Too Much TV: Your TV Talking Points For Tuesday, July 26th, 2022

Why isn't my favorite classic TV available for streaming?

Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Tuesday July 26th, 2022.

WHY ISN'T MY FAVORITE CLASSIC TV SHOW AVAILABLE FOR STREAMING?
The last couple of days have brought a new cycle of stories about one of my favorite topics: why so many classic TV shows aren't available for streaming.

The "music rights" excuse is the most common reason cited and while that is sometimes true, the reasons are often more nuanced than that.

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 after a cable deal was finalized. There are thousands of hours of television that 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 what they perceive as a niche audience.

But what about the music rights issue? It's difficult and often expensive to clear well-known songs and that means that a number of older shows are hung up due to music clearance rights. That'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. But music rights issues also affect a range of shows less likely shows, ranging from Bachelor Father to Harper Valley PTA and some of the episodes of Name Of The Game.

And sometimes the music clearance issues are more mundane. Many of the great 1960s and early 1970s detective and adventure shows from Warner Brothers are 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 costs of the editing.

And there are also a number of shows that are tied up by other rights disputes. Part of the rights are owned by a long-defunct production company 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.

<side note: speaking of Homicide: Life On The Streets, check out this piece about a court case that claimed John Wells had essentially plagiarized Simon's book when he created a show of his own>

But I started this discussion with music rights and that seems to be the big hang-up in streaming nearly all 1990s-era dramas. That was the time when the television production style shifted from generic music to needle-dropping contemporary tracks. And at the time, no one considered the challenges of that decision for secondary markets, ranging from syndication and physical sales to streaming. It's an issue that obviously affects music heavy shows ranging from Northern Exposure and Ed to American Dreams. But because the practice was so widespread, it's nearly impossible to find a drama of that era that doesn't have a half dozen or more songs that need to be licensed or replaced. And for most streamers, that cost isn't worth whatever audience the shows would generate.

Not that it can't be done. HBO Max somehow managed to get all of the rights together to it could stream the series run of Cold Case, complete with the original music. Each episode had a theme to the music tracks and you can stream episodes featuring multiple tracks from high-profile musicians such as Bruce Springsteen and The Rolling Stones.

So 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 on most missing shows.

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. Crackle has been licensing quite a bit of it, but they are hampered by budgets and Sony's apparent hap hazard decision-making when it comes to deciding which old shows they'll license. 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.

WEEKLY WHIP WATCH REPORTS

'THE VIEW' TAPS ALYSSA FARAH AS ITS NEW CONSERVATIVE PANELIST
Being the conservative member of The View's panel is a somewhat thankless job. More often than not, you are both beat up by the rest of the cast for your views while at the same time, conservative viewers don't think you're conservative enough.

But those challenges don't mean that it's not a highly coveted job, so it's worth noting that Variety is reporting that Alyssa Farah Griffin is in "final talks" to join the show on a regular basis:

Multiple sources tell Variety that ABC executives have chosen Farah Griffin, 33, to join “The View” for its 26th season, which kicks off in the fall. She has sat at the Hot Topics table regularly this season, auditioning for one of the most high-profile jobs on TV.

Meghan McCain served as the conservative co-host of “The View” from 2017 through 2021, bringing a rating surge as she got into heated debates with the other co-hosts during the Trump era. Before that, Elisabeth Hasselbeck changed TV in 2003 as the first Republican arguing about the headlines of the day in daytime TV.

But Farah's choice could be controversial, given her former role as the Trump White House director of strategic communications:

Farah Griffin’s appointment to “The View” could be controversial on both sides, as she worked for Trump, only disavowing him after the Jan. 6 insurrection — as she began her television career. “There was a brief period where I, you know, I drank the Kool-Aid,” she told Vanity Fair.

On social media, some fans have threatened to boycott the show if she’s selected. According to reports, comedian Wanda Sykes recently dropped out as a guest on “The View” because she didn’t want to sit at the same table with Farah Griffin.

AN VFX ARTIST EXPLAINS WHAT IT'S LIKE TO WORK FOR MARVEL
Spoiler alert: it's not fun.

This piece in Vulture is great and it lays out the lack of support and tight deadlines that leaves co-workers "next to me, break down, and start crying. I’ve had people having anxiety attacks on the phone."

There are a lot of causes for the problems, but I suspect these two paragraphs will be the ones most discussed inside the industry:

The main problem is most of Marvel’s directors aren’t familiar with working with visual effects. A lot of them have just done little indies at the Sundance Film Festival and have never worked with VFX. They don’t know how to visualize something that’s not there yet, that’s not on set with them. So Marvel often starts asking for what we call “final renders.” As we’re working through a movie, we’ll send work-in-progress images that are not pretty but show where we’re at. Marvel often asks for them to be delivered at a much higher quality very early on, and that takes a lot of time. Marvel does that because its directors don’t know how to look at the rough images early on and make judgment calls. But that is the way the industry has to work. You can’t show something super pretty when the basics are still being fleshed out.

The other issue is, when we’re in postproduction, we don’t have a director of photography involved. So we’re coming up with the shots a lot of the time. It causes a lot of incongruity. A good example of what happens in these scenarios is the battle scene at the end of Black Panther. The physics are completely off. Suddenly, the characters are jumping around, doing all these crazy moves like action figures in space. Suddenly, the camera is doing these motions that haven’t happened in the rest of the movie. It all looks a bit cartoony. It has broken the visual language of the film.

ODDS AND SODS
* HBO has given a series order to the limited series The Palace. It will be directed and executive produced by Stephen Frears and showrun, written by, and executive produced by Will Tracy. Kate Winslet will star and executive produce. 

* Peacock has given a straight-to-series order to a gladiator drama series based on Daniel Mannix’s nonfiction book "Those About to Die."

* The reports from earlier today that Tony Dow, an actor and director best known for his role as older brother Wally Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver, died on Tuesday, are apparently incorrect. Some news outlets are now reporting that he is in hospice care.

WHAT'S NEW FOR TUESDAY
Here's a quick rundown of all the new stuff premiering today on TV and streaming:

D14ries Series Premiere (Netflix)
Extinct Of Alive Jaws Of Alaska (Discovery)
Impractical Jokers Shark Week Spectacular (Discovery)
Jaws Vs. Kraken (Discovery)
MH 370: Mystery Of The Lost Flight (History)
Never Seen Again (Paramount+)
Not Just A Girl (Netflix)
Pigs Vs. Shark (Discovery)
Raging Bulls (Discovery)
Santa Evita (Hulu)
Street Food USA Season Premiere (Netflix)
Whitney Cummings: Jokes (Netflix)

Click Here to see the list of all of the upcoming premiere dates for the next few months.

SEE YOU WEDNESDAY!

If you have any feedback, send it along to Rick@AllYourScreens.com and follow me on Twitter @aysrick.