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TV Time

Posted in American TV (General), American TV Shows, TV channels, TV Culture with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 23, 2013 by Tom Steward

I’ve been (hardly) working my way through Breaking Bad, one of the more remarkable American TV shows of our time, and one of the most striking features of the series is its timeframe. Eschewing the TV rule of thumb that the time onscreen runs parallel with the duration of the initial broadcast, all 5 seasons of AMC’s family crime dramedy take place over the course of a couple of years (there’s a few episodes left but all indications are we’ll go no further ahead than that) effectively making the series a period piece by the time it finishes in 2013. This jeopardises Breaking Bad’s plausibility. The tectonic shifts in character and flurry of cataclysmic events which transform a high school chemistry teacher into an international druglord would be far more credible if spread over a vast number of years. Inside an 18-month window, it puts the series in the realms of bizarre melodrama. We also can’t take what happens to the characters as development as no-one has the luxury of time for any significant growth to occur. Instead, we’re witnessing how the cast of characters react to crises and trauma and watching them expose the existing depths of their personalities.

From Walter White to Heisenberg…in a year?

The time we watch TV is regulated and ongoing so it’s natural for most shows to try and match this for the sake of minimum disruption. Look how seasons of The Office begin with a re-cap of what happened to the characters during the Summer, when the show was off-air, simply to remind audiences that the onscreen and offscreen time syncs up and that the hiatus experienced by viewers was simultaneously endured by the characters. It’s especially important to make sure TV shows can capitalise on seasonally themed episodes (Christmas, Halloween) by juxtaposing them with the time they occur in the real world. Deviating from this scheduling ritual is a source of much innovation and originality in US TV. Unconventional uses of time can be the difference between cliché-ridded formula fare and mould-breaking masterpiece. People were happy to forget what a laboured potboiler 24 was because of its real-time season-as-a-day format and that the non-linear point-of-view narrated Boomtown was just another cancellation fodder cop show. It can even just be temporary relief from a format that is grindingly rigid in how it treats time. Brain-sparing cause-and-effect procedural CSI frequently throws in a flashback or reverse episodes to break the monotony.

Cliche + Time = 24

In a show like Breaking Bad, quirky time management isn’t the first blow of brilliance hitting you over the head but more like a gentle pat on the shoulder reassuring you of quality. If timing is the most noticeable characteristic of a programme, then chances are it will be a fast-fading novelty. 24 lasted 10 years on air but no-one in TV seems especially interested in using its format again. Boomtown was cancelled after 2 seasons once all possibilities of fragmented viewpoint-driven storytelling had been exhausted. On the other hand, it’s possible to watch the entirety of Twin Peaks and Deadwood without acknowledging how each episode crafts its multiple storylines into one day’s worth of time and lose nothing of their artistic brilliance. Indeed it seems perfectly in tune with Twin Peaks’ satire of soap opera and tendency towards the supernaturally fantastic that such an overwhelming wealth of events occur in a ludicrously short space of time. More than that, equating a single episode with 1 day has subsequently become TV’s way of making it seem like it’s running alongside everyday life. Unlike the patchy coverage we get from calendar-linked shows, here we never miss a minute of the action.

30 Days in the Life of Twin Peaks

It would be wrong to assume that US TV shows deal with time in a way that is abstract or avant-garde. Even the most altered state of TV time is highly structured and controlled. The dream world of Twin Peaks may have ruptured the show’s real world chronology but it was only ever there in the first place to plug a gap in the middle of the screenplay of the pilot. The spread of TV might be amorphous and ever-expanding but individual programmes and their runs are tightly timetabled and time within them needs to follow suit. It’s no coincidence that the innovations of time in TV storytelling have complimented the scheduling of the programme. US TV dramas are an hour fitted into a run of 21-25 hence a thriller set over 24 hours with each episode an hour. So is Breaking Bad doing something genuinely outlandish? Time will tell.

 

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It’s not TV…It’s Netflix

Posted in American TV (General), American TV Shows, Internet TV, TV advertising, TV channels, TV Culture, TV History with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 31, 2013 by Tom Steward

What am I watching? It’s the nature of the beast to find yourself in front of the television asking this very question. But usually when we ask we know exactly what we’re watching. It’s generally a comment on the poor quality of the programme we ended up watching or a realisation we drifted into something we didn’t choose to watch (like the time I accidentally turned over from The Terminator to Ordinary People and kept waiting for the robots to turn up). However, watching the Netflix series of Arrested Development, I found myself asking this question and genuinely not knowing.

‘Arrested Development’ delivered in one block.

I’ve grappled before with the question of whether content designed primarily for internet distribution can be considered television. When teaching media studies, I used to debate with students whether programmes that had all the characteristics of television but were being seen online-like the live coverage of Felix Baumgartner space jump-still qualified as TV. Since people are going to the internet to watch this content, on first impression it would seem not. But it’s the case with much television today that people will see it first-and often only-online. So is all the TV that is watched online disqualified too?

Impressive…but is it TV?

With internet content that originated online, you can argue it both ways. However, content that was previously a television programme but subsequently moved online should be a pretty clear cut case of television, right? Well, that’s what I thought until I saw the 15 30-minute episodes of Arrested Development released on Netflix last Saturday night. The series, a revival of a Fox sitcom from the mid-2000s, heralds a new way of telling stories online, adopts a style based on how information is presented on internet devices and is fit-to-burst with points of reference from consuming media content via web technologies.

Flashbacks provided by Showstealer Pro!

It’s a lot to do with how the episodes are delivered to the viewer. Instead of 1 or more episodes broadcast once a week until the run is complete, Netflix make all episodes of the series available at once. Of course, this is a way of watching derived from the possibility of consuming TV series all at once that has arisen from DVD, on-demand services and internet file-sharing. But that was always an option not the primary port of call. The producers of Arrested Development have clearly identified the difference this makes to how viewers are likely to watch the series.

‘Arrested Development’…full stream ahead!

Each episode has been constructed in the knowledge that viewers are able to watch each of the instalments out of order and expect some gratification for watching the concurrently available episodes in their entirety. The full story of what happens is revealed fragment by fragment and at different stages of the series depending on which of the endless combinations of chronologies the viewer chooses. Whatever journey you take, you’ll encounter non-sequiturs which will eventually become comprehensible while what you’re seeing is clarifying an enigma in another later or earlier episode. However, this all assumes viewers will take advantage of the potential for viewing episodes in a random, non-chronological order. In the end, it’s the old Jurassic Park question; of course you can but should you?

TV from the Great Dark Period!

I’m guessing that most viewers wouldn’t know to watch the episodes piñata-style without having been told in advance. Pre-publicity made a big deal of the chronology-optional viewing pleasures, and we’ve been hearing about the revival for some time, but I’m not sure it would be most people’s natural inclination to watch the show like Tarantino storyboarding Pulp Fiction. Sure, Netflix’s catalogues of full series allow for cherry-picking episode highlights, but at the point of selection we’re still in the dark about what episodes these might be. Basically, watching through is as good a way as any of getting to the end.

Who’s story do you want to see first?

In its network TV days, Arrested Development made a big deal of what it meant to be on Fox, and the Netflix revival seems as keen on reminding viewers that it is now internet content. Flashbacks and cut-aways come in the form of online videos, hacked TV-rip software and Prezi-esque slideshows. At times we think we’re looking at the world through a camera only to find we’re looking through someone’s eyes at a webpage. Network TV is still there in the background, with spot-on sideswipes at CBS’ This Morning and NBC’s To Catch a Predator. But you don’t feel like you’re surrounded by the flow of US TV entertainment and news anymore, you feel like you’ve plucked what you’re watching from the annals of cyberspace.

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TV is Balls

Posted in American TV (General), Americans watching British TV, BiogTV, British Shows on American TV, TV channels with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 8, 2013 by Tom Steward

I’m absent-mindedly glancing at the TV screens in the gym to periodically distract me from the pain and boredom of working out. The screens are usually set on sports and news channels in their rolling news phases, which don’t offer much in the way of entertainment. It’s a shame as I once did an hour on the treadmill when back-to-back Seinfeld was on. The news shown is of a fairly reactionary kind, typically Fox and CNN’s televisual garbage. The Rachel Maddow Show was on once but I think that was a mistake as the screen was turned off almost instantly.

Seinfeld: TV about working out

The point is I’m not really paying attention, nor am I listening on my headphones. I don’t want any Fox News editorials subliminally seeping into my brain like a hypnosis tape and I simply wouldn’t know what any of the laboriously paced sports discussion shows were unnecessarily shouting about. It’s safe to say I was caught off-guard when one of the screens starting showing highlights from an Oldham Athletic game, the football team from my home town who play in the 3rd tier of English soccer (‘soccer’ and ‘football’ are both English names for the sport, so suck it purists!).

Oldham Athletic: Not the team you expect to see in a San Diego gym.

It turned out not to be a hallucination brought on by loss of bodily fluids or even a bizarre coincidence like Oldham striker Matt Smith dating a Kardashian. No, apparently Fox Soccer, the football wing of the Fox Sports enterprise, shows the Saturday results feed of Sky Sports News every weekend. Apart from the shock of seeing Oldham on a TV in the USA (where Manchester is only known because of its global soccer brands), I don’t know why I’m surprised. Sky and Fox are both owned by NewsCorp, Rupert Murdoch’s international media conglomerate, so it makes good corporate sense.

Sky Sports News: Just another Murdoch enterprise in the world.

If you’re an American soccer fan, or British ex-pat, it makes sense to go directly to the source, as weirdly removed from local reality as it is watching a Northwest England League 1 team in Downtown San Diego. To those who know football from the European or Latin American leagues, watching a US soccer team play feels like the moment in Futurama where Fry finds that in the 30th Century baseball has become ‘Blernsball’, a barely recognisable Twilight Zone twist on the sport where spectators try to catch players instead of balls and giant spiders roam free through the diamond.

http://www.comedycentral.com/video-clips/4uymvs/futurama-intro-to-blernsball

For a British football fan, watching English soccer on TV gets weirder. It’s been common over the last couple of decades for veteran footballers in the English leagues to start their retirement early by going stateside to play for a US team. Beckham’s time with LA Galaxy when still in his prime is an exception attributable to his avarice. Some of them even end up commentating on TV soccer coverage. This is why I’m listening to ex-Blackburn Rovers and West Ham player-coach Tony Gale speaking over a Fulham FC game, multiplying the feeling of being at home when I’m not.

All your favourite players…from the 80s!

The locality of my new American residence helps the transition from a country where football eclipses all other sports to one where it doesn’t make the top 3. Being in a city with a large Latino community close to the Mexican border means that there’s more call for football from Latin American and European leagues on TV. And the commentators’ passion for the sport is evident from the Three Amigos vocal harmony following every goal.

It must be pretty baffling for US viewers stumbling upon the Sky Sports News feed on Fox Soccer. I don’t know what Americans would make of an interview with Crystal Palace manager Ian Holloway-hell it took us a few years to get used to his bizarre accent and analogies! It’s basically hours of places and teams they’ve never heard of, endless jokes about League 2 players from 1978 and recurring images of grim-looking fans with woolly hats and no necks walking to stadiums that look like backyards. And Kris Kamara, a Lionel Ritchie impersonator with Jerry Lewis levels of incompetence.

Anyway, back to the gym. I’ve never been so absorbed in the table positions of English lower league teams (though I’m a Blackburn fan so they may become increasingly important soon). I never thought of football clichés as my language but in a place where people struggle to understand and you them, players saying something as banal as ‘we nicked it early doors’ (translation: we scored early enough to kill the game) is oddly reassuring.

 

 

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That Was The Week That Was Ass

Posted in American TV (General), American TV Shows, Reviews, TV channels, TV Culture, TV News with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 22, 2013 by Tom Steward

Apologies for the extended break from posting and thanks for continuing to read the site in my absence. I took the last couple of weeks off while G and I got married. However, there’s been no shortage of stories about TV in America since we went away so don’t expect a quiet first day of term. We resume with a post on the TV coverage of the maelstrom of tragic events that devastated the USA over the past seven days:

It’s been a shitty week in America. Last Monday bombs went off at the Boston marathon killing 3 people and injuring over 150 more. On Wednesday, the first round of gun control reform legislation tanked in the Senate. On Wednesday night, an explosion at a fertiliser plant in Texas killed 14, injured around 200 and destroyed 50 homes. By Friday, Boston was in a state of lockdown as armoured tank police vehicles searched the city streets for the outstanding bomber, Dzokhar Tsarnev, who had escaped custody following a battle the previous night with police that killed brother and collaborator Tamerlan.

Three dead as bombs explode at the Boston marathon last Monday.

How did TV cover the seven-day shitstorm? Well, while a number of entertainment shows such as Live with Kelly and Michael and Conan expressed compunctions about peddling amusement in the wake of the Boston bombings, news programmes seemed to have no obvious qualms about this. News reporters constantly reminded viewers how exciting the events unfolding in Boston were, as if the city had been collectively entered in a catch-the-terrorist role play game. ABC news anchor Diane Sawyer at one point thanked a reporter for her ‘thrilling’ coverage of the aftermath like she was Ben Affleck at an Argo press conference.

ABC World News: ‘Entertainment with a Hint of Fact’

On Tuesday, CNN pulled a CNN and falsely reported that an arrest had been made in connection with the bombings despite official denials. The cable news network had been under fire in recent weeks for its misreporting of the Steubenville rape case and now seems to have moved on from doubting moral and legal verdicts to blindly ignoring empirical fact. Later in the week, while covering the hunt for Dzokhar Tsarnev, CNN reporters seemed to suggest that the lockdown was voluntary, ignoring the tanks patrolling Boston neighbourhoods which gently hinted to residents that it was probably wasn’t a park day.

CNN pull a CNN!

To give them their due, CNN were once again the lone voice of reason when it came to the reporting of gun control following Wednesday’s senate debacle. I’m talking of course about Piers Morgan, who has repeatedly slammed President Obama’s inability to mobilise the gun control lobby and exposed the NRA’s hold over senate voting, and was entirely vindicated this week. To offer some cultural perspective, Piers Morgan is known in Britain for being a dick. Yet in the bizarro world of American TV news, his smug, unremitting self-righteousness somehow twists its way into being the perfect conduit of outrage.

Piers Morgan: smug, self-righteous and…right in this case.

Just when it seemed as if it could get no worse for the USA, it did, and the TV coverage followed the downhill gradient. After the Texas fertiliser plant exploded, news channels once again oohed and aahed over the spectacle and somehow managed to disproportionally report an already heinous disaster as an apocalyptic catastrophe. Fox’s ‘Breaking News’ coverage sat back and admired the epic visuals of nuclear mushroom cloud-like smoke and giant soaring fireballs in viewers’ photos and videos, offering aesthetic judgement and firework-display awe rather than the information necessary to understand the localised explosion that these images related to.

But nothing could take screen time away from Boston last week. On Thursday, the networks’ morning line-up was pulled for coverage of a memorial ceremony for the victims of the marathon bombings in which Obama gave a eulogy. It was the kind of heartrending, preacher-style oratory that made the president look powerful again instead of the lame duck frontman (think Bez with missile privileges) this week’s vote confirmed he was. I’m sure Obama’s speechwriters were grateful events took place in such a culturally and historically prominent city and not some backwater small-town where the annual highlight is a vegetable festival.

TV newspeople set up camp on the streets of Boston and no straight-to-air programme could go without some sort of mention of Monday’s bombings. Given that the bombings were more exceptional and containable and less devastating in terms of lives and infrastructure destroyed than the explosion in Texas, why did it get so much more air time? Well, American TV is a largely local animal and the marathon was attended by runners from all over America, making it relevant to a larger number of regional news programmes. Plus, more people on TV seem to come from Boston than West, Texas.

Explosion at Texas fertiliser plant last Wednesday.

But the main difference is in the news story that results. Texas was an instantaneous disaster that left nothing for follow-up coverage. It exposed systematic failures at a federal and local level. Boston was the explosion that kept on exploding, first the hunt for the bombers, then the capture, then the escape, then the re-capture. And law-and-order eventually triumphed. It couldn’t have played better if it were an episode of Dragnet and intrigue was maintained across the week like a soap opera. Interest in West, Texas dwindled faster than in Smash weand ended up looking like a programme cancelled mid-season.

 

 

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Conan The Destroyed

Posted in American TV (General), American TV Shows, TV History, Unsung Heroes with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 5, 2013 by Tom Steward

 

After weeks of speculation, as much of it on-air as off, NBC finally announced this week that Jimmy Fallon would take over hosting duties on The Tonight Show from Jay Leno. The network press release clearly stated that Leno had presented The Tonight Show uninterrupted for 21 years. But when interviewed Leno said ‘this time it feels right’ as if he had been replaced before and somehow managed to take back the host seat. Of course, if you’re not party to the Stalinistic effort to re-write late-night television history, you’d know there was a spindly-legged ginger elephant in the room.

The George Lazenby of late-night talk shows.

In late 2009 Fallon’s predecessor on Late Night with… Conan O’Brien took over from Leno as host of The Tonight Show having been promised the position years earlier by NBC while The Jay Leno Show began airing in primetime. In early 2010, the network attempted to move O’Brien from the current timeslot of 11.35pm to after midnight so that Leno could return to the original The Tonight Show spot with his new talk show following low ratings for both programmes. O’Brien naturally refused and left the network, leaving Leno free to return to his old job for four more years.

So who presents The Tonight Show?

Fallon taking over The Tonight Show only a few years after Leno resumed hosting is the latest in a series of slaps in the face for O’Brien, who after an aborted late-night talk show on Fox ended up with a signature 11pm vehicle on basic cable network TBS in late 2010. Prone to making light of his unexpected obscurity-his house musicians on Conan are self-effacingly named ‘The Basic Cable Band’-the melancholy sometimes seeps through. While comically feigning ignorance during an interview with Kelsey Grammer following a discussion of not getting recognition for doing cable television, O’Brien starts seeming genuinely forlorn.

O’Brien may have been written out of the Tonight Show story but he remains legendary in the history of another great American TV institution, The Simpsons. As writer and producer for the series between 1991 and 1993, O’Brien scripted some of the most undisputedly superb episodes the show has seen in its 24 years on the air (and, let’s face it, will ever see). In particular, ‘Marge vs. the Monorail’ in which Springfield invests in an ill-advised public transport system was a satirical highpoint with probably the best-written celebrity cameo (a tediously anecdotal Leonard Nimoy) and unbeatable dialogue and song-writing.

Other canon-worthy Simpsons classics penned by O’Brien include ‘Homer Goes To College’ and ‘New Kid on the Block’ which pioneered a sophisticated, self-reflexive humour for the show without losing the emotional resonance synonymous with the series from the outset. In fact, Bart’s unrequited crush on teenage babysitter Laura (Sara Gilbert) is positively heart-breaking. He created several characters, such as Ruth Powers (Louise to Marge’s Thelma) and the college nerds, who would return in future episodes. He might even be able to sue the creators of The Big Bang Theory for plagiarism. Perhaps that’s why TBS wanted him at the network.

‘You’re a lot less funny in live-action’

Despite a criminal lack of exposure for a comedian of his calibre, TBS’ Conan is more excellent TV from O’Brien. His sketches remain thoroughly witty and laugh-out-loud funny, as recent spoof discussion segment ‘PopeTalk’, which evaluated the chances of various contenders for the papacy in the manner of a talk radio sports phone-in show, attested. Many recurring bits, such as ‘Celebrity Survey’ in which projected celebrity Q&A responses are collated, seem like they’ll be around for decades to come. After only a couple of years on the air, we’ve seen some memorable interviews, not least a weird-off with Harrison Ford.

Conan: You ever think with all your flying, what you would do if the plane starts to go down?/Ford: Shit and die.

I don’t want to disparage Fallon as much as I want to praise O’Brien. Fallon’s skits and impersonations are first class, as his performance of Neil Young singing the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme tune amply demonstrated. In The Roots, Fallon has at his disposal not only the coolest house band in late-night television but also one of the finest hip-hop/soul outfits of modern times. Fallon’s emphasis on music and sketch comedy undoubtedly gives the late-night talk show a new dimension. But while O’Brien is a skilled, engaging interviewer, Fallon seems more like a teenager who has won a competition.

Class act that he is, O’Brien broke his silence on Fallon’s appointment yesterday only to endorse him and wish him well. He’d have been within his rights to lambast Fallon for taking his job. And call Leno a massive dick…but then there’s never a bad time and place for that.

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