Dave’s Take

Do you remember how broadcast pundits predicted what the future of television would be in the year 2010? How they proclaimed there would be a channel for everyone, regardless of their interests? How the utter abundance of cable and satellite channels would be so unlimited as to be profitable regardless of the specificity of their program’s topics? Well, it’s now 2010 and the pundits didn’t quite get it right.

Sure at first, during the 90s, the availability of hundreds of broadcast channels seemed to be headed in the “anything goes” approach, but then reality set in for everyone. Production companies came to the undeniable conclusion that you really couldn’t make money on simply broadcasting puppies all day, despite their overwhelming cuteness. Cable companies discovered people might like to watch a burning Yule log in fireplaces for an hour on Christmas morning, but that it wore thin the other 364 days each year. In short, in order to make money in the new millennium of entertainment you had to do what has always been done – diversify.

New start-ups like Court TV which were buoyed by early success of big trials like O.J. and the Menendez brothers felt like they had tapped into the collective psyche of America, only to discover that the day to day coverage of ordinary people’s legal problems didn’t generate the viewers they were lead to believe existed. After several years of struggling to build brand loyalty, they threw in the towel and renamed their network truTV. They also diversified their programming to include shows like Cops, Forensic Files, Operation Repo and the old standby, paid programming. Likewise, the Sci-Fi Network watered down their only science fiction programming along with a name change to the ambiguous Syfy so they could show anything they deemed money making. Even the big-brained enticing History Channel slowed down on smart shows and began broadcasting blue-collar shows like Pawn Stars and Axe Men.

Today’s broadcast landscape is not quite the utopia of targeted programming we were promised, but does it really matter? America is a diverse pot of stew and as a reflection of that diversity, so is our entertainment. For those who insist on topical purity in their viewing there’s always the Internet, where rumor has it cute cat videos are abundant.