This series thinking about the future of media is wide ranging, as evidenced by the fact that I want to spend one post talking about the archaic technology of television. And I say “archaic” only partly ironically, in that TV obviously still exists. But the reality is that most of us aren’t watching it live, and we’re certainly not setting any schedules around it the way we used to. Aside from a handful of special events like the Superbowl (and even that is down on live TV and up on streaming services), TV viewership is the equivalent of a post-war city on the front lines: a hollowed-out shell that was once magnificent but is now eking by without even the barest of essentials.
First, we should recognize that this is a sad state of affairs. Live TV is a good thing at least to this extent: for a relatively minor one-time expense, even the poorest of the poor can have access to entertainment that at least has the potential to be worthwhile (whether said potential is now or ever has been recognized is a different question). No subscriptions, no additional internet costs, no hidden fees, no anything. Just buy the box and enjoy what you’re given.
Second, TV has already begun the process of adapting to this new reality. This process in fact began over twenty years ago with the creation of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? And Whose Line is it Anyway? Two shows with incredibly small overhead costs, no needed writing, and reliance on one or two big-to-moderate names to drum up viewership. If viewership was small, no skin off the network’s nose. That these two shoes had large viewership was frosting on the cake. When the early 2000s rolled around, adapting cable “reality TV” shows was a small step to take in the wake of Millionaire and Whose Line? Again, small overhead meant a small viewership could still turn a profit.
And that’s where TV (yes, even cable) has been stuck ever since. The networks can get a minimum number of people to watch, so as long as they keep their costs low profits are still achievable. Whether that’s sustainable in the long run is somewhat less clear. The inflexibility of broadcast TV is simply never going to appeal to anyone who is a millennial or younger (heaven help you if you don’t adapt yourself to my schedule!), which means those audiences are going to start to diminish.
So where will TV go from here? A couple of predictions:
First, foreign language TV is certainly going to take off, if it hasn’t already. For example, Telemundo reaches 95% of Spanish-language households in the US. Don’t be surprised if in the very near future the big four networks come out with a handful of Spanish-language shows for Primetime.
Second, expect to see a sharp upward turn in the quality of writing and acting, and a sharp downturn in the recognizability of the actors on TV. I mean by this three things:
- Because of its small audience, the networks will be less and less able to afford big-name talent to draw viewers. Therefore
- They will need to step up the quality of their writing (and let’s be honest, nobody in American visual pop culture has covered themselves in glory in terms of writing ability in the past decade or so);
- They will need to step up the quality of their acting, but again
- They can’t afford big names, so the search for high-quality/low-cost nobodies will be on.
Finally, expect to see more genre-specific TV. Because the audiences are going to be small anyway, why not target the genres that have built-in fan bases? Horror, sci-fi, fantasy, detective fiction, etc. When combined with better writers and better actors, the constraints of a small budget will give us better materials than we’ve had for a while.
Hopefully this means that TV will be getting better in the short run, and as a result get healthier in the long run.
Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO
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