It’s Garry Shandling’s Show was Garry Shandling’s first big break, and it was a weird one. The show was a traditional multi-camera sitcom except that the characters on the show were aware they were on a show, Garry opened every episode with a monologue to the live studio audience and the audience was encouraged from time to time to interact with the cast and the set. In other words, it was not a traditional multi-camera sitcom.

The show broke the fourth wall at every opportunity and shattered virtually every convention of traditional sitcoms, it set a bizarre precedent and its influence on sitcoms can still be felt today. In short, it was one of those gloriously weird ahead-of-its-time shows whose existence we tend to mourn after a pitifully short life in recent years. But It’s Garry Shandling’s Show lasted for four years, first on Showtime and eventually being rebroadcast on a prime time network. I don’t know if it got cancelled at that point or he chose to end it so he could go do something else, but either way four years is a respectable run for a show as strange as this one.

In today’s market there are so many more channels, offering such a wide variety of niche entertainment; weird shows that used to survive by virtue of a lack of competition are now being supplanted by stuff people want to watch. The truth is that most of the time, weird experimental shows have an audience of a few million at the most. A few million is the very peak, and anything less than that is rarely considered viable in our current market — even though with more than one channel per million people, having an audience of that size should be considered quite respectable.

I’m not sure I’ve articulated this before, but I think we’re coming to a point in modern time where the increased access to increasingly targeted material aimed at increasingly narrow niches will make most of that content too economically risky to produce, except in low budget fare produced cheaply perhaps on and for the Internet. This isn’t the end of this sort of content, but we might see networks taking fewer risks and producing blander content hoping to reach the greatest common overlap of audiences. Yes, they already do that, but they still experiment with genre shows, and weird meta-driven comedies, and rich character driven serials. All of that could be shunted away from television to the internet, where everything is cheaper to make.

And make no mistake, as shows budgets get slashed, their ability to tell large stories, the type of stories people want to see from expansive experimental television, will fall away. Sometimes a limited budget can produce beauteous brevity, see The Twilight Zone, but there are some things that simply can’t be done on a small budget. Lost, for example, could not be made on a small budget. A show that explored similar ideas, maybe even with similar characters, could be made but too much of the scale would be lost — the dangers would feel smaller, the climaxes less earned — the show would no longer be Lost.

(It’s possible with the recent success of True Blood and The Walking Dead — and one hopes similar success for Game of Thrones — we will see a renewal of interest in interesting genre storytelling from the cable channels, but even premium cable channels have their limits: HBO cancelled Carnivàle, one of the best and potentially expansive¹ shows they’ve ever made, because of ballooning costs due to the fantasy nature along with it being a period piece, which tends to require larger budgets for the props departments. So don’t expect the cable channels to rescue us from network television mediocrity forever.)

But if the market speaks, there’s not much we can do about it. People will watch what they want to watch. Enjoy the good times while they’re still here. Watch Fringe maybe?

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Footnotes

1. The show was cancelled before the scope of its story was fully widened, but from the rough sketches of the future of the show made available to fans, the story was headed to big places. [↩]

Here’s a screenshot of my system tray on my computer from about an hour ago.

The red “FF” icon is video decoding using ffdshow. The blue “FF” icon is audio decoding using ffdshow. And the white Omega-ish icon is Haali’s media splitter, a tool to split a movie file into its video and audio parts for decoding purposes. I guess what I’m trying to say here is, my computer’s pretty busy right now. It’s also sort of mind-blowing how utterly normal it is to be able to do all this video and audio rendering simultaneously while still watching a movie, browsing the web, and myriad other tasks which only a few years ago would’ve had to be pre-empted by any video rendering, let alone multiple renderings of different videos.

The first computers were used to calculate polynomial equations, and ballistic trajectories. Now we use them to create Kyle XY videos and Lolcats. At first glance, that’s a bad thing, a sign of the dumbing down of society. But in reality, it’s a sign of the democratization of power. Computing power, that is. Those other tasks are still performed by computers, but now computers can do more than that. Beyond that, computers are more readily available. More people have more access to more computers. And we’re not all mathematicians tired of calculating polynomial tables. We have varying interests, some meaningful, others less so. Some of the things which interest modern society may disgust me greatly, but they are not signs of the devolving of society. They are side-effects of the ease with which anybody can express their true interests.

We’re not getting dumber, merely more aware of how dumb we all are.

The world is getting smaller. With the advent of the internet, information that used to be far away and troublesome to obtain is available within a few minutes in your own home. And now, with the advent of social networks any information you need about your friends is available just by checking their blog, or their twitter page, or their facebook page, or any number of online sources for the intimate details of their life once left to their close network of friends.

There’s a bit of a paradox here. I joined facebook primarily because I wanted to catch up with old friends I don’t talk to much anymore. But for the most part, this can be done passively. I add them as friends and when I go to write on their wall, I come across a tidy aggregation of their hobbies, their interests, the music they like, the movies they like, what schools they’ve gone on to, what jobs they’ve held, and much more information. So before I even ask them how things are going, I’ve received the answer.

Beyond this, any answer to a question asked through facebook is automatically tainted with more forethought than that from a private conversation. That response can be read by anyone you’ve deemed a “friend,” a loaded phrase given the hundreds or thousands of “friends” you can amass through social networks. A facebook conversation has a very different dynamic than that of a real conversation.

Because of this, I’ve never found myself enthralled with facebook. Keeping in touch with dozens of former friends is an empty effort to me. I’d much rather cultivate the few good friendships I have in real life. Obviously, you can develop more substantial relationships through facebook, as you would in the real world, but there’s no real incentive to me. In general, friends you’ve lost touch with weren’t lasting friends. Whether it’s because you changed or they changed or you ran out of things to say to each other, friendships die for a reason. Trying to rekindle them through facebook isn’t likely to succeed.

Which I guess is why I barely ever visit facebook anymore. That initial burst of regained connections has faded away. Obviously, this depends on the person. I’m not anti-social per se, but I’m certainly not comfortable in highly social environments which is why I tend to avoid them.

So my intended use of facebook is not what most people use it for, but even excluding that facebook is not a replacement for more direct communication. Whether it’s face to face, or on the phone, or through instant messaging direct communication, that direct connection is needed for friendships to be anything more than acquaintances.

A friend of mine recently linked to a parody music video on facebook about riding the TTC. I’ve seen lots of parodies on youtube over the years but for some reason this one made me have a sudden realization about how the internet made Weird Al Yankovic obsolete.

Back in the day, Weird Al got started by working with Dr Demento and singing short easy parodies. It was really something that any relatively talented and funny guy could do if given the opportunity by working with Dr Demento. But Weird Al is the one that did it, and with a bit of savvy he turned that into a successful career as a song parodist.

But today, Weird Al, or some modern day analog to him, would be unlikely to move beyond a youtube or myspace page with a few million views. Popularity? No doubt. Celebrity? No way. That world where a moderately talented guy with access to distribution has been replaced by one where thousands of very talented people vie for notoriety in an incredibly accessible and incredibly competitive environment. The internet has done more than made things more easily available: it has also made us all increasingly more critical. In this new world with millions rather than hundreds or thousands of content generators, we all need to judge things harshly or all our time (and then some) would be monopolized by mediocre content.

It’s this increased competition and accessibility that makes the music industry, and really all media industries, in so much trouble. Piracy has existed ever since media could be reproduced even in rudimetary forms. Piracy is not the reason sales have decreased. The problem is that competition and access have increased.