Tag Archives: Roseanne

And When I Looked Up, MPR Had Disappeared

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So I see “Magnum P.I.” is the latest geezer hit to get the re-boot treatment. Fans of TV as it once was already have a new “Hawaii 5-0” up and running, have seen “Roseanne” rise from the dead … die … and be born again (as “The Connors”, without the queen crazy) are awaiting the restoration of  “Murphy Brown.”

Since I never had any interest in any of these shows when I was (much) younger, I’m a bad judge of who they’re meant to entertain in 2018. But my wild guess is that none of the host networks in any rare moment of candor expects these shows to connect with your Gen X-ers, hipster Millennials or really anyone without an AARP card. That’s because what’s on sale here is — like Classic Rock on the radio — nostalgia for the aged, the now creaky folks eager to recall the time when their knees and hips and cataracts weren’t artificial.

Anyone younger than that has something in the range of 450-500 scripted TV series sprawling across dozens of cable channels and streaming apps providing comedy or drama far … far … more sophisticated, complex and involving than a reboot of color-by-numbers formulas anchored in an era 30 years out of date.

Somehow this nostalgia business — which will make a few bucks for the major networks — reminded me of how my own media consumption has shifted even over the past year. I mean, I don’t call watching a network series anytime in the past 10 years. “The Good Wife”? Never saw it. Oh wait. I did follow “Lost”. But when that ended (badly), so did my relationship with the ABCs, CBSs, NBCs and Foxs of the world, except of course for sports.

The main reason? The profound lack of imagination and audacity in storytelling. Think of it as an evolutionary standstill. Point being, times have changed network TV hasn’t. What worked in 1985 works today only with people with an impractical fixation with lost youth.

Other than a few gay characters it’s been years since there’s been anything in broadcast programming that offered any real sense of cultural change, suspense or comedic surprise. Why? Because everything, as they say in football, is being played between the 40 yard-lines. Right in the safe, dull, bland, familiar middle. It’s a safe, friction-less zone of perfect predictability, where everything is designed to reassure viewers that a kind of rule-abiding Eisenhower-era fantasy world still exists. Any viewer looking for a representation of life with the complexity of what they see around them every day has no choice but tune out and look elsewhere … and they’ve found it in abundance in shows like “The Sopranos”, “The Wire”, “Breaking Bad”, “Game of Thrones”, “Mad Men”, “Billions”, “The Terror”  and (a current favorite) HBO’s “Succession.”

In that vein, it occurred to me, while driving up to the cabin recently, that it has been at least four or five months since I’ve listened to anything on MPR, once the last go-to broadcast news source of any value in the Twin Cities. But MPR (and NPR) have now been entirely, and I do mean entirely, replaced by podcasts, all of which offer a far greater depth of reporting and analysis on a wider range of topics, from politics to science to entertainment than anything public radio can (or will) do within its self-determined parameters.

And yeah, this is Trump’s fault, too.

Anyone following the sprawling Trump story is vividly aware of characters and facets and the interplay between cast members that gets only passing “headline” mention on broadcast TV and only slightly more from public radio. (Honest analysis of the story puts hyper-cautious non-profit news outlets into the “bias” zone, y’know.) As with all complex fictional dramas, part of the appeal of the Trump story is figuring out who got to who and what made what happen, as well as building a notion of how it all ends. But most of that — way too much of it if you’re following closely and are, as I say, already familiar with the timelines and characters — is missing from public radio, and the network news.

Where it exists for me today are on podcasts like:

The Ezra Klein Show   (Check out the hour-long Aug. 2 conversation with Adam Davidson of The New Yorker. Note the part where they both express fear of what follows Trump, namely “competent Trump”. Just as corrupt, but not nearly the fool. Klein’s earlier conversation with author Michael Pollan, on his new book, “How to Change Your Mind” is maybe the most fascinating thing I’ve listened to in years.)

The Josh Marshall podcast.  (Linked is a recent one with Marcy Wheeler, a startling savant on dates and interrelations of characters in the Trump-Russia drama.)

The 538 Politics Podcast (The episode linked has Nate Silver and his crew playing with various theories of the Trump case. The key character IMHO is Clare Malone, the gal in the boys club with a very sharp and clever wit.)

Pod Save America. (Kind of the monster hit of political podcasts, starring ex-Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau and cronies.)

“Why is This Happening?”, with Chris Hayes. (This one, starring the MSNBC host, is newer and bit wonkier. But this particular conversation with Amy Chua, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” was a thoroughly satisfying discussion of tribalism in American culture.)

The Lawfare Podcast. (At 334 episodes and counting, it’s kind of a granddaddy of the species. This particular episode, hosted by the conservative Heritage Institute is a fascinating and scary look at what’s coming next in fake news, namely “deep fake” video. Probably in time for this November’s elections. (Also, for a change of pace, here’s another talking with scientists about whether we should communicate with aliens — of the outer space variety.)

“I Have to Ask” with Isaac Chotiner of Slate. (Linked is his conversation with Davidson of The New Yorker.)

Brain Science, with Ginger Campbell MD. (Invariably interesting discussions with scientists on brain research and phenomena. The linked episode is with neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg, (I had never heard of him), discussing creativity and — very relevant to the appeal of fake news — how in some humans novelty overwhelms the right hemisphere’s critical function.)

Celebration Rock. Hosted by Steven Hyden of 93X here in the Twin Cities. (Linked his Hyden talking, with customary intelligence, with Don DeLuca of the Philadelphia Inquirer about my favorite band of the moment, The War on Drugs.)

With all that and thousands more like them, the appeal of a new dude with less of a porn ‘stash and a newer Ferrari is lost on me.

 

“Roseanne” and Sinclair Take Network TV Tribal

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Despite what we’ve been learning about Facebook and its power to deliver “fake news”, it’s worth keeping in mind that your fellow Americans (‘Muricans) still get most of their news, fake or otherwise, from their local TV stations. That’s according to a Pew survey from last summer.

As we digest the power of “Fox and Friends” to guide White House policy, the startling ratings for the revival of “Roseanne” and hilarious-to-appalling mash-up video of Sinclair Broadcasting anchors parroting a Orwellian script from upper management, we need to remind ourselves about how basic monetization drives our rancid tribalism.

The Sinclair video, a brilliant piece of agit-prop by a guy named Tim Burke at the sports web-site Deadspin, (which would be required reading if only for Minnesota native Drew Magary), went viral in about an hour late last week. It is the sort of thing that will laser-etch itself on the reputation of every Sinclair anchor who agreed to perform it. Something so robotic, so herd-like and craven will remain a millstone on their well-coiffured heads for the remainder of their careers. (To date, I see only one Sinclair anchor, in liberal Seattle, who has dared make any criticism of her employer.)

Having spent years observing the folkways and the compromises local TV news personalities make to sustain what still are well-paying jobs, I gotta say laying their faces out there and reading a double-think script ordered by the home office doesn’t surprise me in the least. It is what they are paid to do. The local TV anchor gig is far (far) less about journalism than it is about acting out the marketing strategies of CEOs and boards of directors.

I no longer have access to the deeper internals of Nielsen ratings, but a bit like newspapers, the broad audience for your local TV news was on the decline 15 years ago and there’s no indication that has stopped. (The most reliable figure shows a 31% decline in audience for local TV news since 2007.) But even back then, local TV news was very much a demographics game, designed (scripted and performed) for the primary consumer in traditional households … thirty-something “soccer moms”, with a kind of ancillary focus on an older audience holding hard to loyalties to their favorite hometown TV “stars”.

What’s fascinated me in the past few days, with the return of “Roseanne” on ABC and Sinclair’s Trump-echoing about “false news”, is how much traditional network television — by that I mean primetime sitcoms and dramas — and the local news that bookends are becoming segmented and segregated for service to specific tribal attitudes, like just about everything else in 2018 media.

Despite the high-minded sounding rhetoric from Sinclair’s VP for news, there’s nothing remotely unbiased about the company’s mission as it buys up more and more local TV stations.

For example:

Says Olivia Nuzzi in New York magazine today: “David Smith, the executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group, said he dislikes and fundamentally distrusts the print media, which he believes ‘serves no real purpose ‘. In e-mails to New York, Smith said that print — as in newspapers and magazines — is a reality-distorting tool of leftists. Print media, he said, has ‘no credibility’ and no relevance.

‘I must tell that in all the 45 plus years I have been in the media business I have never seen a single article about us that is reflective of reality especially in today’s world with the shameful political environment and generally complete lack of integrity. Facts and truth have been lost for a long time and likely to never return’, Smith said.

‘The print media is so left-wing as to be meaningless dribble which accounts for why the industry is and will fade away. Just no credibility.”

Good lord.

It would be so refreshing if Sinclair would simply step up and say, “Yeah, we’re your Trump TV group. You like Trump? Stick with us. We’ll give you news that will reassure you you’re on to something yuge and great.”

Sinclair wants to ride/exploit the Trump crest among his believers. It sees good money to be made — shareholder value — serving the preferences (ok, “biases”) of conservative viewers, in particular viewers who maintain a loyalty to traditional network programming and the traditional forms of “news”.

And folks, there’s no law against that. It is, as I like to say, The First Rule of Show Biz: “Give the People What They Want.”  Or, to fine tune that a bit, “Figure out where the audience is for the story you want to tell and drag them into your tent.”

What I’d be interested in seeing today is a survey about the political leanings of the folks Sinclair is betting on — tradition-oriented entertainment and news consumers — as well as the millions of others (and counting) who have largely given up on primetime network TV and local TV news in favor of content that is both more “adult” and, as news goes, less worried about being accused of bias. I’m guessing your the audiences for network and cable (other than FoxNews) is now definably tribal.

I say this as someone who never watched entire episode of “Roseanne” in its hey day, (and I was a TV critic at the time), and hasn’t watched a primetime network show since “Lost” went off the air. For good reason Sinclair Broadcasting has no interest in me. But neither does it have any interest in all the rest of you who have migrated over to Netflix, FX, AMC, HBO, MSNBC, podcasts and the vast, burgeoning universe of alternatives to … stale, timid tradition.

Likewise, my (and I suspect a lot of your) consumption of local TV news has cratered over the past decade. Simply put, local TV news a product that has negligible value to a news consumer like me. (That is to say: Smug, cranky, aged liberal elitist.) Everything about local TV news is compromised to avoid stirring conflict from any quarter. The fact that almost no local TV newscast anywhere in the country dares assert and regularly remind viewers about the human impact on climate change is as conclusive an example as you need for the scripted, tightly coordinated insipidness of the overall product.

But … there is an audience that remains simultaneously resistant to “adult” entertainment and can be reassured by the blandness and celebrity appeal of local TV personalities. That crowd may continue to wane. (“Die off” is a more apt description.) But the bet by Sinclair as it buys up local stations and imposes highly centralized editorial content and viewpoint on them, mirrors what the networks themselves are no doubt looking to capture in the wake of “Roseanne’s” fire. Namely, cash in on Trumpist America while it is still a hardened, easily-defined tribe.

(I predict a Ted Nugent-Scott Baio sit-com in the near future).

There’s got to be at least another decade worth of good profits in giving traditional America what it wants to see.