Too Much TV: Your TV Talking Points For Wednesday, October 6th, 2021

I am back...

Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Wednesday, October 6th, 2021. I'm writing this from the Twin Cities, where AllYourScreens HQ is trying not to obsess about the 200 hours or so of screeners still waiting in my inbox.

PROGRAMMING NOTES
As I warned, some medical issues in the family prevented me from doing the newsletter for Monday and Tuesday. If you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen a couple of mentions about my son and a minor-ish heart procedure he had done on Monday. It went incredibly well and he is recovering quickly. And I am back on the newsletter beat, beginning today. Although I am easing back into it slowly.

THE FUTURE OF INTERACTIVE AT NETFLIX
The Streamable has an enlightening interview with Director Ben Simms, who discusses the latest Netflix interactive film Escape the Undertaker:

Simms also addresses “ragequitting,” which is something those in the gaming space have to consider, but not really filmmakers. “It’s a little bit of a psychological game with the viewer too because you’re trying to anticipate what they are going to get upset about or what they’re not going to get upset about. And you know, one thing that’s been interesting with it a lot is people just like being in control, right?”

“So sometimes you might think they’re going to make a decision within the interactive that’s logical and makes sense, and sometimes they just want to torture the character. It’s interesting trying to guess what they’ll do next. As long as it’s entertaining I don’t know that it matters but it’s just fun to sort of play that game with the viewer too. You don’t get a chance to do that with any other type of content aside from a video game.”

I have been arguing that Netflix's interactive projects are a really under-appreciated approach, although the end results have been creatively mixed. It's interesting that Simms did the You Vs Wild interactives for Netflix, which I haven't always enjoyed. But for what it's worth, I thought Escape The Undertaker was a ton of fun, even if you don't know much about wrestling.

WHY NBC'S 'LAW AND ORDER' REVIVAL ISN'T A PEACOCK ORIGINAL
Despite the flashy headline, this Hollywood Reporter piece doesn't actually offer much new, although it does include this statement, which tells you all you need to know about NBCU's strategy for Peacock:

“The Law & Order brand reaches different audiences across all of our platforms, and our goal is to bring the largest number of viewers possible to the show,” said Lisa Katz, president of entertainment scripted content at NBCUniversal TV and streaming. “This strategy enables us to leverage the broad reach of the network while also making the show incredibly accessible to all of its fans on Peacock. It isn’t a case of ‘either/or’ but rather ‘yes, and.’”

Yes, and...these types of moves are why Peacock continues to struggle to become a first-tier streaming service. Say what you will about Jason Kilar's decision to move a number of Warner movies to day-and-date releases on HBO Max, he was willing to take a massive short-term hit to boost subscriber numbers and cement the image of the streaming service as a must-have destination. Comcast management has refused to do that, trying to have it both ways by keeping the best projects for their legacy media businesses and sending the B-team to Peacock. That certainly optimizes the short-term revenue stream, but at what cost to the long-term success of Peacock. Comcast executives seem to believe that live sports can be the savior of Peacock. Which seems overly optimistic.

IT'S THAT TIME OF YEAR
The nature of my job involves watching a lot of television and depending on the show, that can sometimes feel more like a chore than an opportunity to be entertained. So I have a few random shows I record and watch when I want to just ride the couch and turn off my brain. A couple of them are the NatGeo shows Wicked Tuna: Outer Banks and Life Below Zero, both of which are in the middle of their seasons. But recording them can be a chore, since NatGeo airs not just a new episode of the season each week. There are can be as many as eight or more filler shows, all of them labeled "new" by NatGeo. There are clip shows, "enhanced" episodes, ten-minute "first look" episodes, episodes built around one of the cast. None of which I want to see.

I've been told that some networks do this because they've discovered that a percentage of the audience will then watch the unrequested episodes just because they are there. But this DVR cramming is an incredibly annoying practice, particularly for the millions of Americans who have limited DVR space.

Discovery has a similar love of DVR cramming, although it takes a slightly different approach. Instead of setting random extra episodes as "new," Discovery sticks new episodes of shows such as Deadliest Catch inside a two or three-hour block that appears to your DVR as if it is one episode. So viewers are then forced to fast forward to the point where their target episode is hidden.

And we won't even talk about the nightmare that will infect your DVR if you are ever foolish enough to add History's Secrets Of Oak Island to your record list.

I LOVE A LONGSHOT FAN EFFORT AS MUCH AS THE NEXT PERSON
Change.org is filled with online petitions asking for all sorts of crazy TV ideas. But of all the ones I've seen recently, this one is pretty far out there:

That being said, it would also be pretty funny. Although given that fewer than 20 people have signed the petition so far, the request seems unlikely to be granted.

SPEAKING OF MUSIC
Apparently Christopher "Ride Like The Wind" Cross is not a fan of the ABC series Bachelor In Paradise:

IN SOME WAYS, ALL REPORTING IS THE SAME
The new Julia Ioffe piece on Puck about the state of the infrastructure bill and how it is being covered in the media. But reading these two paragraphs reminded me that a lot of these criticisms could also be levied at media reporters and the way they cover their industry:

I’ve always been amazed that American journalists write about politics the same way they write about baseball: the obsession with numbers and historical trivia, the straining to find tiny moments of what passes for drama in an inherently slow and boring game. I guess it makes sense, since most political journalists love baseball—as does much of the city’s political class. I personally hate it—and find a lot of American political coverage unreadable. (Sorry, friends.) 

The Washington ecosystem of political journalism rewards both a comfort down among the weeds and the dramatization of the blow-by-blow, the hour-by-hour of what are actually pretty standard negotiations. On the print side, the deadlines are relentless and the tiniest scooplet is perfect fodder for the ravenous maw of the content machine. (Twitter also doesn’t help.) It’s hard to look up from the grind and see anything much further than tomorrow or the closest election, let alone the cosmic ramifications of the thing you’re writing about. And at many more traditional outlets, the old notions of objectivity hold sway—nothing is good or bad, it just is, so if there’s a back-and-forth, that’s what you show. The context and analysis are reserved for a different set of journalists in the newsroom. 

And I find myself often being critical of the same tendencies in the entertainment press. There are a lot of "think" pieces that are really not much more than trying to spin a story out of nothing. How many breathless "Is Netflix considering advertising?" pieces have you seen over the past few months? Or pieces that argue one round of weekend box office numbers means that "movie theaters are back!" Too often there isn't a lot of context or the context is just ignored, because it gets in the way of a good headline. As someone who writes about the stuff regularly, I have begun to rely on the opinions of a select few reporters and analysts, because most of the other people are just writing for the audience response.

ODDS AND SODS
* Here are five successful rock bands from the 1970s that you're probably forgotten.

* Technical problems continue to plague the UK's Channel 4, which meant some fans missed parts of this week's episode of the Great British Bake-Off.

* HBO Max unveils its European roll-out dates across Europe.

SEE YOU THURSDAY

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