Category: media

Why are Americans so fascinated with police shows on TV? “Last season, a third of the Top 40 shows on television were procedurals, loosely defined as programs that depict a crime each week and solve it. Most of the other top-rated programs were reality shows or comedies, with only six dramas having nothing to do with crime making the list.”

Last week a US Congressional committee voted to cut money for public broadcasting by 25 percent. This week, public TV and radio is fighting back. “Faced with their biggest budget battle in a decade, public broadcasters are waging local campaigns through the Internet and on-air advertising to oppose legislation that, some claim, would weaken their ability to produce local programming and cripple their sister stations in rural areas of the country.”

US TV networks are increasingly turning to outside producers for their shows. “No one in Hollywood expects the networks to stop favoring their own. But at a time when some conglomerates like Viacom are reassessing the benefits of bigness – and when a hyper-competitive ratings race makes closing off any possible advantage foolhardy – most network and studio heads have come to realize that an overreliance on their own fare can lead to creative and financial trouble.”

“Through the end of May, HBO’s average prime-time viewership was down to 900,000 from 1.2 million for the same period in 2004. The weekly “Deadwood” audience has dropped by 2 million and “Carnivale” was canceled, while “Six Feet Under” and “Entourage” both started new seasons with smaller audiences than the year before…”

“When it comes to DVD consumers, the studios are confident that if they build a strong adult movie, the audience will come. That feeling does not extend to theatergoers. For that, the studios have only themselves to blame. They’re driving that ever-loyal viewer home to watch HBO or DVDs by not keeping the moviegoing habit going with strong movies aimed at adults. The movie business is pushing them away, making them look for other things, like renting all the seasons of ‘Six Feet Under’.”

“The US House Appropriations Committee approved a bill on Thursday that would cut funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting by $100 million, or 25 percent, starting in October.”

The Nielsen TV ratings company is starting to roll out “people meters” to measure viewing in local markets across America. But some in the idustry are complaining about the shifts in ratings compared to the old method of measuring viewership. A Nielsen exec say that the more accurate meters show an increae in viewer time in front of their TV’s…

Prominent Democratic Senators question the direction of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting under chairman Kenneth Tomlinson. “Tomlinson, appointed to the CPB board by President Bill Clinton and to the top job by President Bush, has made ideological balance on PBS and National Public Radio a central theme of his tenure at a time when broadcasters in the field are primarily occupied with possible large cuts in federal funding. The House Appropriations Committee on Thursday approved a 25 percent cut in the CPB’s budget for next year.”

An investigation of Corporation for Public Broadcasting chairman Kenneth Tomlinson turns up emails showing consultations with a former White House official about the public TV politics. “The e-mail messages are part of the evidence being collected in a broad inquiry by the inspector general of the corporation into whether Mr. Tomlinson violated any rules that require that the corporation act as a buffer between politics and programming.”

How does the movie business work? We don’t really knoww. According to a recent academic paper, the effectiveness of “star power” is one of many “puzzles” that haunt the movie business, an industry where executives “rely heavily on tradition, conventional wisdom, and simple rules of thumb.” Despite extensive market research dating back to the ’20s, Hollywood is the King Lear of the entertainment world: It has always but slenderly known itself.