Entertainment

How Much is Too Much Television?

Published

9 years ago

February 4, 2015

This image released by Fox shows Taraji P. Henson, as Cookie, in a scene from “Empire,” an original scripted series airing on the Fox network. There were 26 original scripted series on cable in prime time and late night in 1999, and 199 last year, an increase of 665 percent. An additional 25 series were offered in 2014 on Netflix, Amazon or Hulu, services that didn’t exist as original programmers 15 years ago. (AP Photo/Fox, Chuck Hodes)

DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Beth Hoppe loves television dramas. Yet even with a digital video recorder and on-demand services that enable her to watch on her own schedule, there’s not enough time to see everything on her list.

As the chief programmer for PBS, Hoppe has a business reason to stay current. So if she’s feeling overwhelmed, how can the rest of us keep up?

For all of the changes in television, none is more profound than the sheer volume of material available now. From NBC’s “About a Boy” to SyFy’s “Z Nation,” there were 352 original scripted series shown in 2014 on broadcast, cable and streaming services. That doesn’t count news, sports, talk shows, documentaries, movies or reality shows.

There were 26 original scripted series on cable in prime time and late night in 1999, and 199 last year — an increase of 665 percent. An additional 25 series were offered in 2014 on Netflix, Amazon or Hulu, services that didn’t exist as original programmers 15 years ago.

The pace is only accelerating: the number of original cable prime-time series alone has essentially doubled since 2010, according to the FX networks, which keeps count of the programs.

“The amount of competition is just literally insane,” said John Landgraf, FX chief executive.

Cable networks could once run a successful business by showing primarily movies and reruns of old broadcast shows. “That’s over,” Hoppe said.

Viewers now can order an old movie whenever they want through a streaming service and not wait for a network to air it, said Alan Wurtzel, chief researcher at NBC Universal. Despite occasional successes like “The Big Bang Theory,” the taste for past-season network reruns is also fading, in large part because of all the fresh material available. Many reruns, too, can be ordered online for binge watching.

Distinctiveness is crucial now. Networks need shows of their own to establish identities. What was AMC before “Mad Men”? IFC before “Portlandia”? FX before “Rescue Me”?

“People won’t become Lifetime fans because it ran ‘Golden Girls’ for a while,” said Tim Brooks, author of “The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows.” ”But when you produce original shows, especially ones that pop, they come back to the network looking for the next premiere.”

Brooks and co-author Earle Marsh updated their book for a ninth edition in 2007. No more, though. There are just too many shows.

Maybe there will be a saturation point, but it clearly isn’t evident. The market doesn’t really punish failure, Landgraf said. Unsuccessful shows disappear, but networks rarely do.

For viewers, there’s almost never a lull period. There’s a series premiere, or season premiere, seemingly every week. All of the action makes true out-of-the-box hits, like Fox has achieved with “Empire” the past few weeks, more and more rare.

A decade ago a television executive could advertise a new program and take comfort that a potential audience would be motivated to watch, knowing they might miss it or miss being a part of the cultural conversation, Landgraf said.

“Now, why should you pay attention to television marketing?” he said. “Because there are too many shows. Most of them aren’t very good. The good ones are going to survive and you’ll know about them eventually. By the time you know about them, you can just go back really easily and catch up. You can save time by just being Darwinian about it. Say ‘I’m not going to pay attention to television, I’ll just wait for the fittest to survive.'”

If the crowded marketplace offers one advantage for producers, it’s that it makes executives tend to give shows more of a chance to stick. They often can’t immediately be sure if viewers have rejected a show or simply haven’t found it yet.

The competition forces creators to sharpen ideas, increasing the pressure to make something unique. NBC’s upcoming drama “Allegiance,” for example, starts with a major handicap because critics have suggested its plot about embedded Russian spies in the United States makes it sound like a watered-down version of FX’s “The Americans.”

“We’re at a world where passion rules, where social conversation is so important and where people can watch what they want to watch when they want to watch it,” said ABC entertainment president Paul Lee. “So they’re only going to watch the shows that they really love, that they’re really passionate about.”

TV executives have a phrase for it: They say the time of “least objectionable television” is dead.

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Entertainment

O.J. Simpson, 76, Dies of Prostate Cancer

Orenthal James (O.J.) Simpson, who rose to fame as a college football player who went on to the NFL and parlayed his talents in acting and sportscasting, succumbed to prostate cancer on April 10, his family announced.

Published

5 hours ago

April 17, 2024

Oakland Post

Orenthal James (O.J.) Simpson. Wikipedia photo

By Post Staff

Born and raised in San Francisco, the Galileo High School graduate was recruited by the University of Southern California after he was on a winning Junior College All-American team.

At USC, he gained wide acclaim as a running back leading to him becoming the No. 1 pick in the AFL-NFL draft in 1969 and joining the Buffalo Bills, where he had demanded – and received — the largest contract in professional sports history: $650,000 over five years. In 1978, the Bills traded Simpson to his hometown team, the San Francisco 49ers, retiring from the game in 1979.

Simpson’s acting career had begun before his pro football career with small parts in 1960s TV (“Dragnet”) before “Roots” and film (“The Klansman,” “The Towering Inferno,” Capricorn One”).

He was also a commentator for “Monday Night Football,” and “The NFL on NBC,” and in the mid-1970s Simpson’s good looks and amiability made him, according to People magazine, “the first b\Black athlete to become a bona fide lovable media superstar.”

The Hertz rent-a-car commercials raised his recognition factor while raising Hertz’s profit by than 50%, making him critical to the company’s bottom line.

It could be said that even more than his success as a football star, the commercials of his running through airports endeared him to the Black community at a time when it was still unusual for a Black person to represent a national, mainstream company.

He remained on Hertz team into the 1990s while also getting income endorsing Pioneer Chicken, Honey Baked Ham and Calistoga water company products and running O.J. Simpson Enterprises, which owned hotels and restaurants.

He married childhood sweetheart Marguerite Whitley when he was 19 and became the father of three children. Before he divorced in 1979, he met waitress and beauty queen Nicole Brown, who he would marry in 1985. A stormy relationship before, during and after their marriage ended, it would lead to a highway car chase as police sought to arrest Simpson for the murder by stabbing of Brown and her friend Ron Goldman in 1994.

The pursuit, arrest, and trial of Simpson were among the most widely publicized events in American history, Wikipedia reported.

Characterized as the “Trial of the Century,” he was acquitted by a jury in 1995 but found liable in the amount of $33 million in a civil action filed by the victims’ families three years later.

Simpson would be ensnared in the criminal justice system 12 years later when he was arrested after forcing his way into a Las Vegas hotel room to recover sports memorabilia he believed belonged to him.

In 2008, he received a sentence of 33 years and was paroled nine years later in 2017.

When his death was announced, Simpson’s accomplishments and downfalls were acknowledged.

Sports analyst Christine Brennan said: “… Even if you didn’t love football, you knew O.J. because of his ability to transcend sports and of course become the businessman and the pitchman that he was.

“And then the trial, and the civil trial, the civil case he lost, and the fall from grace that was extraordinary and well-deserved, absolutely self-induced, and a man that would never be seen the same again,” she added.

“OJ Simpson played an important role in exposing the racial divisions in America,” attorney Alan Dershowitz, an adviser on Simpson’s legal “dream team” told the Associated Press by telephone. “His trial also exposed police corruption among some officials in the Los Angeles Police Department. He will leave a mixed legacy. Great athlete. Many people think he was guilty. Some think he was innocent.”

“Cookie and I are praying for O.J. Simpson’s children … and his grandchildren following his passing. I know this is a difficult time,” Magic Johnson said on X.

“I feel that the system failed Nicole Brown Simpson and failed battered women everywhere,” attorney Gloria Allred, who once represented Nicole’s family, told ABC News. “I don’t mourn for O.J. Simpson. I do mourn for Nicole Brown Simpson and her family, and they should be remembered.”

Simpson was diagnosed with prostate cancer about a year ago and was undergoing chemotherapy treatment, according to Pro Football Hall of Fame President Jim Porter. He died in his Las Vegas, Nevada, home with his family at his side.

He is survived by four children: Arnelle and Jason from his first marriage and Sydney and Justin from his second marriage. He was predeceased son, Aaren, who drowned in a family swimming pool in 1979.

Sources for this report include Wikipedia, ABC News, Associated Press, and X.