What does the viewing public want?
Do viewers want the distraction of silly comedies, or sci-fi escapism? Do they want cathartic crime dramas like "CSI" because they find and punish bad guys in an hour? Are they hungry for stories about Sept. 11, or burned out by them?
"What does it say about the public and the media," one reporter asked Katie Couric last week, "that both of them are 20,000 times more interested in who is reading the news than what the news actually is?" As a member of both the public and the media, let me be the first to say I really do care more about what the news actually is.
Such questions are amusing, but they have never sounded more irrelevant.
For starters, the discussion presupposes that harried executives analyze the public consciousness when cobbling together their schedules. Most are moving too fast for such contemplation, trying to identify which successful formats to replicate, with a twist, fast enough to prolong their jobs.
The more misguided thread, however, hangs on the assumption that there is a cohesive TV viewing "public" anymore, with families gathered around the set in Eisenhower-era fashion. Today, with the audience dispersed as never before, speaking of "the public" is a waste of time; rather, programs address many different publics, not all of them mutually exclusive.
With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps, it's possible to discern broad trends for the 1950s, '70s, even '90s, when the media environment was less diffused. Spanning the years, though, also reveals a thirst for certain kinds of entertainment -- from "Gunga Din" to "Pirates of the Caribbean," or "Dragnet" to "Law & Order" -- that highlight the durability of various genres as opposed to a decade-specific mood.
"Any direct connection from TV consumption to the culture at large is going to be wrongheaded and simplistic," says Barry Glassner, a USC sociology professor and the author of "The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things." "You can take any shows from the period and read what you want into what they say about the culture."
To the extent that viewing choices reflect (and more often, distort) the times, Glassner adds, "There's no one-to-one correspondence. The analysis needs to be much more subtle and complex."
So what, based on a survey of the current TV topography and Nielsen standings, do viewers want?
They want crime and punishment. And they want mobsters who don't get punished.
They want philandering bachelors, and single moms.
They want slowly unfolding mysteries, and neatly self-contained episodes.
They want karaoke.
They want Darwinian struggles for survival, and heartwarming demonstrations of communal goodwill.
They want workplace relationships, and the perils and pitfalls of family.
They want to see ordinary people suffer, and also want to watch them achieve sudden fame, find love and have their homes remodeled.
They want cops, lawyers and doctors to be impossibly beautiful, and just a trifle neurotic.
And this is just an educated guess, but they want pirates. Definitely throw in some pirates.
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The Squeaky Wheels: Critics and TV execs have been at odds during press tour over an intriguing question: Do networks pay a price for canceling serialized programs, denying audiences the satisfaction of closure and resolution?
The debate fundamentally comes down to whether critics and small numbers of irate, petition-circulating fans truly represent the wider public. The network suits argue that most people don't harbor lingering grudges or develop TV-commitment phobias because a show gets axed. Series fail. Life goes on.
On the whole, that's probably accurate, and those prone to despair over a program's cancellation are the sort who will likely bond with something else. In essence, programmers are saying, "Go ahead, 'Carnivale' and 'Everwood' junkies. Whine all you want, but we have a business to run, and we don't think you can stay mad for long."
Although that could amount to wishful thinking, it's at least a healthy way to deal with fringe elements. In fact, if the Republicans and Democrats adopted that approach, things might actually start looking up.
