At the TV press tour, the buzziest drama is all about corporate intrigue
BEVERLY HILLS, California: Twice a year, the Television Critics Association gathers for its press tour, which lasts many days and gives broadcast, cable and streaming networks their best shot at dazzling 200 or so reporters and critics with new and returning shows in the season ahead.
You’d think it would be a terrific place to assess the state of the art: how good (and how bad) the shows are, ways to cope with how many there are, what works in one show and what doesn’t in another, and so on.
Nope. In two weeks I’ve had exactly one spirited exchange with another critic about the content of a TV show — Showtime’s ‘ The Affair’ — and whether its current season has been a near miss or a slow build to a fantastic comeback. ( Both, I say.)
Aside from its annual awards ceremony held Sunday (at which FX’s ‘ The Americans’ won outstanding drama and program of the year; ‘ The Good Place’ won for outstanding comedy; and ‘Killing Eve’ won outstanding new program), the talk at the press tour is increasingly (and breathlessly) about matters that are miles above our pay grades.
Can CBS function without its powerful chairman Les Moonves, who remains precariously perched at the top while CBS’s board of directors investigate claims in the New Yorker magazine that he, like so many ultrapowerful male media moguls, had also been a predatory creep during the industry’s patriarchal epoch? And what happens now, in Moonves’s desperate standoff with CBS/Viacom heiress Shari Redstone for control of the company?
“Obviously this has been a tough week at CBS,” the network’s current president of entertainment, Kelly Kahl, said Sunday morning at the press tour.
“We’re not saying we’re perfect — no large company is, and there’s always room for improvement. . . . All allegations need to be and are being taken seriously. There’s simply nothing else I can say about Leslie or the current investigation.” Despite that opening statement, Kahl still got hammered by reporters and critics over continued harassment reports coming out of CBS’s many divisions and the company’s overall culture, most of which he declined to specifically address.
Moonves aside, maybe we could talk about HBO’s ‘Succession’ instead. It’s much easier to follow, with more satisfying front-row access to the mayhem in executive suites and the bitterness that accompanies top-level crises and transfers of power.
Did someone say HBO? Again, there’s an intriguing rumble beyond our reach, the outcome of which won’t be apparent to viewers for many months — if not years — but which supersedes any trenchant criticism of shows that are actually on the schedule. In his Q& A with reporters and critics at the start of the press tour, HBO programming head Casey Bloys delivered news of a ‘Game of Thrones’ prequel pilot and a very long- awaited
‘ Deadwood’ movie, which will soon go into production.
That sort of stuff got some juices flowing, but a bigger story looms in what could potentially become a fight for HBO’s soul, now that AT&T has acquired the network in a takeover of Time Warner.
During a meeting with HBO staffers earlier this summer (the details of which were urgently relayed to The New York Times), AT& T executive John Stankey and HBO chairman Richard Plepler seemed at apparent odds about AT& T’s eagerness to fill viewers’ devices with Netflixsized all-you- can- eat portions of new HBO content — far more than the boutique network could reasonably create at its usual standards. Bloys took a few minutes to walk back a showdown narrative. ( Stankey, too, qualified his remarks in
a recent AT& T earnings call.) “What I heard in the meeting with (Stan key) was someone talking about investing in programming, which was music to our ears,” Bloys said. “This is the first time in a long time we’ve heard anybody talking about investing in programming . . . No one has talked about diluting our brand, or increasing the volume to a point where we lose quality control . . . No one is asking us to take pitches of a ‘ Love Boat’ reboot or anything like that.”
Like everyone else, Facebook is itching to become a player in scripted TV. Two brighteyed minions — Fidji Simo, Facebook’s VP of product, and Ricky Van Veen, the head of global creative strategy — came to the press tour to tout the social network’s recent shows (‘SKAM Austin’, ‘Sacred Lies’) but were instead grilled about a more typical Facebook Watch experience, in which the user can be easily led down a rabbit hole to right-wing videos and Fox News.
Simo and Van Veen reminded critics and reporters that they weren’t here to talk about Holocaust deniers. This was all happening on the same afternoon that Facebook’s stock was taking a record-breaking swan dive.
Meanwhile, as you may have suspected, Netflix forges ahead on its secret plan to control your mind and your desires. The streaming giant, which sometimes takes a pass altogether on coming to the press tour — playing hard-to- get with reporters is part of its disrupter image — sent its vice president of original series, Cindy Holland, to tout its never- ending list of new shows and new deals.
Because Netflix won’t ever share viewership data, any information about its inner workings tends to pique reporters’ interest. In her opening remarks, Holland mentioned “taste communities” - a way that Netflix figures out what kind of watcher you are.
This is apparently an altogether different algorithm than the hit- or-miss way Netflix leaves recommendations in your queue.
“Demographics are not a good indicator of what people like to watch,” Holland said. “Instead, our team of scientists has understood that there are connections among content types and what people like to watch. A simplistic way to think about it would be genres, but it actually goes several layers deeper than that . . .(As) we’re deciding what to commission, we can look and see if we can aggregate taste communities that generate a bigenough audience to justify the expense of the particular idea that’s been presented.”
You might be curious to know which taste communities you and your family fall into. Good luck finding out.
FX, a Fox network that will soon be owned by Disney (once that megadeal finally goes through), is doing its best to maintain its uncommonly good roster of shows while it waits to learn its eventual role in Disney’s long-term plans, which include more streaming.
“They don’t own us yet, and I don’t take any marching orders from them,” said FX head John Landgraf, the rare network executive who is always willing to share his deeper thoughts about the industry and the state of TV.
Landgraf admitted on Friday that his now-famous “peak TV” predictions — that the ever-increasing number of new dramas and comedies would not be sustainable and would eventually collapse — was probably wrong. “I think overall you’re going to see a lot of continued profusion in content,” he said.
His new worry is more existential — a concept cribbed from director Paul Schrader called “narrative exhaustion.” It means exactly what you think it means: TV viewers have so many stories in front of them that boil down to similar plots and structures. Faced with so much choice, and so many shows that are average, we simply surrender. Narrative exhaustion is a drag.
In happier news, FX announced that a fourth season of ‘Fargo’, set in 1950 and starring Chris Rock, will film next year; the network has also ordered a limited series, ‘ Shogun’, based on James Clavell’s epic novel — a more culturally sensitive version than the 1980 NBC miniseries. FX’s prolific and provocative hitmaker Ryan Murphy defected to Netflix earlier this year, but his legacy remains with ‘American Horror Story’ (renewed through 2020), ‘Pose’ and ‘ American Crime Story’. ( The next instalment of ‘Feud’, which was to be a Charles and Diana divorce story, has been shelved for now, Landgraf told Entertainment Weekly.)
What’s striking about the press tour is how easily distracted we get by shows that don’t technically exist. This is also true of TV chatter at large. While reporters and critics tried to focus on the fall season, news of more possible reboots kept breaking: a resurrected ‘ ALF’, a revived ‘ Frasier’ and a new ‘Facts of Life’.
Nobody wants to actually watch TV anymore; we’ve become obsessed with preproduction rumours and corporate intrigue: What might happen, what could happen, what’s not yet on. — Washington Post