Live by the hype, die by the hype

Picking up where we left off last time:

We've been talking about the content bubble (under various names) for going on five years now, but we haven't mentioned it recently so here's a quick primer. The basic argument started out with the claim that original scripted programming on cable only made good business sense under certain conditions and that more and more of the programs were in a corner of the market that could not sustain them indefinitely. My concern, then and even more now, was that when hype drives decision-making, the easily hyped will increasingly be favored over the sound, profitable, and sustainable.

Since then, Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu not only jumped into the field, but started a major bidding war. Netflix in particular was willing to pay more for licensing rights to a show than other outlets had been willing to pay for outright ownership. At the same time, basic cable channels continued to invest more heavily in the idea that they could only be defined by having a "______ original."

The inevitable result has been a huge mass of product that can't possibly find an audience large enough to sustain it. As mentioned below, there are over 450 shows now in production. It has become obvious to pretty much everyone that the majority of the shows will be costly failures. This has led to a parallel bubble in marketing and PR as everyone tries desperately to have one of the handful of shows that gets noticed. Here in LA, I routinely see billboards for shows I've never heard of, often on channels and streaming services I've never heard of.

Let's expand a bit on the role that hype played in all of this. Most television is reruns. This is true regardless of service or medium. If you run through the selection from your cable box and skip over sports and "reality, unquote most of what you see, even on channels known for their original productions, will be previously shown movies and series, mostly old sitcoms and police procedurals. This is a sound and time tested business model and, if done with taste and a respect for the medium, it can even be an interesting and satisfying one for the viewers (Weigel Broadcasting is the master of this. They understand that, no matter how many times you've seen them, old episodes of NYPD Blue and the Phil Silvers Show are more entertaining than the latest CSI and Two Broke Girls).

The primary problem with this model is that it is difficult to hype. A Jack Lemmon festival on Movies!      or a marathon of the Altman run of Combat might be great television, but it's next to impossible to get a news story out of it. Original shows, however, are remarkably effective buzz generators. The stars and, in some cases, the behind-the-scenes talent can get interviews. Press releases can generate quick yet click-worthy copy. In many cases, people at the PR firms will actually write news stories and send them to a friendly reporter who will simply take off early that day.

What's more (and you cannot overestimate this in Hollywood), original series are fantastic for collecting awards, stroking egos, and measuring dicks. A wildly disproportionate number of billboards for shows populate Studio City and North Hollywood. They are generally placed so that people who work on the shows or on rival shows will see them. Many stars actually insist upon this in their contracts.

When there are a fairly small number of originals out there, this can make a certain business sense. A couple of interns in the press office can generate the equivalent of millions in advertising and make the VP of production feel like a big deal in the process, but when there are over 450 shows in production, the model breaks down, particularly when audiences are simultaneously developing a taste for older content.

Buzz and paid advertising are no longer nice, relatively cheap pick-me-up's; they are a costly, necessary addiction. Given the competition for viewers and the costs of production, it is now virtually impossible for a show to simply find its audience unassisted. No matter how good a series is, unless the people behind it are willing and able to spend obscene amounts of money promoting it, no one will watch.

Ken Levine used to be a skeptic on the subject of the content bubble. These days, not so much.

But back to the ratings. Only 11.4 million people watched the back-slap-athon. The last MASH episode drew over 100 million people. I know – apples and oranges, but the point is those 100 million people are out there.

So now the question about the near record low ratings: How come?

The obvious answer is that no one has seen any of these Emmy winning shows. Or in many cases, even heard about them. And that’s not to say that they’re not totally deserving of their wins. The shows selected were excellent. But study after study shows that the vast majority of the country doesn’t know they exist. They’re on delivery services many people don’t have (or don’t want to have because of the cost), and in such a crowded marketplace it’s almost impossible to get noticed above the din.

I guarantee you this: If these shows did not send screeners to every TV Academy member, and if there was not good word-of-mouth within the community, most of them would never get a sniff from Emmy. If Hulu had to rely on TV Academy voters finding, subscribing, and watching THE HANDMAID’S TALE (even though it’s from a popular book) on their own, their outstanding series would be overlooked. And that’s people IN the television industry. So imagine folks who aren’t.

[typos corrected.]