Television is a ubiquitous art form.
Since achieving rapid popularity in American households after World War II, TV has continuously evolved in both technology and content. Although an an estimated 96.7 percent of American households own TVs today, people aren’t as interested in sitting down once a week to catch up with their favorite characters as they once were.
Netflix, which has close to 30 million subscribers, made history this past year when it made web-exclusive series cool.
In February of 2012, Netflix premiered its first Netflix-exclusive series “Lilyhammer”, a dramedy about an American mafioso in witness protection in Norway. The seldom-watched show was treated only as an experiment: Netflix helped finance the project, which aired on traditional television in Norway. Essentially “Lilyhammer” only differed from other TV offerings on Netflix because it was the only access American audiences had to the show.
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In March of 2011, Netflix won the bidding war over HBO for “House of Cards”. Since airing last October, it has received rave reviews and nine Emmy nominations. Netflix has since released five exclusively distributed series, three of which are originals. But if “House of Cards” made streaming cool, “Arrested Development” made it mainstream. The show, which was cancelled in 2006, never gained the audience it had on streaming services. AD’s perfectly timed interwoven jokes and plot lines work better in binge watching than weekly installments. The season four revival of AD boosted Netflix subscriptions and had everybody talking.
“Orange is the New Black” was Netflix’s second original runaway hit and received praise from critics and viewers alike (myself included).
The quality of television has improved drastically since the start of the century. When HBO premiered “The Sopranos” in 1999, it disrupted the status quo that serious drama was worthy only for film. Ever since, HBO and Showtime original series have been commercially and critically successful, forcing the terrestrial networks to keep up. As a result, we were given cultural icons like “LOST”, “24″ and “House”. When AMC got serious about originals too, we were given “Mad Men” and the anxiety-inducing “Breaking Bad“.
Although networks are making efforts toward keeping their audience, they recognize that the future of TV is in streaming. The “big four,” NBC, ABC, FOX and CBS, offer their own apps that allow next-day streaming of their shows. Their apps also encourage second-screen experiences, which allow you to comment on what’s happening in real time with other viewers, but it hasn’t gained popularity simply because a lot of content just isn’t worth talking about and Twitter already has a huge community of viewers discussing television.
The coming fall season shows that networks have a few promising plans. “Hostages”, “The Michael J. Fox Show”, “The Blacklist” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” are just a few examples of shows premiering in the upcoming weeks with original, viable concepts and all-star casts.
Acknowledging the demand for elevated content, “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” chose to take a huge risk this fall by changing the format of the show entirely for its fifteenth season. Season 15 will focus on one story arch throughout the season rather than individual cases self-contained within each episode. Whether streaming or broadcast, viewers today want to follow their characters throughout a journey, rather than find out whodunit at the end of each episode.
The networks do hold one large advantage over streaming services: live broadcasts. “America’s Got Talent” and “The Voice” consistently get high ratings and quickly become trending topics on Twitter. Making the conscious effort to sit down at a specific time to watch a program live as it happens and then talking about it on Twitter makes a world-wide broadcast feel more like a community activity, showing us everyone else’s reaction, similar to sitting in a crowded movie theater. Watching these shows later, either via streaming or DVR, even carries a social stigma, as if you missed the best party of the week.
Other than the presidential debates in 2012, Hulu, which is co-owned by NBC, FOX and ABC, has not aired any live events or shows and Netflix has yet to try. YouTube has several live-streamed events, including select sports, concerts and standup shows, but the performances haven’t attracted a large audience. Perhaps because people don’t want to sit in front of their computers to watch a competition show, but in the world of Apple TV and Chromecast, it can easily become an identical experience.
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Surprisingly cooking shows have developed an interesting approach to melding broadcast and streaming content. Episodes of the Food Network’s “Chopped” are accompanied by “Chopped: After Hours“, an online exclusive where the judges compete in a round of Chopped using the ingredients from one of the baskets from the last episode. This past season of Bravo’s “Top Chef: Masters” included the online series “Battle of the Sous Chefs“, where the Masters’ sous chefs, or partners, competed in a separate competition before each episode to either earn a reward or receive punishment for their chef, depending on the outcome. The numbers for the supplementary content are not available, but online content retains high production value and works seamlessly with the main show.
As our lives become busier, watching TV becomes a chore. It’s simply inconvenient to stop everything to sit down for a show in the middle of the week, so if we’re going to do it, it better be worth it. For the shows that aren’t deemed worthy, streaming services give us, the viewers, the power to control when we watch. As the television industry adapts to the changing playing field, viewers and consumers win. As the industry competes amongst itself to produce better content and improve technology, all we have to do is just sit back, relax and experience stellar entertainment.
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