her head and shoulders.
Compare that with another singer-songwriter-at-the-piano video from 2002: Vanessa Carlton’s “1000 Miles” (could she look more underwhelmed in her photo on Wikipedia?). I’ve put a few screenshots together to illustrate:
Obviously this is only a single data point, but I’m reminded of an earlier post I wrote about musicians co-opting the style and conventions of YouTube.
Music video directors must recognize that a huge part of their viewership has shifted mediums. I wonder how much (and how else) the move to YouTube is impacting videos? Do they use more saturated colours? Simpler set ups? Any thoughts?
On a related note, it’s interesting that I’m not allowed to ‘embed’ (that is, include in a blog post or elsewhere) either of these videos. It’s been disabled on YouTube. What are record companies and managers afraid of?
Here’s the scenario. Bear with me, it’s kind of tedious:
My local copy of my music files are stored on a Windows desktop. We’ll call that PC1. For the record, I also store a synched backup at MP3Tunes.
Julie and I both have iPods. We listen to podcasts. I use iTunes on PC1, but she subscribes to her own set of podcasts on her Mac. We’ll call that Mac1.
As far as I can figure, you can’t load stuff (songs and podcasts) on the same iPod from multiple computers, particularly when those computers use different operating systems. When I plug my Windows-formatted iPod into Mac1, it wants to reformat it and wipe the thing clean. The same happens in reverse with Julie’s Apple-formatted iPod.
In short, I want to load music from PC1 and then podcasts from Mac1 onto the same iPod. I think this is impossible, at least if I want to use iTunes. What do you think?
This problem would go away if iTunes offered support for user profiles. I guess I’d better submit a feature request.
I think the least painful solution is to remove my Windows PC from the scenario by copying all of the music to an external hard drive. Then we can just attach that to either of our Macs, and access the music library that way. Alternately we could try to set up a home network amongst all our computers. Both of those solutions feel like way too much solution for such a simple problem. Such is consumer computing in 2008, I guess.
