http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/south-park/season-13/south-park-1304-eat-pray-queef/#clip155565

Not for everyone.

I started out writing this essay because I was bummed about seeing my favourite brands disappear (Scream was a favourite channel of mine). I’m sure this post comes across as a little bit of male whining in parts, but it’s actually strengthened my feminist perspective.

To follow cause and effect in the reverse order of this post (in causational order): women are biologically designated, for better or for worse, the child bearers. Traditionally, they are child rearers as well, since it is they who lactate. As a result, even today, it is women who remain in the home most and assume the greater burden of child-rearing. They also perform the greater share of other domestic duties, like cooking and cleaning — I’m not saying that’s the way it should be, I’m merely remarking that those are the facts. TV works better in the multi-activity environment when it’s low-concept, and has broad cues. These same types of programs don’t work as well when your audience is looking for more sophisticated focus-intensive fare. When anyone — male or female — sits down to watch TV intently, without distraction, their viewership will skew towards scripted dramas, serials, and higher-concept shows.

Secondly, not only are women the primary homemakers and child-rearers, they are the primary shoppers for household goods.

Combined, these two facts make women with children the obvious target for TV advertising. They are the ones in the home with the TV on in the background, as one of several objects of attention; they are the ones unable to take advantage of focus-intensive programming on torrent, DVD, or even PVR. They are the easiest for advertisers to reach, because they have the least flexibility in their TV watching schedule. They are also the ones who spend money on the types of things advertisers want to promote.

As ABG says, “Advertisers do not create the viewer, they only respond to them.” TV ads will obviously be targeted towards the people who watch the ads and subsequently spend money. The programming is determined by the advertising; the shows are only there to attract viewers to the ads. Obviously, shows are only viable if they draw the type of viewers advertisers want to reach.

It’s only natural that more TV programmers want to make their shows palatable to female viewers; this is simply the laws of the marketplace bearing out. But interestingly, I think that while the statistical trend in passive (ie, background) TV watching leaning towards young mothers is slight, because programmers chase this slight edge, it creates a vicious circle (as the title of this post implies): the more programmers chase the audience of young mothers, the more it drives everyone else away (there now being more alternatives than ever), and the greater a percentage of TV viewers is made up of distracted young mothers, and so on.

If TV is being feminised (and I believe it is), don’t blame TV — blame society (as trite as that sounds) for the double-standard that places the greater burden of domestic chores and childrearing on women. And if it’s being dumbed down, blame the fact that anyone who can pursue an alternative method of delivery (Internet, DVD, PVR) will; only the people who let the TV drone in the background are sitting through the ads, so the ads have to reach people who are watching low-concept shows.

The problem with the networks’ approach is that TV as background noise doesn’t capture the whole picture of TV viewership. There’s two other factors to consider. The first is destination programming, also known as appointment programming. The other is secondary methods of delivery, and secondary streams of revenue.

Appointment programming draws viewers looking for focus-intensive higher-concept shows; they seek it out and watch it on the set with the same intensity that viewers online seek and watch TV shows on their computers. The trick here is getting your show to be an appointment show — this is the Holy Grail for TV everywhere. I would argue that the Simpsons in the early 90s was an appointment show. The X Files in the late 90s was an appointment show. Seinfeld, too. Today, Lost is the obvious example. Note that all of the above were blockbuster shows. These are shows that people — all types of people — consciously plan to stay home and watch, distraction-free. Appointment shows are really the only shows on TV that can get away with being focus-intensive and still draw huge numbers. The problem, of course, is that they’re both expensive to produce, and really rare — hence high-risk.

That leads into my second point: alternate outlets for viewing and secondary revenue streams. I’m talking, of course, about DVD sales and webcasting. These are two woefully neglected delivery methods. I believe that networks have started to factor future DVD sales into their decision to renew or not renew, but only just. Revenue from the Internet does not factor into their decisions at all.

Of course, appointment shows are precisely the kind of shows that perform well on DVD and the Internet. If a greater emphasis was placed on these two media, a much greater diversity of programming would be produced. It may not even be appropriate to put destination programming on TV, given the nature of the medium’s limitations. The tragedy is that as of this writing, if a show can’t perform on live TV, it won’t get the chance to perform anywhere else. Real-time rating of TV makes or breaks a show, despite the fact that real-time TV is dying, and other media make more and more sense all the time.

One example: Gossip Girl had a strong cultural impact. It’s ratings were also weak. Wired explains the rest.

Basically it boils down to this: there are lots of different kinds of people who enjoy TV shows, but in different ways. And due to the vagaries of home life, one small group is enjoying a growing influence over the types of shows that get shown — not just on TV, but also on DVD and the Internet. When we finally figure out how to monetise webcasting (personally, I think it’s just a matter of reaching critical mass), appointment programming will overtake background-noise programming, and we’ll start to see programming targeted at all the world’s colourful niches again.

Also, women rank very high in demos for of sci-fi and crime shows. (Dexter, Battle Star Galactica, etc,) sometimes outpacing men, except for CSI, which is enjoyed by both genders. American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, etc are enjoyed by an entire family. These shows cut across all demographics. Families also like to watch tv together, regardless of how many male/females are in the household.
Advertisers do not create the viewer, they only respond to them. The viewer is a multi-faceted individual with many different interests and lifestyles. They are the true clients of tv. For any channel to program to everyone all the time is to lack a focus or an appreciation of different interests and points of view.

Men who work night shifts watch a lot of daytime programming. Women who work all day watch a lot of prime time programming.

Are you offended by the ads on tv or the content on tv? Two completely different topics. You end your piece with “tv can only ensure its irrelevance” To you? Or to the hundreds of millions of men and women who watch a plethora of tv on many different channels, because they make that choice out of free will. Forgive me, but are saying people are idiots?

The blanding resulting from a fear of risk-taking is, I agree, only tangentially related to this gender skewing; there is a great article here that explains that by attempting to make themselves unobjectionable, newspapers have made themselves irrelevant — they have, in fact, totally undermined what they set out to do in the first place, which was to impart meaningful information. As they lost meaning, they lost readers. I would argue that many of the very persuasive arguments contained therein apply to the TV model as well.

The bland-ification of TV is going on because of network fears of trying new things in the “horrible recession” – most of the “new” things that are tried are broken off, and if you were to pitch “Lost” or “Babylon 5″ or “Battlestar” today you’d probably get laughed out of the pitch – it’s a pendulum switch because the epoch is changing – and most nets aren’t really looking to find the ‘net presence yet because you “can’t” make your money back.

Also, if you’re going to use Canadian quotation-mark rules (periods and commas inside), then please use Canadian spellings (ostracised/generalised/serialised are incorrect; we use -ize/-yze endings). To your credit, you spell “yogurt” the sensible way (though that spelling appears only half the time). The noun “defence” is spelled thus (also “licence,” “practice” as nouns). Please stop using British English; it’s colonial.

PS That Top 10 list is depressing. I watched ONE of those shows. And even it got cancelled.

TV watching, which has traditionally been contrasted with film watching, has certain features arising from the way shows were made, and the environment in which they are watched. Film, for example, predates TV; it has traditionally been watched in a darkened theatre, and it is shot using a single camera. There’s a lot of theory out there about the construction of the film viewer — sitting in the dark, the viewer’s body and immediate surroundings fade away. Watching the action onscreen, as the camera jumps from one angle to another, produces the illusion that the point of view demonstrated is detached from a corporeal body. The film viewer becomes invisible, omniscient, and non-corporeal.

Television, on the other hand, has traditionally been shot in a studio; the old 3-camera setup doesn’t cross the field of vision, so the viewer doesn’t get the opportunity to construct a point of view that eliminates his or her physical body. In fact, we’re encouraged to imagine ourself in an audience of bodies, who are often shown (as in cuts to shots of the studio audience) and even more often heard (as in the laugh track). Television does not encourage us to leave our bodies behind in quite the same way.

More than this, television has traditionally been watched not in a quiet, darkened theatre, but in a noisy and well-lit home. The medium is constructed to accomodate viewership as only one of several streams of activity a viewer may be undertaking: that is, it’s meant to be on in the background, and it often is; of the 7 hours the typical American home has a TV on, only a fraction of those involve active viewership. TV has therefore constructed modes to convey meaning in a noisy multi-activity environment: TV is much more dialogue-heavy than film (especially in terms of exposition), it relies more on sound cues to direct the viewer when to look at the screen (operating under the assumption that the viewer may otherwise be looking away), and using far more quick cuts, movement and bright colours to act as cues to important information. TV (and especially advertising) has adapted itself to an environment where it’s only one of several things going on at once.

Because TV is watched in the home, it’s also perfectly fine to talk during shows, unlike at the movie theatre, where it is NOT OK to talk during the show. TV programming tends to better serve communally-watched shows where attention is divided. Shows that demand a great deal of attention don’t work well in a home environment where one television serves several people simultaneously, and conversation is inevitable. It’s easier to follow variety shows, talk shows, sports and other easily-digested shows where information is not serialised — so this is what draws the audiences in front of the set.

The audiences watching TV shows online seek a very different experience than people watching the TV set in their living rooms: they are usually alone, and while they may be reading different websites, they are able to choose the focus of their attention, and can more easily follow high-concept storylines and serials. They choose the time and place of viewship, they look for specific programs (as opposed to flicking until they find something tolerable), and they can pause and rewind if they need to.

If you’ve ever brushed elbows with advertisers, you know that numbers don’t tell the whole story: the more engaged an audience is, the more effective advertising is. The first TV watching scenario I described is an advertiser’s nightmare: with their ads in the background, and conversation happening overtop, it’s all too easy to ignore the ads altogether. With an online viewer, not only are they rapt, not only are they alone, but you can also lock ads or make them interactive so the viewer HAS to pay attention to them, AND you can also target your ads much more effectively, because the datastream can contain loads of information about the viewer! Why this is not something that TV broadcasters are exploring more aggressively I don’t understand …. It might be because cable and satellite delivery systems make billions of dollars a year — but then, networks and the delivery systems have somewhat strained relations to begin with.

In short: TV is great as background noise, and TV is also great if you want to sit and watch something really engaging. But the time and place for both varieties is different, and the method of delivery needs to be different as well. TV may be a victim of its own success; its ubiquity is what makes it so easy to ignore. On a computer screen, where the viewer is more focussed, the experience is different, and this focus allows and demands a whole different type of programming.

The rub is that all TV is made for TV; so far, attempts to make original programming for the Internet-viewing audience have been meagre and weakly received, despite their advertising-friendly delivery. How much this will change remains to be seen.

The way this all relates to age and gender should be coming clear: women spend more time in the home than men, especially when supervising children. Parents also can’t abandon their children to engross themselves in a show (at least, not during primetime — and if they want to do it after the kids are in bed, they’ll have to head online). It’s women and younger people who watch the TV set, as opposed to TV programming online, because it is they who are in the home, in a supervisory role, with divided attention, and are unable to pursue more focus-intensive viewership. They watch TV, an inferior delivery system, not by choice, but of necessity.