Music empires aren’t easy to build
‘Empire’ aside, the dramas can fall on deaf ears
TV programmers are big fans of shows about the music business, but it’s not exactly turning into a collection of greatest hits.
Fox’s Empire has been a charttopper, but HBO pulled the needle from Vinyl after one season, and Showtime’s Roadies began its summer tour Sunday with a tiny audience (348,000) of same-day viewers. Nashville, never a hit, was canceled by ABC after four seasons, but CMT — spurred by the show’s small but devoted fan base — picked it up for a fifth.
Shows that go behind the scenes of the music business offer great potential: drama inherent in a high-stakes, high-dollar industry where excess often is rewarded; appeal to a younger audience of music fans; and a great environment for captivating original soundtracks that can be broken into shorter clips.
A big success often leads to a copycat flurry of similar but lesser shows, and David Bushman, television curator at the Paley Center for Media, sees evidence of that in these tune-filled series.
“One thing that started this was the (initial) success of Glee, and now with Empire, you have two extremely successful shows that are very much talked about. TV programmers say, ‘How do we get in on this?’ ” he says. But “you’ll see more often than not that it doesn’t work.”
Big-name performers and directors can be a draw, too. Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese produced Vinyl; Almost Famous director Cameron Crowe created
Roadies; and 50 Cent (aka Curtis Jackson) is featured in Starz’s
Power. But marquee names don’t guarantee success.
Here’s a look at TV’s summer music tour, along with a couple of upcoming acts: