First Turning "purge"

[pbrower2a]

(04-13-2019, 09:11 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(04-12-2019, 02:28 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: Infomercials and shopping-thanks for the reminder.

I had signed up for a so-called "bundle".  I found that I pretty much preferred to be online.  Seldom watched the cable channels.  Didn't bother to install the land line (I already had a cell phone).  When the contract expired, I cut the cable to save money.  

So I expect old style television to be marginalized, if it survives.  Hence, the need to be cheaply produced.

There will always be a market for so-called Premium programming.  That's what Netflix has used to get where they are, and it was and still is the lure used by the HBOs and Showtimes of the cable universe.  Any quality programming that is exclusive to a pay service will garner an audience.  Some, like Game of Thrones, will move into legendary status. Of course, sports is in the same category, since it's at its best when viewed in real-time, or close to it.  Expect more and greater diversity of that as well

I actually expect to see more not fewer high-quality scripted shows, greater sports diversity and many more inexpensive talking heads.  That's not a big change from today.  There will be a sorting, at some point, because there are only so many eyeballs t support the programming, whether ad-based or as a pay service.  We'll see how that falls-out in the next few years, but the programming will continue.

Most people would seem to watch as few as ten channels of cable TV if they get cable TV. In my case (I did not get the super-premium HBO, Showtime, and the like; cable operators have essentially turned juist about anything on cable to premium cost even if it used to be very cheap, fitting the ethos of contemporary American capitalism -- just raise profit margins and stick the consumer!  Eventually people will have to decide what they will give up on. Maybe neoliberalism (reference to another thread) might as well be called the New Serfdom

I remember what I watched a lot:the local FoX Sports channel (easy to give up when the Detroit Tigers are really a minor-league team playing over its heads), CNN, MSNBC, ESPN, FX Movies, Turner Classic Movies, American Movie Classics, History Channel, Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, Comedy Central ... C-Span... there is only so much to follow, and filling life with television is for people who want to see no problem with being spiritually empty. 

The quality of scripting will depend upon the quality of writers. The great writers have a love for learning, including reading. People write no better than the material that they read, even if they write very different material. I can't imagine writing like Dickens, Dostoevsky, or Hugo, but it is generally easy to determine what writers read and what writers instead go to the beach or the golf course. 

If we get through this Crisis we are going to discover that narrow, swift specialization for youth -- teaching them to get their first job and not concerning ourselves with their preparation to do something else after five years and whether life has meaning in free time when people are working somewhere between 25 and 32 hours a week as a norm because we easily produce everything that we need. Any more work is for developing excellence at some rarefied activity such as writing, athletics, musical composition or performance, acting, academic life... Consider this: for really happy people, time is an asset. For prisoners, time is simply something that ages them in a dangerous environment.