Too Much TV: Your TV Talking Points For Tuesday, January 11th, 2022
The TCAs are back...virtually, that is.
Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Tuesday, January 11th, 2022. I'm writing this from the Twin Cities, where AllYourScreens HQ is preparing for the TCAs, which are again being held virtually. It kicks off today with the first of two days with ABC, followed by Fox and wrapping the week with Friday's Disney-branded networks. The virtual TCAs will go on and off through the end of February.
IN THE CATEGORY OF NOT ANSWERING THE QUESTION YOU'RE ASKED
As I write this, I'm listening to a press call with Craig Erwich, President, Hulu Originals and ABC Entertainment and a couple things jump out me. He was of course asked the "How long can Hulu exist as a stand-alone service?" question, which he declined to answer. This is one those questions that is being asked not because the reporter expects an answer. But because it provides a nice quote and peg for a "Erwich declines to discuss Hulu's future" article. I realize that Hulu being rolled into Disney+ at some point is the pet theory of just about every media reporter, but there are a couple of big issues standing in the way of that happening.
The first is not just the challenges of integrating Hulu's massive catalog, but it's live TV service. The reporter asking the question suggested Hulu could be a tab on Disney+ similar to the ones for Marvel or Star Wars content. The big difference is that those tabs only contain a couple of dozen titles, as opposed to the thousands of titles currently included on Hulu.
There is also the complication of the Comcast stake in Hulu, especially given that Comcast executives have recently been stating that they are no longer in a rush to sell off their stake and/or pull all of the NBCU content from Hulu. Comcast likes that revenue stream and short of overpaying Comcast to go away, Disney can't make Comcast liquidate Hulu anytime. And we won't get into the question of whether it makes sense to shut down a business with millions of subscribers and fold it into a Disney+ tab. Which would also have the unintended consequence of forcing a rate hike on Disney+ subscribers.
It's not a sexy approach, but there are some good business reasons for Disney to continue its bundle of separate streaming services for as long as it can.
Erwich was also asked several times about original content spend at Hulu and whether the service would be ramping up its pipeline of original material in the next several years. He deflected the question entirely, opting to discuss how Hulu's marketing and willingness to focus on quality over quantity is a net positive. So I suppose the answer to the question is "No, the amount being spent at Hulu for original content won't be increasing significantly in the coming year."
IS STREAMING ACTUALLY A GOOD BUSINESS?
Ryan Faughnder wonders in the L.A. Times Wide Shot newsletter if it's really a good idea for media companies to make the shift to streaming. His core point seems to be that the competitive nature of the business means that streamers will be forced to continue spending large amounts of money for new content for the foreseeable future:
“The truth about content spending for media companies looking to make [direct-to-consumer] pivots is there is no real end in sight,” Nathanson wrote. “Whereas media companies before could only program around limited linear time slots during the day as well as their own studios’ release strategies, thanks to the unlimited, endless potential of content on streaming services, this level of spending should continue to ramp for any company that can afford to compete.”
The big expenditures put pressure on profits, even among those with the strongest subscriber numbers. Increased spending by Netflix, which is expected to deploy $19 billion on content in 2022 (up 10% from the prior year), will continue to weigh on cash flow. Nathanson estimates that Netflix’s free cash flow margin will shrink to 2% in its current fiscal year, though it should steadily rise in the future.
It's true that billions is going to be spent on streaming content and that isn't great for the bottom line of any of the streamers. But that's almost beside the point. It's not as if any major media company could opt out of the streaming business, even if it wanted to. The audience is moving elsewhere and the streaming business is still relatively new. You can't decide five years from now that you want to launch a streaming service, consumer preferences will be set at that point and the cost of entry will be too high.
Sure, it would be wonderful if you could build a streaming business without spending the money necessary to be competitive. But I think the lesson that services like Paramount+ haven't yet learned is that the only way to be truly successful is to spend money and forgo short-term profits to build market share. Being a content arms dealer or spending just the bare minimum to get by leaves you with the worst of both worlds: a streaming business just large enough to bleed money without providing the growth needed to make money in the medium-to-long term.
SPEAKING OF TOPICS I AM BORED WITH RIGHT NOW
I am officially at the point where I am past bored with the "is binging or an episode a week a better release strategy?" The answer is "it depends on the show," but that is the type of nuanced-yet-accurate take that is whatever the opposite is of clickbait.
So the various entertainment and trade publications continue to crank out think pieces rehashing the topic, because readers will inevitably click on the story. The latest example of this reporting genre is the piece by Vulture's Alison Willmore and Kathryn VanArendonk, who ask the question "Is Week-To-Week TV Winning After All?" The answer is "sometimes," but that's not quite their take on the topic:
HBO’s Mare of Easttown definitely accrued an audience and urgency over its seven-episode run, The Mandalorian was an old-fashioned serial in ways that weren’t just about its aesthetic, and Succession has swept more and more viewers up in its horse race of horrible people. Were we too quick to accept that binge-viewing is the future of television? Are we tipping back toward the way things were?
The problem with this take is it ignores the very real fact that what all of these shows have in common is that they are very good. Plenty of other scripted streaming shows are also being released on a weekly basis that no one cares about. And there are plenty of shows that are released all at once that still somehow manage to gain cultural traction (like Squid Game). For those rare well-made and layered shows that are worth slowly breaking down, a weekly release schedule works. But it's foolish to extrapolate the experience of Mare of Easttown or The Mandalorian to the streaming industry as a whole.
Then we come to the real crux of the issue for a lot of entertainment journalists, which I find pretty amusing:
I am old enough, and have been doing this long enough, to remember some of the earliest Netflix binge seasons — House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black. They got plenty of attention, but the trouble of the binge season, which is obvious in a kind of amorphous way to lots of viewers, was instantly very clear to people writing about TV at the time because there was a simple pragmatic problem: When do you post the recaps? Do you put them up all at once? Do you drag them out over a couple days? A week? How do you deal with posts about spoilers and endings? When is fair game?
That’s an extremely tiny problem for a small group of people, but it’s not hard to see the way it magnifies a much broader problem for the binge as a release model. I remember thinking that eventually we’d figure out a norm, a socially accepted rhythm for how and when to talk about all-at-once season releases. And we … never did. Sure, we’ve been muddling along okay, and lots of binge seasons have still become genuine TV phenomena over the last several years (Stranger Things! Selling Sunset!). But once we gave up enforced, serial audience synchrony, we never figured out how to get it back. We never found a way to replace the way weekly releases can shape conversations, hold people’s attention for more than a weekend at a time, and establish a communal experience. Serialization as a form is not just dividing something into small parts; it’s about harnessing those installments to the audience’s own, extra-fictional experience of time. When TV is serialized, the whole audience gets to live alongside it for a while.
But here's the thing. There are a lot of very good TV shows (the majority of shows, in fact) that will never have shared cultural experiences, even if the streaming service released one episode a month. And while the cultural experience for bingeing shows is different, this also feels like a generational problem to me. Along the lines of "I miss when music fans would listen to the entire album as the artist intended." Yes, there is some validity to that approach, but all art - music or television - is constantly evolving and so is the way it is consumed.
ODDS AND SODS
* ABC has renewed Station 19 for a sixth season.
* Hulu has renewed The Great, from Tony McNamara, for a 10-episode, third season.
TWEET OF THE DAY
WHAT'S NEW FOR TUESDAY
Here's a quick rundown of all the new stuff premiering today on TV and streaming:
American Masters: Ailey (PBS)
Dollface (Hulu)
I Am Shauna Rae Series Premiere (TLC)
NAOMI Series Premiere (The CW)
Spycraft Series Premiere (Science)
Street Outlaws: Fastest In America Season Premiere (Discovery)
Superman & Lois Season Two Premiere (The CW)
Teen Mom: Family Reunion Series Premiere (MTV)
Teen Mom: Girls Night In Series Premiere (MTV)
The Colony (Netflix)
The Kings Of Napa Series Premiere (OWN)
Wipeout Season Premiere (TBS)
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.