Goodbye. The revolution has been televised.
Televised Revolution lived too long. So now I must kill it.
It was Batman’s secret identity, ‘Clark Kent’ that did it.
Reading that in a blurb review of a Batman film in The Courier Mail really bothered me. It was broadly known pop cultural knowledge, but the mistake was lazy. Why couldn’t newspapers and magazines understand that TV and pop culture, broadly, was actually pretty serious business?
This was firmly in my mind as I sat in a tent at the Brisbane Writers Festival in 2004 listening to ex-ABC chief Brian Johns and some academics talk about the rise of blogging and new media publishing. “Why not me,” I asked myself while thinking back on that silly Clark Kent gaffe that should have been caught by a copy editor.
So, through Televised Revolution I started writing about TV. And then podcasting about TV. And then radio broadcasting about TV. And streaming video about TV. I even made a streaming video game show about TV at one stage. It was a lot of talk.
Televised Revolution: From birth to its inevitable death
The original plan was for Televised Revolution to publish smart and interesting news stories about television. This was in 2004, so it was very much with broadcast TV in mind. My vision was pretty close to what David Knox started just a few years later with his excellent site TV Tonight. The difference was that Knox wasn’t as lazy as I was and he was starting from a base of having better connections and he lived in a city where there was actually TV being produced. I was in Brisbane where the only media at the time was The Courier Mail, and the evening TV news. Things aren’t that much different today.
So, I launched Televised Revolution with opinion pieces, reviews, and perhaps too many Sopranos recaps. Soon after I found regular full-time employment as an adult/uni graduate, so Televised Revolution slipped into the background and became a side project for the next 13–14 years.
Working on the site gave me a broad range of DIY digital skills, which I expanded to embrace social media and podcasting as time went on. With Chris Yates, I kicked off the Televised Revolution podcast — it ran for a good 10 years or so, launching right as the podcasting medium had started to take shape. Yates slipped away from the pod after about 10 episodes and I had the good (mis)fortune of meeting Simon Band, the guy who would become my podcast wife for the rest of the podcasts run. With him I ran Televised Revolution as a radio show on 4ZZZ, as a dedicated podcast, and the two of us played around with live streaming video versions of the show as we went along.
Being Brisbane-based and far removed from the industry, we approached Televised Revolution (the website and podcast) from a true outsider perspective. It was heavily opinionated and filled with maybe too-pure ideas about how TV should function — even if these ideas were divorced from the commercial realities that drove the industry.
And this is the thing. For the entire lifespan of Televised Revolution, it was always a side project as I worked through all manner of terrible media-adjacent jobs. The content was always forward-looking, looking to a future of on-demand TV. In recent years I moved from Brisbane to Sydney and while Televised Revolution continued on, it started to seem more and more out of step with TV broadly and with my own professional development.
Today I am working for a TV network - the forward looking SBS. The content there is great, with both traditional TV and the really quite good SBS On Demand service. It’s hard to write scathing commentary about an industry when you’re then a part of it. But then also, what should that content be? As I look around at the local industry, what does Televised Revolution even still have left to talk about?
The on-demand TV world the site championed is now a firm reality. Broadcast networks are now being driven largely by their accompanying digital platforms. We have great SVOD providers in the form of Netflix, Stan, and the emerging Amazon Prime. Anything Televised Revolution would have to say now would just be to catalogue the death of the linear broadcast signal. That’ll be a good decade away, most likely.
Watching the future
It makes little sense to keep Televised Revolution round. I’ll keep the site up as an archive of what once was. And I may even use the name again for something else down the track. So, what now?
We don’t yet live in a perfect TV utopia where we can watch everything we want, when we want it. But we now have considerable more options than we did. No longer are viewers constrained by the shackles of linear broadcast TV. We are now always watching something, but what should we be watching? There’s a lot of choice and a lot of new and interesting programs available every week.
Rather than complaining about the state of TV all the time, the future is about embracing our viewing options and creating a roadmap for viewers to make more educated choices about what to watch.
Earlier this year I launched Always Be Watching. It’s an email newsletter delivered to your inbox in time for weekend viewing. It isn’t giving a heads-up on shows that are airing in the future. Rather, it is highlighting everything that debuted (and returned) that week. It’s about immediate gratification — if you like the look of a show mentioned in the newsletter, you can go and find that show immediately. How you do that is your own business, but I’d like to think you’ll be doing it in a manner that is respectful of copyright and licensing in your respective country.
There is also an Always Be Watching website which will sort-of replicate the newsletter, but also have regular updates of interesting links to check out across the web and reviews of upcoming shows. It’s about making smarter, more informed viewing choices.
The revolution was televised. Now it’s time to sit back (and lean forward) to watch some TV.
