Too Much TV: Your TV Talking Points For Tuesday, June 29th, 2021
Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Tuesday, June 29th, 2021. I'm writing this from the Twin Cities suburbs, where AllYourScreens HQ is powered by iced tea and a Gyro.
HBO MAX GOES INTERNATIONAL
HBO Max is launching in 39 territories in the Caribbean and Latin America today. The notable thing is that if for people who subscribe before July 31st will receive a 50% discount off the regular monthly plan for as long as they maintain their subscription without interruption. While some of that is certainly a reaction to the need to price the service in line with local market conditions, this deal is also a strong answer to the challenges of new customer acquisition as well as customer churn.
HBO Max has promised to launch 100 new programs across the region within the next two years. Which makes this a good time to note that none of the streaming services do a great job of making sure that those of based in the United States have access to shows produced in other regions. Series will pop up on a streaming service with little advance warning and no information to help with a review. I do want to highlight as much international programming as possible, but it's often not that easy to do.
THIS IS WHY MOST CLASSIC TV ISN'T AVAILABLE FOR STREAMING
I love the television industry. Television has always been a marker for the state of American society, and aside from the outstanding quality of some of the early television shows, they are fascinating to watch from a historical standpoint. There is an audience for the old shows, and while it's not huge, in theory, a streaming TV equivalent of Turner Classic Movies would seem to be a slam dunk. To say nothing of what Disney or WarnerMedia could do with their archives. So why is it so rare to see obscure programs from the classic age of television available for streaming?
As with most things, it comes down to money. Although maybe not in the way you might think. For the most part, any TV show that aired from the early 1960s forward is available in some archive. Finding a copy is usually not a problem. Unfortunately, every step after that costs money.
There is a cost to transfer the prints and remaster them into a format suitable for streaming. A number of the old shows that are streaming were converted for DVD sets or recent syndication deals. While the transfer costs aren't massive, they only make financial sense if there is some pre-sold market that will help underwrite the expense. An example of the latter are shows such as Laramie, The Virginian, and The Man From Shilo, which were remastered only after a cable deal was finalized. Thousands of hours of television sit in vaults and won't be transferred because the perception is that it's not worth the expense. Dozens of anthology shows, lots of programs in black-and-white. The cost of remastering is too steep for some niche streamer to justify, and the large streamers aren't interested in making a substantial investment for a niche audience.
As I have looked into this, one surprising hang-up is the number of TV shows that are hung up due to music clearance rights. It's not surprising that it's difficult and often expensive to clear well-known songs. It's the reason why the family of Rick Nelson has spent more than a decade trying to get episodes cleared from The Ozzie & Harriet Show. And similar problems affect a range of shows from Bachelor Father to Harper Valley PTA and some of the episodes of Name Of The Game.
But sometimes, the music clearance issues are more mundane. Many of the great 1960s and early 1970s detective and adventure shows from Warner Brothers are apparently held up in a clearance issue because the studio decided at the time to save money by library music instead of original background music to save money. And so now to prep the shows for streaming, they would have to have big hunks of the background music replaced. Which is cost-prohibitive for nearly all of the programs. One of the few Warner Brothers shows from that era that has been syndicated & streamed is 77 Sunset Strip. But that is because MeTV was willing to make a deal that would cover the editing costs.
And there are also some shows that are tied up by other rights disputes. A long-defunct production company owns part of the rights, and it's no longer clear who can legally give approval. Or there are shows such as Run For Your Life where the owners are known, but for whatever reason don't have any interest in making a deal. That's also the case with Hec Ramsay, which is owned by Jack Webb's estate. These independent production companies are also the cause of most of the shows that are missing from archives. For instance, Jack Webb apparently trashed all the episodes of Pete Kelly's Blues to save on storage costs. That is generally not something you have to worry about with the larger studios. They have their faults, but they also generally have pretty solid asset management systems.
Then there are the high-profile shows such as Homicide: Life On The Streets that are aren't available for streaming for reasons which don't seem to be clear to any of the rights holders. Due to some contractual wrangling partway through the series run, various underlying rights are held by several different entities, some of which have changed ownership a couple of times over the ensuing years since the show went off the air. Every rights holder has to sign off to make the show available and every one of the rights holders I spoke with claimed they were agreeable to having the show on a streamer. BUT, they claimed it was X who was standing in the way. And when I spoke with X, they blamed one of the other rights holders, and so on.
This problem - like most of the issues in Hollywood - can be solved with some good lawyering. But the negotiations can be messy and expensive and so far no media company has stepped up to tackle the job.
And if we are talking about the major studios, there are also two other snags in getting classic television onto streaming and they both come from major studios. Sony TV has a lot of great stuff in their vaults, but now that they don't have a streamer of their own, they have absolutely no incentive to spend the money to transfer and remaster old TV shows. And as for Disney....all I can say is that they don't seem to be interested in releasing anything from the 20th Century Television vaults, which is a shame.
There is a lot more I could add to this, but at least now you have a sense of why it is so difficult to get classic television onto your favorite streaming platform.
SO WHY HASN'T NETFLIX PICKED UP 'MANIFEST'?
There are times when I know there's an aspect to a story that I am missing. Not because I'm not doing my job, but because I don't access to the numbers and contracts that would explain why something is (or isn't) happening. I feel that way about efforts by fans of the recently-canceled series Manifest to convince Netflix to pick up the series for a fourth season. On the face of it, the show certainly seems to be a good fit for the streaming service. The first two seasons of the series hit Netflix just as the third season was wrapping up on NBC. And as I write this, the show has spent 20 straight days on Netflix's top ten list. It returned to the #1 slot for today for the second time since it's debut, so presumably the show is a hit with Netflix subscribers. So why did executives make a point last week of announcing that they weren't interested in saving the show?
I am assuming that the decision is somehow cost-related. Either the show is too expensive for Netflix because it's heading into a fourth season or perhaps Netflix has decided that the cost outweighs the value they would get out of a new season. And then there's the fact that Netflix hasn't "saved" a broadcast television series since 2018.
I know there has to be an underlying reason for the decision. I just know what it might be since I'm working from the outside.
IMDb TV MAY PICK UP THIRD SEASON OF 'FOR LIFE'
Amazon-owned AVOD IMDb TV has just rights to the first two seasons of For Life, which ABC canceled in May. And Variety is reporting that the streamer is close to greenlighting a third season of the show:
Series executive producer Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson was said to be instrumental in reviving the series, working with top leadership at Disney, like Hulu-ABC chief Craig Erwich, to find the show a new home. “For Life” was not a linear ratings breakout during its time on ABC but has been said to have performed very well in streaming playback on platforms like Hulu. Jackson’s hope is that putting “For Life” on a free AVOD service like IMDB TV will allow the show to further grow its streaming audience.
THIS WILL NOT END WELL
The Directors Guild of America have announced films released after June 15th, 2021 must have an exclusive 7-day theatrical run before arriving on other platforms to be eligible for their awards, disqualifying Dune, Cry Macho, and any other day-and-date release.
ODDS AND SODS
* Good Omens was renewed for a second season by Amazon
* Demi Lovato's unaired Quibi short-form talk show The Demi Lovato Show will premiere July 30th on the Roku Channel.
* The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel to The Sopranos, will be in theaters and streaming exclusively on HBO Max on October 1st.
* Season three of The Wine Show moves from Hulu to Sundance Now and it premieres July 29th.
* The streaming service Walter Presents is expanding into Latin America.
* Stuart Damon, who was best known to daytime audiences as General Hospital's Dr. Alan Quartermaine, has died at the age of 84.
WEDNESDAY'S PREMIERES
1) America: The Motion Picture (Netflix)
"A chainsaw-wielding George Washington teams with beer-loving bro Sam Adams to take down the Brits in a tongue-in-cheek riff on the American Revolution."
2) Nature: The Bat Man Of Mexico (PBS)
"Ever since ecologist Rodrigo Medellin first kept bats in his bathroom as a child, he has dedicated his life to saving them. Now Mexico’s most famous export, tequila, is at stake."
3) Somos (Netflix)
"The lives of the people of Allende, a Mexican border town, are overtaken by a powerful cartel's operations leading to tragedy. Inspired by true events."
4) Sophie: A Murder In West Cork (Netflix)
"This true crime series is based on the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier, a French woman found dead near her West Cork holiday home."
If you have any feedback, send it along to Rick@AllYourScreens.com and follow me on Twitter @aysrick.