Too Much TV: Your TV Talking Points For Thursday, September 29th 2022
When it comes to content discovery, it's a pod culture world.
Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Thursday, September 29th, 2022.
CORRECTION:
Jayson P. let me know that - despite what yesterday’s newsletter stated - The Bad Batch season 2 premiere was pushed into 2023.
A FUN MARKETING IDEA FOR 'GHOSTS.' BUT DID IT MISS THE MARK?
I have generally been very critical about the broadcast network efforts to market returning shows, especially by reaching out to the specific niche of the audience who is most interested (cough. La Brea). But CBS has done a really solid job of promoting its sophomore comedy Ghosts throughout the summer, and its marketing efforts often included reaching out to fan-run social media accounts and web sites.
Which makes the show's latest marketing idea both genius and a bit frustrating:
In a marketing stunt tied to this Thursday’s return of the hit Eye comedy, the season opener of “Ghosts” is being showcased in the middle of the night at venues in Los Angeles, Savannah, Ga., and Portland, Ore., but to empty seats. Instead, CBS is inviting actual ghosts to view the show — mortals be damned.
“We are using social media and we’ve got some mediums and some other folks that we’re using to put the word out to people who are not amongst the living, to stop by any of these theaters and attend the screenings,” says CBS chief marketing officer Mike Benson.
These types of events tend to take place exclusively in Los Angeles and New York. In large part because it's easier for the event to be managed when you have your marketing staff nearby. And it also means the event will be noticed by the L.A.-based actors, managers and agents who will see the press for the idea and feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
While I have to give props to CBS for also including a theater in Portland and Savannah, it strikes me this idea would get a lot more attention from the press and the public if they had added a showing in smaller markets - especially ones in which Ghosts did very well during season one of the show. In Los Angeles, this type of promotion might rate just a passing mention in the highly competitive L.A. local news market. But doing one in Tulsa or Birmingham or Cleveland would garner the show a lot more attention. And even with the complications of the distance, it would provide better marketing bang for the buck.
IN DEFENSE OF THE BINGE
I often feel as if I'm the only media analyst/journalist consistently arguing that the binge release approach makes a lot of sense. I wrote a piece about this about 18 months ago and much of what I wrote still makes sense to me:
The pop culture zeitgeist only has the attention bandwidth to deal with so much buzz at one time. And in an industry where there are maybe a dozen potential buzzworthy shows being released each month, dropping an entire season of most of them at once gives more of them a chance to shine-even if it's for a shorter amount of time.
Releasing an entire season at once also plays to the reality of streaming television in 2021. We live in a world with a lot of media distractions. We're discovering things at different times and on a variety of unexpected platforms. Our viewing habits are defined by our friends and social media feeds as anything else. For the most part, we don't live in a pop culture world of entertainment. It's a pod culture world. More and more often, we discover a show because someone we know or follow on social media talk about. I am sure nearly all of us have suddenly had a discussion of an older show dominate our cultural pod because one person discovers it and encourages everyone else to give it a try.
Some of the griping about binge-releasing television comes from people who have built parts of their careers around the concept of a weekly release schedule. Journalists who write weekly recaps, publications who crank out tons of breathless coverage of every episode - none of that work fits into a world where entire seasons of TV shows are dropped every week, carpet-bombing viewers with an endless selection of new things to watch.
But binge-releasing television plays to that time-shifted pod culture most of us live in now. Yes, a traditional weekly release works for some high-profile programs with built-in fanbases. But entirely too many industry analysts and reporters confuse "how I watch TV" with the way it should work for most people.
I was reminded of this piece today after I read the latest "Buffering" newsletter from Joe Adalian, which argued that the various streaming services might be wise to move away from the binge release model:
To me, this is another argument in favor of earlier time slots. Rather than dumping its big blockbuster tentpoles on Fridays with everything else in streaming, imagine if Prime Video were to turn Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET into the spot in which the streamer rolled out fresh episodes of TROP, The Boys, Jack Ryan, and other big-budget spectacles that lend themselves to appointment viewing? Similarly, why aren’t HBO Max originals like Hacks, The Flight Attendant, or And Just Like That … debuting on Sundays instead of quietly debuting in the middle of the week? No, they’re not linear shows, which require you to tune in to a channel, but data shows most people who watch House of the Dragon or Succession or Euphoria on Sundays don’t do so via their cable box but via the HBO Max app. It’s not TV that makes people watch these shows on Sundays — it’s the HBO brand.
The first problem is 9pm ET is 6pm PT. Which isn't ideal for buzzworthiness. And a bigger issue is that the marketing issues of training people to tune in to stream a specific show at a specific time is substantial. Disney+ can get away with it with Dancing With The Stars because viewers are already accustomed to watching the show at a specific time. It's just a matter of changing the platform. But it's a much different challenge to convince viewers to tune in at 9pm ET to watch the latest episode of Big Shot.
As far as the social media buzz aspect of the argument is concerned, I can tell you that I've had people at both Netflix and Amazon tell me that while releasing a show at 2am in the U.S. might suck for American viewers, the upside is that most shows aren't at the level where viewers feel obligated to watch the episode the very second it drops. So when the average customer checks around for something to watch that night, their social media feed is filled with reactions from people around the world who have already watched it. It's not quite the communal experience Joe talks about, but it's what passes for it in the streaming era.
The binge or not binge question is complicated by the various quirks associated with the licensing of some programs. A number of the TV shows Netflix releases on a weekly basis are released that way because they are picked up from other networks and that is the way they receive them (examples being the UK's The Great British Baking Show and the South Korean series Extraordinary Attorney Woo). And in other cases, Netflix (and some other streamers) break the season up into "chapters" as a way of stretching out the season in order to save money. And then there are the cases such as Apple TV+'s Slow Horses, which produced twelve episodes in one go, which was then split into two six episode "seasons" premiering six months apart.
The truth is that it's not a black-or-white issue. Binging has its place in streaming, particularly with shows that don't have a pre-existing audience. Or, as an Amazon executive told me last week when we were discussing this issue. "Not every F&*^ing show can be marketed like it's The Mandalorian."
ODDS AND SODS
* Apple TV+ announced a number of premiere dates today: season two of The Mosquito Coast premieres on November 4th, season three of Mythic Quest premieres on November 11th, season two of Slow Horses premieres on December 2nd and season two of Little America premieres on December 9th.
* Newsy is being rebranded as Scripps News, beginning on January 1st.
WHAT'S NEW FOR THURSDAY:
Here's a quick rundown of all the new stuff premiering today on TV and streaming:
Call Me Kat Series Premiere (CBS)
CSI Vegas Season Two Premiere (CBS)
Dragon Rescue Riders: Heroes Of The Sky (Peacock)
Ghost Adventures: Devil's Den (Travel)
Ghosts Season Two Premiere (CBS)
Hell's Kitchen Season Premiere (Fox)
Looney Tunes Cartoons Halloween Special (HBO Max)
So Help Me Todd Series Premiere (CBS)
The Empress (Netflix)
Welcome To Flatch (Fox)
Young Sheldon Season Premiere (CBS)
Zatima Series Premiere (BET+)
Click Here to see the list of all of the upcoming premiere dates for the next few months.
SEE YOU FRIDAY!
If you have any feedback, send it along to Rick@AllYourScreens.com and follow me on Twitter @aysrick.