Retro rockets.
Friday, October 30th, 1998
As the last whoo and haw of the campaign trail gave way to the relative quiet of the voting booth, it’s time to stop and give thanks for a moment—thanks that our airwaves are cleansed (give or take a runoff) of those damnable he lied/she lied ads that marked this election year. Yes, our airwaves have been swept clean to make room for—uh-oh, November sweeps promos.
But before we kiss off politics completely, I’ve got to mention a spot that aired once or twice in the last days of the campaign that was a strange, nostalgic breath of fresh air. Libertarian Lieutenant Governor hopeful Lloyd Russell’s spots featured—hey! The old-white-guy candidate his own self, standing in front of a plain blue-sky background, talking to the camera in his best rural Georgia twang. His suit and hair seemed straight out of the WSB newsroom circa 1962 (which is, in fact, from whence he came.) His name, in non-shaky type, sat on the screen for the whole 30 seconds as he said, basically, "Vote for me, I’m the best man for the job, let’s get some things changed." How retro.
And speaking of retro (as in rockets), even though we’ve all heard the word "godspeed’ enough in the last two weeks to last us another 30 years, when a client called me up the other day to tell me that "we are go" for a project I had proposed, I knew that at least for a short while, America has rediscovered NASA chic. Dust off those tattered paperback copies of Tom Wolfe’s "The Right Stuff" (as local stations dust off the soundtrack album from the movie), and play along at home, won’t you? The reason television news has gone astro-crazy over the John Glenn coverage goes beyond nostalgia, patriotism and ratings: it’s a schedulable event. They had time to plan their going overboard, creating fancy promos and deploying team coverage drones across the countryside so that we could see the faces of kids in the high school in Glenn’s home town look around, slightly bored after the launch and say "okay, what next? Is that it?"
And in as about a retro experience as you could get, crowds of folks (well, some folks) wandered in to local appliance stores to watch the shuttle launch in glorious high-definition digital television, the miracle of our age, the future we’ll all be—wait a second, how much are those HDTV sets!? And how little programming will be up on the bitstreamed airwaves for the next five years? Oh. Ohhh. Well, maybe this future can wait.
Although it’s a luxury we can afford to avoid now, for local broadcasters, and their chief engineers in particular, this is crunch time, as they must spend millions—now—updating their technical plants (hey, engineers like spending millions, don’t get me wrong) and, as the prototype digital equipment rolls in, they’re not unlike kids starting a really big and complex model airplane kit. The parts are spread out all over the floor, they don’t all quite fit together, and it takes quite a bit of imagination to see the day when it’s all ready to fly. They are very much duplicating their television forefathers, who put together the first TV stations with a lot of tweaking and jerry-rigging for what was then a few people watching in an appliance store. Retro, indeed.
Unpleasant.
Friday, October 23rd, 1998
Sam Neill has been trapped by MCI Worldcom in a featureless gray room. The only way out, and the only color pouring in, seems to be through some sort of fancy Ethernet connection (one that MCI would be happy to hook you into.) He peers out, smug, confident; his face warmed by the rainbow of the outside world. Moments later, a guy who I almost recognize is marching around on enormous monochromatic teeth talking about the salubrious effects of Listerine, and a spectacular bottle of bondi-blue mouthwash is the only color in the scene. And then we’re treated to the gray-ghostly corridors of the Georgia Capitol, as a gravelly voice tells us that Mark Taylor is somehow more respectable than Mitch Skandalakis. He must be: Taylor’s the one in color.
Welcome to Pleasantville. Welcome to how television talks to us these days. It has become an accepted, almost mundane component of television commercials, part of the learned vocabulary: buy our product, live a more colorful life in a vivid, spectral world. From TV’s earliest days, when "brought to you in living color" signified extra effort and expense to keep you ("the home viewer") entertained, through the early 80s, when MTV rediscovered black-and-white and pronounced it "art," television’s practitioners have been controlling your horizontal, controlling your vertical, but mostly, controlling your mind through the judicious manipulation of color.
Maybe I’m especially aware of this as autumn creeps down from the mountains, pumping up and then draining our surroundings of hues, but color can carry its own message.
The somewhat clever conceit of the new movie "Pleasantville" is that the black-and-white world of 50s sitcoms represents a sort of bottled, remembered, wafer-thin perfection, a virginal state of pre-discovery that we can guarantee won’t stay that way once the characters take a bite out of a very red apple. And just as television stepped past "Leave it to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best" into the day-glo shades of "Batman" and "Laugh-In," it discarded set-piece innocence, picked up and then set aside sixties and seventies idealism, and broke a taboo or two along the way. The pastel shades of the 80s (in stereo, where available) yielded to street-edgy 90s color shot with a shaky camera-hand, and we find ourselves, well, here at century’s end.
Now advertisers, designers, and television producers have a full palette to work with. Go ahead, we’ve told them, supersaturate the picture or drain it of chroma completely—it’s your choice. They can tell stories with the dated sensabilities of "Touched by an Angel," or they can paste together bright ripped hunks of colorful construction paper into something grotesquely funny like "South Park." The limits are off. The choices are myriad. Censorship is a thing of the past. There shouldn’t be any excuse for mediocrity, right?
Well, that’s the problem with comfortable theories.
Even armed with all of the above, I can’t even begin to explain some of the stuff that’s passing for television. Not even here—on the printed page, in glorious, unsmudged black-and-white.
Keri is so very.
Friday, October 16th, 1998
Maybe it’s me. But there’s something inherently manipulative in the ad campaign—or just the intensity of the campaign—for the new WB young angst program "Felicity". First of all, of course, there’s that WB announcer guy—Don LaFontaine—the same voice we hear in countless movie trailers and, hilariously, in a parody of those trailers where he pops up behind the counter of a Hollywood Video store to narrate the plot of a movie to a customer. He just seems to care so… much…about making us believe that "Felicity" is the next hit we’ll take…into our hearts.
His intensity and caring pale, of course, next to the pale Keri Russell, who seems so very ready to show us the importance of being earnest. Although in fairness, compared to the gamut of facial twitches that Calista Flockhart uses to communicate complexity of thought, Ms. Russell wins the prize for nuance and subtlety in her acting. But are you watching "Dawson’s Creek" and whatever-the-heck-that-is-Beach and "Felicity" for the acting? Or are you going for a quick pang of recognition, a remembrance of insecurities past? An Altoid of emotion after a long day’s work.
But c’mon, don’t you feel just the slightest bit…targeted? As if beyond that two way mirror, shadowy demographic marketers are adjusting the nuances of the show’s lighting, the percentage of hair-curl, the background sadness of the string section for maximum impact based on their observations…of you. Don, give us just a little more tug when you say "this fall…on the WB." And call Paula Cole up to see if she has something for this show. (I have this image of Ms. Cole maniacally cranking out song after song to keep up with the WB’s new programming. Don’t wanna wait, indeed.) Keri, 10 percent more pout, please.
I think the folks deep within the vast Disney and Time Warner empires (it’s interesting how a tiny handful of media companies intersect to come up with this stuff) have worked hard to craft this piece’o’television. And they were proud to hire a 19-year-old writer—a prodigy!—to create several of the show’s episodes, because, like, she’s lived though it, you know? The quote in Entertainment Weekly was "In many ways, I am Felicity."
Well, yes, except then we hear in the L.A. Times and on Entertainment Tonight last week that 19-year-old Riley Weston is, in fact a 32-year-old actress who, because she looks young, has always lied about her age to get acting jobs. It’s acceptable to do this as an actress, she says. But when Disney is promoting you as the voice of your generation, well, now Disney says "we trusted her as a colleague and are saddened by her dishonesty."
So what part of the process of the making and marketing of "Felicity" isn’t dishonest?
What part of television isn’t, in that way, dishonest?
* * * * *
By the way, the evil spirit of Bill Gates who lives inside my word processor, judging my every cobbled noun, would prefer the name "Chalets Flowchart" to Calista Flockhart. Hey, not bad!
* * * * *
Pants on fire.
Friday, October 9th, 1998
I stand before you today an optimistic man. Optimistic that if things go far enough there will, eventually, somewhere way down the ladder of messed-up-ness, be a point where people say "Enough." "We’re sick of this." Or at least, "This isn’t working, let’s try something else."
That’s kind of an all-purpose lead-in to a media column in the 90s, but what triggers my basement-level optimism today is the (gosh, isn’t it exciting) state political campaign, especially as it plays out on Atlanta television screens.
It goes something like this:
"What Guy Millner says about Roy Barnes is just plain wrong."
"Roy Barnes says this about Guy Millner, but he’s a liar."
"When Paul Coverdell says this about Michael Coles, he’s distorting the facts."
"Michael Coles is lying about what Paul Coverdell has done."
"Guy Millner’s commercial about Roy Barnes’s lying is, in itself, a lie."
"Roy Barnes is lying about Guy Millner’s commercial accusing Barnes of lying about Millner’s commercial."
Okay, okay. What have we learned from these carefully-produced messages? We’ve learned that candidates are willing to spend millions of dollars of what are, after all contributions-other people’s money-to call each other a liar over, over, and over again. That’s it. End of content. Oh there’s a few sideswipes, like "he’s more liberal," and "no, I’m not liberal, he’s the real liberal," but those are really just variations on a theme.
All these guys are saying is: "the other guy lies." (Aren’t you glad I used my years of media experience to decipher this for you?) And we’ve been hearing this for months, crammed in to almost any local spot availability on any Atlanta station that has an audience worth annoying.
In the age of the remote control, I can’t understand why they thing these things have any impact at all. After seeing them once, anyone’s remote finger is sensitive enough to yank the viewer away from the spots, to the relative safety of an episode of Friends (especially since WATL and WXIA, as a public service, make sure that an episode of Friends is airing somewhere in town, 24 hours a day.) We’re gone at the first sight of the fake Georgia geezer lady with a bar of soap. When a really unflattering image of Michael Coles hits the screen, we’re elsewhere in a 30th of a second.
So they spend this money-big chunks on producing the ads, huge chunks on paying stations to air the ads-and we don’t watch. But the same sweaty advisors who tell them to make the ads parse the polls and tell the candidates that yes, the numbers are moving in response to the ads. They really are. It’s because of the ads, I tell you, so let’s make some more.
That’s why I say this has to be close to rock-bottom, the nadir of political advertising on television, doesn’t it? Won’t we wake up early next year and say "What have we done?" and completely overhaul the way people who run for office tell us about their issues and ideas?
I mean, what other choice is there? Uh…don’t answer that.
Your TV friends.
Wednesday, October 7th, 1998
WAGA excuse me, FOX 5 Atlanta is now running a promo where an announcer runs through their daunting array of talk show hosts and other syndicated presenters as if he’s making rapid-fire introductions at a genteel Southern social: “Joe, Sally. Sally, Jerry. Jerry, Judy. Judy, Rosie” Everyone sit down and have some lemonade, why don’t you. One of the amazing powers of television is its apparent familiarity, where it seems to the viewer that he or she really is on a first-name basis with folks who tape their programs in Chicago or New York. As if you found yourself buying bagels in the store next to Rosie O’Donnell you’d be able to strike up a friendly chat, neighbor-to-neighbor. As if.
Tom Brokaw tells us “I’ll see you back here tomorrow night,” as the camera pulls back from his image towering over Times Square. See you back where exactly, Tom? Times Square? Thirty Rockefeller Plaza? Outside your lovely Upper East Side brownstone, on the stoop? Or in front of that fake newsroom backdrop where you deliver a bit of news in and around promos for CNBC and MSNBC?
And of course, none of them ever do see us tomorrow. They see the lens, the teleprompter, the bored floor manager. When my wife gets particularly exorcised about something someone has said on television, be it a factual error, an anthropological faux pas, or a poor choice of wager on Jeopardy, she loudly tells our Sony off, prompting me to say “just a second, let me flip on our TV’s special microphone so they’ll actually be able to hear you.”
As if.
The best producers and performers do create a comfortable home for us in a hard-to-define space somewhere between our heads and theirs. It’s a space that doesn’t require pictures-it can be that place where the Morning X trio shares coffee with you or a Turner Field of the mind, painted there by a few well-chosen words from Skip Caray. The comfort generated feels real. The familiarity feels comfortable.
So it makes me wonder on the other hand about some of the choices producers and scenic designers make when they decide that we’d be most at home hearing about the news from rooms decked out somewhere between The Overchromed Boardroom from Hell and the bridge of the Enterprise-D. (And who are those well-dressed young people in Aeron chairs sitting in a half-circle around Peter Jennings surfing the web while he does the heavy lifting of news delivery?) How do these images mean news?
Sometimes familiarity is just a shortcut. Why do the sets for revivals of The Hollywood Squares and Love Connection (yes, they’re back, we couldn’t get by without them) look likewell, the sets of Hollywood Squares and Love Connection? The unfortunate answer is that Those Who Decide are afraid we’d be uncomfortable anywhere else. It’s a visual shorthand, an easy answer, a way to avoid tedious re-introductions to old concepts.
Peter Marshall, meet Tom Bergeron. Whoopi, meet Paul Lynde. And come over here and say Hi to Jerry. And Judy.
Can I get you anything?
TV News a la carte.
Friday, September 25th, 1998
I’m laptopping this week from San Antonio, the brutally hot-and-muggy site of the annual grand bazaar of broadcast news. The Radio and Television News Directors Association conference has a collection of seminars and speakers that gives it a thin veneer of legitimacy, but the get-together really centers around an exhibition of the stuff sold in the name of “improving” newscasts.
So, get out your checkbook:
You can pick up a new news set here, all gleaming chrome and rich wood, for fifty grand and up (WSB’s new set was way, way more than that), or you can buy a Forward Looking Infrared Radar for your news helicopter-and if you don’t have a chopper, they’re had at the RTNDA for a price, too.
But why buy a real set when something upwards of six figures will get you a virtual set, changeable at the click of a mouse, always perfectly lit and scuff-free?
Shop for satellite trucks in aisle 1, and duck inside a Sony booth crammed with cameras and tape machines in aisle 2. Automation systems and robotic cameras, sit next to weather computers that will spin you sickeningly in three dimensions around the meteorological disturbance du jour. (Be thankful: you’ve been spared the experience of listening to Texas-accented weatherfolk trying to pronounce “Georges..”)
But transcending all the pricey hardware is the real commodity: programming. I’m talking reporting, features, and even those sweeps week specials that are poured identically into newscasts around the country.
Pick up customized live shots a la carte from Fox NewsEdge (they say it’s “the feed you need”) or the enormous CNN Newssource booth plopped in the exact center of the exhibition floor. For a price, you can get reporters you’ve never heard of reciting stale facts from the wires while they stand in front of the crashed plane, bus, or Presidency. A quick packaged report, and then the moment news directors are really paying for-when the guy at the crash site-live!-answers questions and tosses “back to you, Amanda and Russ.” And moments later, he’s saying “back to you, Stacey and Tom” to some other place, some other audience fooled by this televised slight-of-hand.
News Directors, faces painted with the anxiety of job insecurity, ask the sales person to make them just as cool as KCBS, or to get that WSVN kind of impact. Deals are made with a snappy exchange of cards and email addresses, and yet another market (we all live in a market, y’know) looks a little bit more like everyplace else. Think it’s only in Atlanta that stations are “live, local, and latebreaking,” “dedicated, determined, and dependable”, with “coverage you can count on”?
You know better.
But do the NDs? As fewer and fewer people watch local newscasts, more and more of what is poured into these broadcasts is pre-chewed, unoriginal, over-consulted, and if you ask me, unwatchable. So fewer people watch.
The programmers of television news might catch on to the pattern here. Sometime.
But until then, and for now, we’re live in San Antonio. I’m your name here, Eyewitness News. Back to…uh…back to you.
The past future of television.
Friday, September 18th, 1998
I watched a tape of the future of television the other day–but it was an old tape of an old future. My friend had been to a reunion for employees of the first experiment in interactive television, and he brought back a dusty VHS filled with 1977-vintage optimism (and fashions).
They called it Qube (pronounced as if they had meant to type a ‘C’), and it was run by what is now Time Warner out of a remodeled appliance store in Columbus, Ohio. It would qualify as mediocre cable today–offering an then-unprecedented 30 channels of television. Ten ‘premium’, or pay-per-views. Ten local and regional channels. And since there was no national programming to speak of– HBO was a newborn, and WTBS (then called WTCG) snuck into a few cable homes via satellite–the Qubians spent what was then a bundle concocting hours of original, often-live, local programming to fill up those last ten blank spaces.
Imagine how stunning this was at the time–thirty channels! Why, that was, like, unlimited choice! Endless entertainment! This ancient tape showed interviews with experts who sagely predicted that this might just be too much of a good thing, that people couldn’t cope with that many channels of television. But heads didn’t explode, at least as far as I remember. Those same predictors added, by the way, that no matter how popular cable became, it would never make much of a dent in the audience share of the big three networks.
This bounty of choice was dialed up by proto-couch-potato Ohioans on a chunky remote control the size of a fat Bible, wired, yes, wired to a large set-top box. But what was cool, what made this must-have TV was a row of five buttons down the right side that gave viewers–gasp!–the ability to “talk back to their television set.” At any time, the hosts of “Columbus Alive!” or “Mr. Qubesumer” (terrifyingly and unquestionably Clark Howard’s direct ancestor) could ask the viewers of America’s Most Generic City their opinions on…well, how they liked their eggs. “Touch now!”, the flashing screen commanded, and moments later, the breathless hosts reported that 32% like them sunny side up, and…gee, it’s hard to see why this two way TV never caught on.
The real irony is, in and around the “Touch now” crap, there was actual, watchable (if uneven) locally-produced programming, including a channel for kids that evolved into Nickelodeon, sports coverage and local politics. It was stuff that hasn’t been consulted into a national melange that looks the same whether you’re in Georgia, Oregon, or Kansas. The local programming isn’t why they did it–the two-way features gave them a great excuse to wire the city into the impulse-buy heaven of pay-per-view, and in the days before video stores, that was a very attractive deal.
But it did fill a void, and here and now, in our city, amidst dozens of channels of indigestible “choice”, I’d touch any button you’ve got for some local programming that feels like here…like us, like how we like our eggs.
