There’s a fairly common argument made among Apple fanboys that the difference between Apple and Microsoft is that Microsoft responds to user demands by fulfilling the demand and Apple responds to user demands by fulfilling the underlying demand that the users didn’t even realize they were asking for. It’s a cute way of saying that Apple doesn’t do what you want, it does what you need. On the surface it’s an interesting concept; of course, it’s also one that fails the test of history. No user was asking for the Ribbon UI when Microsoft started integrating it into their interfaces. They came to a decision about the Ribbon UI through extensive user testing but ultimately chose something that they thought answered the underlying needs. Apple doesn’t do user testing. That’s the big difference. Apple doesn’t care about users in the same way, they do things the way they want and expect their user base to follow them or for their new way to lead to new users in numbers that will offset the loss from their existing base. In other words, Apple don’t care, Apple don’t give a shit:

But I’m not here to incite an argument about whether or not Apple cares about their users. I’m more interested in the idea that what a person thinks they want isn’t necessarily what they actually want and how that relates to what’s happening in television right now.

What people who like television want is to pay less and have more control over what and when they watch. Those goals are generally achievable but with caveats that a lot of people don’t really think about. We might want to pay less but that will make our shows cheaper, it will make some shows not exist in the first place.

I’ve already written about the way television works and how the current system of advertising drives most of the financials for the networks, but there’s another side to this equation. The countless cable stations that mostly air syndication repeats that have flooded the market in the past couple decades, the channels that get placed in cable package bundles in annoying distributions that make you purchase five bundles of seven channels each to get the eight channels you really want to watch, are a large part of how cable providers make money as well. Those annoying distribution packages, the ones that force you to buy channels you don’t want or care about to get the ones you do care about, are a way of offsetting costs from expensive channels. This is, as far as I know, a much smaller part of the cost of generating original content, but it still factors into the cost calculus of a lot of the smaller cable channels that do produce original content.

A consequence of making cable options more flexible might be that channels that you really like, that produce shows you really like, stop being bought in generic packages by people who enjoy other channels that you don’t care about. This leads to fewer cable providers supporting that channel and that channel having less money to work with. I’m not necessarily saying this is a good way of socializing the cost of television¹, but this is the way it works now and changing that can have undesirable outcomes. But if you still want to get rid of the annoying lack of flexibility in cable packages² you have to accept the possibility of paying more for some of your preferred viewing. Either that or change your viewing, which brings me to my next point.

Earlier today, Alyssa Rosenberg argued that there should be more shows like Louie. Now I’d love to see more shows like Louie, though if it were the only type of show around — something that would basically have to happen if users get what they currently want³ — I’d have to stop watching television⁴. But Louie is certainly a poster child for a cheap⁵ show that still provides humour and pathos in strong doses, but its system of operation is not one that scales. Louis CK is a true anomaly, and I mean that in the best possible way. He is brilliant and prolific and willing to work cheap; he was offered other show opportunities and turned them down because of the limitations of network input. The only reason his show exists is because he worked for less. The only reason his show exists is because he can construct all these stories and write and film and edit them all on his own. Put simply, Louis CK works harder and better and cheaper than pretty much anyone else, and there aren’t a lot of people with both the inclination and the ability to do the same. Resting our hopes for the future of television on Louie is ultimately foolish.

This race-to-the-bottom mentality of seeking out cheap shows above all reminds me of our current political landscape⁶. Everybody wants the good parts of government, the infrastructure and public resources, without the bad parts, the taxes. Unfortunately, we have to take the good with the bad. It’s true that television can have a different configuration of good and bad, but there will be bad, and I wonder if the people who rail against the backward ways of the cable providers and networks really understand that the new economy they are demanding will fix their existing ills but introduce new ones, ones that are possibly worse. I wonder if they’ve really thought this all through⁷.

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Footnotes

1. As much as I hate Reality Television, I’ve come to accept that without it, there would be many shows that the networks would not be able to afford to make. [↩]
2. This argument also holds for shows that are produced for a specific channel with cheaper shows socializing the cost of the more expensive fare, and is what my earlier piece mostly discussed. [↩]
3. Rosenberg’s piece talks about the stratification of television into super cheap shows like Louie and very expensive affairs subsidized by foreign markets, the latter of which is simply another unsustainable source of funding that will have to be supplanted over time as other nations get the very same options we are having to adjust for now. [↩]
4. Or maybe catch up on the great shows of the past decades that I’ve yet to see. [↩]
5. At $250,000 an episode, it’s basically cheap enough to produce while still making money at the $1 an episode price point that people seem to have decided they won’t go beyond. [↩]
6. Geeze, did I really have to shoehorn politics into this discussion? Looks like. [↩]
7. Spoiler alert: they haven’t. [↩]

Alyssa Rosenberg, who I respect but very frequently disagree with (if not for her conclusions than for her path to those conclusions), has come out against Andy Serkis winning an Oscar for his work on Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I didn’t want to comment at first, because I haven’t seen the film yet, but my issue with her stance lies in a fundamentally flawed assumption on her part about the nature of film.

Film is a collaborative art form. When someone is nominated for Best Director, they are receiving praise for the costumes, for the lighting, for the lenses used, for the performances, for the script, for the way it was shot, for the way it was edited, and yes for the way they championed all those things to make a final product. I’m not saying that Directors don’t offer up tremendously valuable work or that they shouldn’t be considered for awards because they rely on others to make a final product.

Serkis is one of the few actors who has figured out motion capture as an art form. He acts through totally fictional characters, but if you were to compare his work to any of the wholly CG characters you see in other films that don’t have an actor providing a base performance, it would be laughable to claim that he contributed nothing to the film.

Should we create a new category called Best Baseline Performance for CG Character? I guess we could, but I don’t see the point. What Serkis does is acting. He acts without little balls tapped to a spandex suit just as frequently as with. However they altered his performance in post production is a part of post production and should be examined as a separate act.

Recently, Alyssa Rosenberg praised the smooth, albeit incomprehensible, flow of a french female rapper, Diam.

I like flow fast, and full of bravado.  But most of all, I need my flow to be smooth.  You can’t hear the breath pauses in Diam’s voice.  She’s going fairly fast.  The phrases aren’t chopped up.  Just gorgeous.  I realize this is a prejudice, born out of debate (and yeah, it’s called flowing there too) where the ratings you got for your speeches declined the choppier and breathier you sounded (content counted too, of course).

I don’t enjoy commenting on rap or hip-hop because I barely listen to it, and there are people out there who know so much more about it than me, but this statement bothered me. Ignoring the obvious problems with her love of Diam’s raps given the language barrier — content counts too — I think having this view of flow in rap is a little limiting. And yes, I know that she’s only making a statement about her preferred form of flow, but even with that caveat this seems too restrictive.

That amazing BET Cypher I posted a few months back exemplified what I’m talking about here and that’s that flow is flow, smooth or rough. Mos Def kicks it off with a silky smooth free-style, just totally relaxed with the words practically melting off his tongue. I love it, but after that Black Thought comes in a goes to a whole other level, with the staccato roughness of the rhythm. You can hear the gasps in between words, he’s fighting to get the words out, his mind’s racing faster than his muscles can work. There’s an intensity to it that just elevates the already amazing words. It’s a different sort but it still flows, more than the others to my ears.

I surely have my own prejudices that lead me to enjoy the struggled staccato a little bit more than the effortless silky delivery, but I think bowing down before either style, regardless of the content and the message, is a mistake. I think you have to know where the words are coming from to understand and appreciate the flow; the breathiness, the choppiness, and everything else all contributes something to the content of the song; whether its endorsing, subverting, or otherwise affecting the content, it’s there for a reason.