LISTEN UP: Your fave online columnist might be appearing on a local talk-radio outlet soon. Maybe even this Friday. Further details forthcoming.
NOT TOO LONG AGO, I used to gloat to my friends in the rest of Seattle.
I was luckier than they were, because I lived in Summit Cable territory. That meant I got almost 20 cool channels that the losers out in TCI neighborhoods couldn't.
The tables have since turned. TCI was bought by AT&T, which promptly worked to finish up the fiber-optic cable installations TCI had lagged on for years. Summit, which already had fiber in its downtown and south-end service areas, was bought by a multi-regional company called Millennium Digital Media.
The respective buyers saw new fortunes to be made in cable-modem services and expanded "digital cable" channel selections.
So now, AT&T Cable customers can get the likes of TV Land, BBC America, the Food Network, the Game Show Network, and several other specialty channels offering prime examples of TV programming at its most direct; shows that come close to the Platonic ideals of entertainment and info programming.
Last month, Millennium trotted out its own digital channel lineup. For dozens more bucks a month, you can get dozens more premium and pay-per-view movie channels.
And nothing else.
This is way wrong. Television and video are more than just post-theatrical transmission mechanisms for feature films. TV has its own family of program genres.
A feature film is a one-shot. It's constructed of scenes, which are constructed of individual shots. Even a low-budget film is made with this kind of rigorous pre-planning.
A TV show is usually an ongoing operation; a premise built to last a hundred episodes or more.
A TV show is built of segments; some of which may intercut across different scenes of action. These segments are, in traditional studio-based productions, made with several cameras running at once; this means individual "scenes" involve continuous flows of acting, movement, etc., rather than individual shots cut together to simulate continuity.
Because of time/money constraints, and the need for ongoing viewer identification with characters, TV shows are much more dialogue-heavy than features.
(Among other effects, this means social-theorists who use TV viewing as evidence of "the decline of words" are almost hilariously misinformed. TV's all about words; though some of those words are better-chosen than others.)
Movies are about sitting in the dark, with a few friends and a lot of strangers, sharing in one larger-than-life sensory experience. TV's about sitting comfortably in a well-lit room, alone or with a few pals and/or relatives, paying greater or lesser attention to a succession of smaller-than-life spectacles.
Aside from documentaries and occasional episodic films like Tales From the Darkside, movies are almost always dramatized works telling a single fictional (or fictionalized) story over the course of 80 to 180 minutes.
TV shows, in contrast, encompass episodic sitcoms, ongoing serials, limited-run serials (miniseries), anthology dramas, quasi-anthology dramas (such as crime shows where only the detectives appear in more than one episode), nonfiction storytelling (documentaries, newsmagazines, "reality" shows), and other formats that exist in no other medium.
The success of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? proves that audiences, even in a cable-fragmented TV universe with umpteen movie channels, are still attracted to pure-TV entertainment when it's done right.
If only Millennium Digital could understand that.
TOMORROW: Are transit authorities passively capitulating to tax-cutters or sneaking an activist end-run around them?
ELSEWHERE:
RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:
- Unadvisable holiday gifts and cards.
- The relics of bank merger-mania.
- Some bad beers I have known.
- In the Brave New Seattle, every new building must be monumental, "world class," and tastefully outlandish.
- Imagining life after Microsoft, and exploring the roots of the Gates personality cult.
- The first and second parts of our visit to an imagined Northwest theme park.
- Parts one, two, three, and four of our WTO protest post-mortem; a list of WTO-protest links; and the earlier preview piece.
- The "new secessionists" somehow think business still has too little power vs. government.
- The new Coldwater Creek store sells the fantasy of living on the land but not off it; while the new Ballard Fred Meyer hypermarket tries to look like the steel plant it replaced.
- Parts one, two, and three of a look back at Ed Bellamy's Looking Backward, which promised that by now we'd have complete socio-economic equality but not computers.
- Imagining a newspaper for the Net age.
- Some of today's more perverse, ephemeral "art forms."
- I still kvetch about arrogant San Francisco; but is Seattle now no better?
- Can you tell me how to get to Coronation Street?
ARCHIVES:
- 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1986-94 columns
- Reviews of literature & art, monfiction & culture criticism, movies & videos, and music & noise
- Longer articles and essays
- The origin and future of MISCmedia
