Saturday, May 22, 2010
There's Nothing Ironic About Show Choir!: The Sentimentality of Glee
Since before its actual airing, I had been hearing buzz about Fox’s Glee becoming the new television sensation. After attempting to watch the pilot, I found myself unimpressed by the show half-way through and gave up, deciding that the show did not live up to its hype. Still, the buzz didn’t die down as the season went on, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the show actually got better after the 25 minutes I had actually watched. So I gave the show another shot and watched the first dozen or so episodes in one sitting. What I found was that the show was much more enjoyable than I had originally assumed. Yet, there was something about the show that still struck me as strange. There seems to be a certain sentimentality to the show that hipster cynics tend to reject unless it is being treated ironically. Yet those same cynics have embraced the show whole heartedly. This raised the question for me: What is the appeal of Glee?
The fact that a musical television show has, to the best of my knowledge, never been attempted before certainly adds a sense of originality to the show. Yet, the show is more than a musical. Glee is a hyper-postmodern collage of musical, sitcom, teen drama and soap opera genres. In traditional postmodern style, the show is brimming with irony, which I would argue is a large part of the show’s appeal. The irony of the show comes in the wholesomeness of the show’s premise being contrasted against clearly unwholesome elements, such as Sue’s abusive treatment of her cheerleading squad, or Terri’s stint as a school nurse where she fed all of the students pseudoephedrine in a misguided attempt to keep them “happy and healthy.” Yet, as Rachel so acutely points out in the pilot episode “There’s nothing ironic about show choir!”
The ironic elements of the series create the illusion that the show is parodying conventions of the genres it incorporates into its pop-culture blender. However, the irony and the sentimentality of the show, while simultaneously present, are kept distinctly separate. Take, for example, the episode “The Power of Madonna.” That the show’s plot was an razor thin premise designed as an excuse to do an episode centered around Madonna was treated with a postmodern self-reflexivity; the show was fully aware of how flimsy this premise was and reveled in the absurdity of it. Yet, the show still fell back on a stock plotline that it did not treat ironically. One plotline of the show involves the male characters collectively treating their female counterparts poorly and putting together a performance for the women as a way of apology. If this plot sounds familiar, it’s possibly because Saved by the Bell did it in 1990 with “Breaking Up is Hard to Undo” and Boy Meets World had the same plotline in 1997 with “Last Tango in Philly.” All of these episodes ended with the men putting on a performance of some sort, and Saved by the Bell’s incarnation of the plot was the only one of these three examples without a musical number.
The following episode, “Home,” features another stock plotline straight out of the sitcom archives. After the events of “The Power of Madonna” land Kurt and Mercedes in the Cheerios, Sue forces Mercedes to lose weight, forcing her to develop an eating disorder. The story of a female character developing an eating disorder for exactly one episode, only to find herself miraculously cured of her affliction by the next episode (which is almost unheard of in the real world of eating disorders) has been so prevalent in sitcoms over the years that examples of it hardly need citing. The episode concludes with Mercedes realizing that she does not need to lose weight, singing the song “Beautiful” at a pep rally to demonstrate her renewed confidence, much to the surprise of her new coach, Sue. If there is irony to be found in this plot, it’s in the fact that Sue, rather than being punished for her abuse of her cheerleaders, is actually rewarded for her behavior when a local reporter mistakenly believes that Mercedes performance was planned by Sue and, thus, gives Sue a glowing write-up in the local newspaper. Still, the lesson that Mercedes learns is a trite one that has been taught to female sitcom characters for several decades and it becomes doubtful that Mercedes will ever show signs of her eating disorder again, which would place her more in line with real life anorexics and bulimics than with the anorexic-for-a-day women of the classic family sitcom.
What I think disarms the otherwise cynical and jaded television viewer is the irony in these episodes—or, to be more accurate, the perceived irony. Because the show goes to such extremes with Sue’s hateful and ignorant remarks, Brittany’s bizarre non sequiturs, and Emma’s comical naiveté and germ phobia, it creates the illusion that these stock plotlines are being parodied. Yet, these extreme elements of the show are kept in separate boxes from the stock plots described above, and the sitcom sentimentality is carried out unironically. My point here is not to suggest that Glee is not a wildly entertaining show. Rather, I’d like to point out that the show is pulling from the very hokey family sitcoms that its otherwise jaded audience would normally reject. Feel free to continue enjoying it, but understand that, in pulling from the clichéd plots of family based sitcoms, the show is not performing satire. The sentimentality is meant to be nothing more than pure sentimentality.
Friday, January 15, 2010
The Late Shift 2: How NBC Dug Their Own Late Night Grave
Hello, all! I’ve come back out of the darkness. Now, in light of recent events in Haiti, it seems trivial for me to talk about matters of little importance like media and television but, this is a media studies blog, and I have nothing in particular to say about the media’s coverage of the earthquake in Haiti. All I can say about the situation is that I encourage you to donate and help out as much as you can. I donated at http://www.yele.org, you can also, naturally, go to http://www.redcross.org. Do all you can, please. Now, while I cannot help the current crisis situation, I can lighten the mood by talking about something funny today: the amazing mismanagement of a major broadcast network.
Now, since I intend for this blog to be an academic blog, I always try to keep somewhat of an academic distance in my writing. Whether I succeed or fail in that regard is up to debate. However, in this entry, I find myself struggling to maintain my impartiality. What I am talking about, of course, is NBC’s astounding mismanagement of both The Jay Leno Show and the subsequent Jay Leno/Conan O’Brien controversy.
As NBC planned to move the failing Jay Leno Show to Leno’s old 11:30 PM timeslot, Internet fan support for Conan O’Brien, who has said he will not do a Tonight Show at 12:05 AM, became so strong it prompted a New York Times article.1 The article estimates fan support of Conan on Twitter beating out fan support for Leno by more than a 50-to-1 ratio. With support of Conan getting so much media attention, NBC obviously has to be aware that fans are favoring O’Brien. Yet, in a stunningly odd PR move yesterday, Dick Ebersol chose to ignore fan support for Conan and publicly blame Conan O’Brien for the entire fiasco.2 According to him, O’Brien failed to take Ebersol’s advice on how to broaden the appeal of the show. How, exactly, this accounts for the low ratings of The Jay Leno Show, or how, exactly, advice from Dick Ebersol, who caused ratings for Saturday Night Live to drop when he took over that late night comedy show in 19813, was never explained in the article.
As I have been writing this article, I have now found sources online reporting that Jay Leno will officially be taking back The Tonight Show, with Conan exiting NBC with a 30 million dollar severance package. Obviously, as witnessed by the Ebersol interview, NBC and Conan are not parting ways on good terms. If one were to place blame for the entire debacle, I would say that the blame rests on the shoulders of the network themselves, as the situation comes about as a result of several strikingly poor decisions on the part of the network. While the network tried to pride themselves on being able to take risks, the series of that led to the creation and ultimate failure of The Jay Leno Show can be better described as reckless.
The network first announced in September 2004 that they would be replacing Jay Leno with Conan O’Brien starting in 2009. The network’s decision seemed strange since Leno had been winning his time slot. The best explanation for the decision, as posed by Leno himself, is that, perhaps, NBC predicted a decline in the ratings within five years. At the time, Leno agreed to the change without any fuss, and the plan to transition to the new host in 2009 was put in place. The problem is that five years is a long time to think over a decision, and during that time, Leno started to regret his agreement to step down from the show and started entertaining offers from competing networks. Worried that Jay Leno, who had been consistently beating his late night competitor David Letterman for many years, would become Conan’s new competition in the 11:30 timeslot, NBC offered him a show in the 10 PM weekday timeslot five nights a week.4
No network had aired the same show in prime time five nights of the week since the Dumont network aired Captain Video and His Video Rangers from 1949 to 1955. While it seems like a risky move to do something as radical as putting the same show on in prime time five nights a week, the economic logic behind the show was pretty sound. While cable and premium cable are becoming more and more popular, broadcast networks consistently beat out cable networks in prime time ratings. While we now live in a five network era, the two younger networks, Fox and The CW, do not have any programming on in the 10-11 PM time slot. Therefore, NBC is pretty much guaranteed to finish at least third in the ratings every day in that time slot. Thus, they can easily aim for a modest ratings success in the 10-11 timeslot rather than trying to win their timeslot and simply make a less expensive show, like a talk show, to increase their profit margin.
While this is a sound strategy on a national level, NBC failed to take into account the effect this would have on a local level. The majority of the revenue for a local affiliate station comes from that ever important timeslot between the end of prime time and the beginning of late night at 11:00 to 11:30 (or earlier for a Fox or CW station) where stations air the local news. While a third place finish of a cheap show may be acceptable to NBC on a national level, it just was not okay as a lead in for local affiliates who saw their local news numbers tank due to a low-rated lead in.5 The affiliates even had a name for this problem: “The Leno Effect.”
It would be unfair to claim that NBC had no way of predicting that this would happen as they did get an early indicator from my own local NBC affiliate, WHDH 7 in Boston. The Boston affiliate originally claimed that they would not show The Jay Leno Show when it aired because they were afraid that it would kill the ratings for their local news. They planned to, instead, push their local news to the 10:00 timeslot. The affiliate only backed down when NBC threatened to pull all programming from WHDH.6 Still, this was not where NBC made their biggest mistake. Their biggest mistake was in the fact that, while trying to change the face of prime time television, they failed to give themselves an out if anything went wrong.
Whether it was because they thought their plan for the show was so economically sound or because they wanted to appease Leno, NBC made a strange move when they gave Leno his own primetime show, promising to keep the show on for at least one year regardless of ratings.7 Despite NBC’s claim that the Jay Leno Show was like launching 5 new shows in prime time, this contract hardly seems like the contract for a new show. A new show would almost never be guaranteed a full season run regardless of ratings, and most new shows in prime time are not running through the summer either. Leno was guaranteed a full year of episodes, five nights a week, which further shows that the network was thinking nationally and not locally. While the network could always afford to take the hit of finishing in third every night as long as the budget for the show itself was pretty cheap, local affiliates certainly could not handle that kind of ratings bust for a year straight.
Thus, Conan’s fate was sealed. Despite the support for O’Brien, NBC had no choice but to move Leno somewhere else in their schedule, or else force their affiliates into bankruptcy. The 30 million dollar severance package to Conan O’Brien was, in essence, the cheapest option that NBC had available to them under the circumstances. What becomes the biggest shame of all this, though, is that O’Brien, who worked for years behind Leno with the promise of being given the prestigious title of Tonight Show host, and uprooted his entire family and moved them to Los Angeles, is being forced to let go of one of his life’s dreams because NBC backed themselves into a corner. As O’Brien said on what will now be one of his last few episodes of The Tonight Show: “I just want to say to the kids out there watching: You can do anything you want in life. Unless Jay Leno wants to do it, too.”
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