It took a pandemic for Hollywood to embrace the dictates of "We need fun." The credo pronounced by host Kimmel—"What's happening is not important but it’s fun. And we need fun."—at the top of the show was just about the polar opposite of the guiding principle of every awards show for the past decade. From the Oscars to the MTV Awards, when you've turned on a kudos fest of late, the hosts have all but opened with the declaration that "What you're about to see is not going to be a whole lot of fun, but we've decided that it's important for you sit through five hours of it."
HBO may win awards but how useful is having the tv that the chattering classes write about really ? You noted in previous letters that prestige tv has a very uncertain footprint, yes The Sopranos, the Wire eventually but everybody who watched Mad man was a culture writer and their families. Yes the wins increase the brand names of the services but one not much remarked effect of the streaming wars is that all the services know exactly how many people watch each show , the Nielsen ratings were only an extrapolation of a sample of viewers with a margin of error of ?. I think we are seeing with certain cancellations ( high fidelity comes to mind) that the impact of good reviews is a lot less even within the media class is a lot less than previously thought, and it was not considered high. Oh and good luck to anybody who thinks that Succession is going to break out and become a powerhouse, British style wry black humour is a tough sell to people who read novels for fun, look at the bestselling novels list and see how many literary novels are successful. Then remember that an unsuccessful show has to get ten times( at least) that number in viewers each episode to only be considered a failure rather than a debacle. I say this as someone who admired a lot of things in the first season but could not care enough to watch the second.
HBO may win awards but how useful is having the tv that the chattering classes write about really ? You noted in previous letters that prestige tv has a very uncertain footprint, yes The Sopranos, the Wire eventually but everybody who watched Mad man was a culture writer and their families. Yes the wins increase the brand names of the services but one not much remarked effect of the streaming wars is that all the services know exactly how many people watch each show , the Nielsen ratings were only an extrapolation of a sample of viewers with a margin of error of ?. I think we are seeing with certain cancellations ( high fidelity comes to mind) that the impact of good reviews is a lot less even within the media class is a lot less than previously thought, and it was not considered high. Oh and good luck to anybody who thinks that Succession is going to break out and become a powerhouse, British style wry black humour is a tough sell to people who read novels for fun, look at the bestselling novels list and see how many literary novels are successful. Then remember that an unsuccessful show has to get ten times( at least) that number in viewers each episode to only be considered a failure rather than a debacle. I say this as someone who admired a lot of things in the first season but could not care enough to watch the second.