From today’s Dear Abby

DEAR ABBY: I am a professional costume wearer. By that, I mean I have been an elf, a giraffe, a moose, T-Rex and a character for a major hamburger chain. I am presently a character for a major cereal company. Once I am in costume, I am not allowed to speak.

Adults and older children think nothing of hitting me, kicking me, pulling at parts of my costume, and trying to knock me down. One 12-year-old even tried to “head butt” me while his father looked on and encouraged him!

I am in costume for about an hour or so before I can take breaks. It gets hot and sweaty inside these costumes. I have a limited field of vision and can’t see many of the oncoming attacks. Even if I saw each one, I would not be able to say anything to stop or deflect these random attacks. What I do is have a paid “helper” walk beside me. This is now discouraging such actions by adults and children.

I would ask parents to please remember that there are real people inside these costumes, which are not heavily padded. I feel each and every hit and kick as if I were wearing street clothes. Thanks for printing this. — H.S. IN COLORADO

DEAR H.S.: You have my sympathy, and I am seconding your request. That a parent would encourage such poor behavior incenses me. You should not have had to hire a “bodyguard” to protect you.

I find it interesting, however, that the children who are acting out against you do not regard you as another human being. It seems they have mistaken you for the same kind of cartoon character they see on television — probably too much television — against whom violence is committed with no repercussions. (I’m reminded of the “Mr. Bill” character that was once featured on “Saturday Night Live.”)

One of my assistants, who has occasionally dressed as a chimp in her work as a docent at the L.A. Zoo [Ahem?! I’d suggest that if you’re wearing a chimp costume, you can’t really call yourself a docent! – SP], tells me that this is one of the hazards in your line of work. Call me humorless, but to me, assault and battery are criminal behaviors — and if someone I cared about were subjected to it, I would be very concerned.

A while back, Steve posted regarding the oddness of the Ask.com Algorithm ad campaign. Last night, I finally had the camera handy and snapped this shot of the company’s latest TV ad:

For anyone who hasn’t seen it, the spot features a William Hurt-esque everyman doing a Busby Berkeley number, as he celebrates the success of a search he has just done for “Chicks With Swords.”

Does this seem like a really odd choice of content to anyone else? The ad has me wondering: how would you parse the factors that separate “offbeat and interesting” from just plain “out there?”

Well, Yahoo’s TV page is in beta with its new facelist. Sexy. Content-y.

And useless. I don’t need to have a Rich Media Interaction with the Property and the Brand. I want to see if this episode is a repeat. The old version said very clearly
Original Broadcast Date: xx/xx/xxxx – if that was today’s date, then it was a new episode.

Sometimes they’d put (repeat) if it was a repeat, but the absence of that information doesn’t seem sufficient to verify it’s not a repeat. And reading the plot summary and trying to decide if I’ve seen that one? That’s work.

I know, users like to gripe when things get changed. But did they ask anyone how they use it, first? Or did real estate for big banner ads for the show take precedence over actionable data? I dunno.

Update: even worse…if you click on a show in the grid, say, the 10:00 pm listing for Law and Order, Yahoo shows you the “Law and Order” page, with information about the next episode. But the next one is a 2:00 pm syndicated episode on TNT. It requires much more work to get to the details of the episode I already told them I wanted. Finding the “all upcoming episodes” link and then looking through that to find the 10:00 link, clicking that and finally, the info I am seeking. Ludicrous!

Boomers Aren’t Happy With What’s on TV

A study conducted by Harris Interactive suggests that the television industry’s obsession with youth is backfiring.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they believe that most TV programming and advertising is targeted toward people under 40, the survey said. More than 80 percent of adults over 40 say they have a hard time finding TV shows that reflect their lives.

A significant number of baby boomers _ 37 percent _ say they aren’t happy with what’s on television, according to the study.

Note that there’s a difference between TV not reflecting my life (i.e., Sopranos), and not being happy with what’s on (i.e., how O.J. would do it).

“The amount of people dissatisfied with television overall was a pretty big eye-opening thing for us,” said Larry Jones, president of the TV Land cable network, which commissioned the study.

Because TV Land of course aims at this forgotten demographic with rescued-from-the-garbage-pail programming. Who’s up for a Benson marathon?

To a certain extent, the generation that decades ago warned against trusting people over 30 can blame itself for the predicament. The TV industry’s slavish devotion to ratings within the 18-to-49-year-old demographic started when most baby boomers fit into that group.

The theory among advertisers is that it’s important to reach young people as their preferences are forming _ get them hooked on a certain toothpaste or soda early and they’ll be hooked for life. Advertisers will pay a premium for young viewers: $335 for every thousand people in the 18-to-24 age range that a network delivers, for example. Viewers aged 55-to-64 are worth only $119 for every thousand, according to Nielsen Media Research.
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To a surprising extent, advertising is also alienating. The Harris Interactive study found that half of baby boomers say they tune out commercials that are clearly aimed at young people. An additional one-third said they’d go out of their way NOT to buy such a product.
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Some advertisers have responded to the aging population. Financial services firms, for example, see many potential customers advancing toward retirement. Two decades ago drug companies didn’t advertise on TV; now you could fill a medicine cabinet with all the products hawked on the evening news.

Not to mention those commercials for Hoverround home mobility devices where an old lady sings “you made me love youUUUUUU” while she plays with her hair coquettishly.

TV Land’s Jones is already using the survey in his business. The results have convinced him that, more than ever, his network of mostly classic TV shows should be boomer-centric, he said. He also comes armed with the survey when he meets with the Madison Avenue types who buy advertising time.

At least the article is clear on this part.

One statistic he’s sure to cite: The survey found 51 percent of the postwar generation describe themselves as “open to new ideas.” Meanwhile, only 12 percent of young adults think the older folks feel that way.

Why does that matter? Jones said the average media buyer or planner is under 30. Many are undoubtedly hired for their know-how in appealing to a specific generation, and it isn’t the baby boomers.

The critics seem to have grasped the limited resource of attention that is impacting (and yet driving) the exploding volume of media we are faced with.

From two different reviews of The Nine

The SF Chronicle

What the TV industry has wrought this year, making us choose among “Brothers & Sisters,” “Men in Trees,” “Six Degrees,” “Ugly Betty,” etc. — puts a burden on viewers to make a bevy of decisions quickly.

The New York Times

Not many people have time and energy to commit themselves to yet another series that requires weekly loyalty and close attention.

There’s obviously some problems with the models here; as everything gets more narrowcast, we can’t – and aren’t expected to – consume it all, indeed we’ll need to just ignore most of it. So why are there more products that demand even greater loyalty? Dick Wolf, in an extensive New York Times Magazine profile a year or so ago, pointed out some of the elements designed into Law and Order that made them re-watchable and timeless, making for huge wins in syndication. These other shows – cliffhanging serials – may or may not do as well in syndication, but I imagine they’ll do better on DVD. The barrier to entry is high, the barrier to late entry is impossibly high. This can breed high loyalty, doubtless, for those that do join the exclusive viewer club, but the critics are right to question the wisdom of Lost-followers trying to repeat that trick.

Metalocalypse is a new animated show on Adult Swim, featuring the ridiculous misadventures of a metal band, DethKlok. It’s filled with lots of irony and post-irony (as only can be done with rock music, especially heavy metal). Co-created by Brendon Small of the excellent (and improv-rich, at least Season 1) Home Movies. Home Movies had frequent knowing rock-and-roll winks and beyond; this series takes that theme full-bore.

And speaking of themes, YouTube (yes, a post about YouTube, including YouTube links. roll your eyes, everyone) has a number of examples of folks playing the Metalocalypse theme.

Not surprising that guitarists would learn and perform their own version, but still neat!

Truck o’ bikes

Browsing Cow

Yesterday’s episode of 30 days was pretty interesting. The show is hosted (and presumably created) by Morgan Spurlock and is inspired by his Super Size Me (where he ate only McDonald’s for 30 days). In each episode, someone tries something different for 30 days, with some Reality TV flavoring (i.e., next week, an athiest lives with a family of fundamentalists). The better episodes are more documentary in nature and less sensastionalist. Last season, Morgan and his girlfriend moved from NYC to another town for 30 days and tried to live on minimum wage. It was one of the most moving and disturbing things I’d seen on TV (it’s a failure, and we learn pretty directly about enormous problems faced by our society; especially the poor).

Last night’s episode featured a recently laid off software engineer from New York State moving to Bangalore for 30 days, living with a family and working in a call center. The previews were funny and wacky, a big doughy white guy sitting in a room full of brown people taking lessons in pronunciation – but the episode itself was very emotional on many levels.

My chest tightened as I watched our guy, Chris, struggle with the basic Maslow stuff that India makes challenging – his middle-class family hosts had a hornet’s nest in the bathroom. How could Chris get a job and adapt to this new culture if he couldn’t even clean himself safely? We see broken sidewalks and dirty signs and crowds and crazy traffic.

But Chris goes deeper and develops (what we are told are) deep relationships with his host family, with some touching departure stuff by the end of the episode. He’s an interesting guy, and I was reminded at times of the Michael Moore from TV Nation (or maybe a bit of Louis Theroux [deep aside: I see that Theroux had an early gig on TV Nation – small world]), where Chris was participating in the experience (say, going shopping in a fancy Bangalore mall, or attending a festival, or taking a test to qualify for a call center job, or visiting a placement agency), but also observing the experience (some tightly written and insightful voice-overs suggested that Chris was spontaneously uttering brilliant insights but I imagine it was written by others and added much later) and also provoking the experience by asking questions, persistently. When the city is exploding in riots over the death of a legendary actor and the call center is being evacuated, Chris stops to ask questions about what is happening, and why. I imagined myself taking immediate action but not spending a single second to inquire if it would delay my passage to safety (in an environment where feeling safe is obviously rare).

Chris (and we, the audience) leave Bangalore with some powerful perspective shifts. He’s seen how hard the Indians are trying to succeed, how little so many of them have, the challenges and changes between traditional and modern (“American” and “Indian”), and between men and women. And then casting all that back into the frame of his own situation – a newborn baby and being out of work.

The show runs Wednesday at 10 and again at 11, on FX. It looks like this episode (“Outsourcing”) will be rerun on Morning morning just after midnight and at 11:30 PM. Check it out!

Brotherhood

is the latest Showtime series. I watched the first episode and I quite liked it. You could describe it (in a fashion reminiscent of Altman’s The Player) as West Wing meets The Sopranos meets The Wire (second season). But that doesn’t mean it was derivative, it just had familiar elements of storytelling, character, less than style.

But 3 minutes before the episode wrapped up, they went to the indie-emo-gritty-yearning-soft-hard-rock-song thing. Ya know, where a white guy-sing shouts slowly over plucky distorted guitar, while there are a bunch of slow shots. A character looks wistfully out at his city. Another turns over in his bed and stares at the wall. Meanwhile, the mother feeds her bouncing children in the kitchen, unaware of ill portent, as life carries on normally for other characters. I don’t know if those were the shots they actually used in Brotherhood, but they are so generic that it doesn’t matter.

I just read something about Michael Mann and his legacy in revolutioning the way we see TV drama, and they cited that very phenomenon. And normally, I don’t mind it. It evokes some great emotions on Rescue Me, on the Shield, the Sopranos. I remember Homicide: Life On The Streets using music (specifically Tom Waits’ Cold Cold Ground) very well. There was just something default about Brotherhood doing it. Oh, it’s a show, it’s dramatic, we better toss ’em the song at the 52 minute mark. Felt perfunctory and actually pulled me out of the show.

We build this language of signs and symbols that we use in drama (and in every form of storytelling, like advertising, and products, and web sites, and interfaces) and they are effective short hand. But we have to be careful to really mean them when we use, else they come off as insincere and cliched.

I’m excited to keep watching Brotherhood, but they’ve got me a bit on the defensive, ready for them to screw up. We shall see.

Another hilarious Tim Goodman skewering of crappy TV (new series The Bedford Diaries) in WB lowers its standards one last time

The WB sent two episodes. To finish the first was like having dental floss wrapped around your spleen and then pulled up and out of your mouth by a runaway horse. Second episode? There’s not enough Percocet on this continent.

Through wincing eyes, one must endure young Owen getting paired in a class assignment with a pretty young girl who — gasp! — was the sole survivor of a rash of students who jumped off a very, very tall building in a suicidal leap. (Apparently they had all seen early screeners of the series.) Having survived (she has a small limp, because anything more would be ugly by WB standards), she’s paired with Unlikable Fabio and he says to his video camera later: ‘A girl who would jump off a roof. There is something very hot about that kind of crazy.’

There might be a word missing in that quote. If you put both of your hands over your ears and yell ‘Make it stop!’ at the top of your lungs, then it’s quite difficult to be verbatim about these things.

In a great example of demography (and other factors) driving cultural shifts, Latino-style soaps will be appearing on English-language TV in San Francisco.

MyNetworkTV’s dramas – called ‘Desire’ and ‘Secrets’ – are each hourlong programs featuring 65 episodes that run over 13 weeks.

The network describes ‘Desire’ as the story of ‘two brothers on the run from the mafia who both fall in love with … the same woman’ and ‘Secrets’ as ‘an in-depth look at the dreams, successes and tragedies found in the fashion industry.’

MyNetworkTV, which officially premiered last month, is the first network to produce English-language versions of Latin American-style soap operas, said Les Eisner, the network’s spokesman.

‘These story lines will be guilty pleasures. There will be beautiful people, intriguing and captivating story lines with a cliff-hanger at the end of each episode,’ Eisner said.

Called ‘telenovelas,’ Spanish-language serial dramas keep tens of millions glued to their sets throughout the hemisphere. They differ from traditional American soap operas primarily because of their finite story arc. Eisner said the network is ‘Americanizing’ story lines and creating them with the same production value of regular prime-time programming.

‘This (telenovelas) is a concept that I, as a television person, have looked at for a long time and said ‘Why doesn’t anyone do that for an English audience?’ ‘ he said. ‘It attracts younger people, and it attracts just the kind of audience advertisers desire.’