The Producers’ Strike Against TV Viewers
Boffo has a fascinating post on why the motion picture and television studios are, somewhat mysteriously, in no big hurry to end the writer’s strike.
Read the whole thing for a much better explanation, but it basically boils down to this: Many of the studios bigwigs are not all that invested in quality to begin with, and the strike gets them off the hook of paying for quality content — that is, as long as most TV buffs are willing to watch crap reality-show programming.
Boffo concludes:
And that’s what the strike is: An experiment to see what happens when circumstances prevent any network from airing high quality shows. They want to know if Who Wants to Marry a Monkey will attract as many viewers as CSI if its only competition is Battle of the Choirs and Real Stories of Accountants For Hire. If Spitting for Dollars attracts as many viewers as Chuck, or even enough viewers that it’s more profitable given its lower production costs, that will be the end of decent television as we know it.
The studios engineered this strike not as an attack on writers, but as an attack on viewers. And it’s up to the viewers to fight it. What can viewers do to protect not only their favorite shows, but the very idea of good shows? The answer is simple, and requires absolutely no sacrifice: Don’t watch bad shows.
I’m not saying you need to avoid reality shows in general. If one of them intrigues you, it’s fine to give it a chance. There is a place for reality shows on TV. American Idol makes millions of people happy, and nobody’s trying to take that away.
All I’m suggesting is that you should avoid the lousy shows. Don’t pick the least awful of a bad bunch. Turn off the TV instead. Watch DVDs of good shows. Play video games. Read a book. Surf the Internet. Talk to your loved ones. Go outside and play. Do whatever it is that makes you happy, which is almost certainly something other than watching terrible TV. Because if you support awful TV, that’s all you’re going to get in the future.
And one other thing: Spread the word. Remind every TV fan you know not to watch bad strike replacement shows. If the AMPTP is performing an experiment on us, let’s make sure the results they get will convince them to produce good television in the future.
Interesting stuff. Read it all.
