Technology and the golden age of TV
Don’t read this post, just go watch ‘Horace and Pete’
I just finished watching the finale of “Horace and Pete”, Louis CK’s masterpiece. It’s so fucking good. And sad and funny and lonely and all sorts of humanity.
“Horace and Pete” is, in essence, a 6+ hour dramatic play that has been filmed and delivered as 10 self-contained episodes directly via the internet. I’m not a film critic, read more here and here.
Beyond the content of the show itself, which is, again, fucking good, I find fascinating the very existence of the show, and its channel to its audience. It is so complex, dark, and real. And it illustrates how technology can enhance and enable artistic expression.
Earlier this year, I went to an excellent (and hilarious) panel featuring many of the folks involved with the show Bojack Horseman.
In a response to a question about the state television, show creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg pointed out that the move to streaming has had big impacts on what creators can do with storylines.
In the past, shows came on once a week for a season run. People needed to be home at a certain time and tuned in to catch each episode. No DVR, no streaming.
As a result, producers and writers could not count on the audience knowing all the details in the prior episodes of a season. So the humor was less in the plot but in the situation. Dramatic irony relies on the audience knowing something or suspecting something about a character’s beliefs or intents.
But now, with streaming and bingeing, people watch episodes in order and often close together (or back-to-back). Thus, show creators can go deeper in their stories without having to constantly re-establish context.
Horace and Pete works like a play because while there are intermissions between episodes, each viewer sees the work in a linear, consistent way.
On a macro level, the audience benefits tremendously from streaming — as people get more options, they watch when and how they want. This leads to audience fragmentation, but expands range of profitable artistic expression, and thus higher quality and more desirable content.
The whole idea of over the top television (OTT) changes the relationship between the content creator, the content distributor and the viewer.
In the old broadcast model, content is monetized through advertising. The number of eyeballs is the most relevant metric to a show’s success. So even though NBC used to get very enthusiastic audiences for its shows (E.g., “Community”), it didn’t have close to the numbers of terrible ABC/CBS shows (e.g. “Two and a Half Men”). You know the best part about “Two and a Half Men”? It’s just so fucking easy after a long day. It’s funny. It’s stupid. It doesn’t ask anything from me. But it’s junk food. It works perfectly for broadcast.
In the Netflix model, the goal is to attract and retain a paid monthly user. The company needs to ‘earn’ the monthly subscription by aggregating enough compelling content for each user. And it needs ‘killer apps’ to drive new user adoption and keep people coming back. These are the big properties that it pays to develop — “Orange is the New Black”, “House of Cards”. These are good shows. Not junk food. The Netflix model creates more flexibility to deliver content that customers want where the link between value and monetizing that value is actually much tighter, and therefore more efficient. It realigns the economic model to better artistic expression. That’s important.
Ultimately, the direct publishing model (what Louis is doing) makes the link between value, monetization, and art even stronger — Louis creates incredible art and people pay per episode to consume it. But it only works because Louis has some money in his pocket and can finance it up front and he has a built-in audience based on his fame and past successes.
In fact, this isn’t Louis CK’s first foray into independent film-making and film distribution. Louis started out making independent short films in the late 80s and early 90s. These shorts are very cool and he even brought them to Sundance. But barely anyone has heard of them — what was the plan, for them to run as shorts in little art houses? I mean, that’s fine, but there’s no business there. It is still the case that Amazon and Netflix are not big buyers of Oscar-nominated shorts, but they are generally huge buyers at Sundance. And you can watch a whole bunch of short films on those platforms.
The rise of super high-quality, serialized dramatic televion is a great case on the intersection of technology, business, and art. As technology reduces the cost for us to communicate with each other, we have more capacity to speak. That doesn’t mean only good things will be said. But it means more better things can.
Go and watch Horace and Pete.
