HBO cut its current 3 still-on-air, longest-running comedies but decided to renew its new coming-of-middle-age comedy ENLIGHTENED. HUNG and BORED TO DEATH are being canned after 3 seasons, HOW TO MAKE IT IN AMERICA after 2 and with Larry David, as always, wondering whether he REALLY wants to do another season of CURB, its longest-running comedy still on the air is EASTBOUND AND DOWN.
ENLIGHTENED, the recent survivor didn’t get great ratings but HBO is legendary for assigning no value to ratings. In fact, their gauge is whether you can find a show like it being done anywhere else / is it unique enough to draw acclaim and attention from the people who matter. TREME hasn’t done great numbers (nor did THE WIRE, before it, though it is considered by many to be arguably the best television series of all time) but the unique blend of down-home Cajun charm, blasting musical numbers and deep, emotional characters ensure it will continue, regardless of such insignificant details as “What’s the plot of the show?” Also, it helps that ENLIGHTENED just garnered two Golden Globe nominations.
Still, how do you run a network without ratings? CW does something similar where the high concentration of viewers in high-consumer teen demos is more important than the often worst-in-their-time-slot ratings. But what does this mean for an artistic medium that originally started as little more than a means to get people’s attention long enough to throw ads at them?
What HBO has been doing for years, and which has been adopted by all the other premium cablers as well as a few basic cable networks (AMC most notably), is creating a new paradigm for TV heads as more and more viewers fast forward past valuable commercial time (which is why networks have been struggling to reach their quotas with the exception of during live sports, the only programming people watch in real time anymore, as evidenced by the $4Mdollar sale of a 60-second Super Bowl ad this week). Create a show that gets massive attention by A-adopters, a sort of “intelligentsia” hit but these are the people who will watch a show religiously, will purchase merchandise and box sets, and will waste time writing about the show to other geeks, blogosphere fodder for the high-minded lowlifes of America’s couch critics. These are the people who will also get excited about a movie based on a TV show. And their lower viewership is made up by their greater affection and their influence on B-adopters who then influence the mainstream, making people who don’t “get” a show like MADMEN start watching if only to fit in with the people they emulate.
But what happened and why did they ditch HUNG, BORED TO DEATH, and HOW TO MAKE IT IN AMERICA?
Here are a few theories backed up by nothing but personal conjecture:
HUNG: Everybody loved HUNG at first because it was a reflection of the times – an All-American family man in the All-American city of Detroit who ends up a homeless loser because of the recession while the asshole next door keeps getting richer. Even more, he becomes a man-whore because of his monstrous trunk, if that’s not a valid Man’s Ambition I don’t know what is. Then MTV launched a similar show about a high school loser named RJ Berger with a large Johnson, pointing out the silliness inherent in said idea. Then people decided they were tired of hearing how bad some people had it; they were ready to hear about the good life again. Especially when the man in question had something that even richest of men envy. Maybe the appeal of a man-whore wasn’t strong enough for a viewing public as women don’t want to admit ever paying for sex (have you seen the women in GIGOLOS? No lady wants to be that) and men just don’t want to watch some dude getting paid good money to bed beautiful women complain about how tough he has it. I know after a few episodes it just felt tedious. Then my mother-in-law told us she liked it, conjuring images of her and my stepfather-in-law enjoying the comic sex and cock-talk and, well, that just got to be too much for our youthful, child-like minds.
BORED TO DEATH: Just like its title, unfortunately. Listen, I love Zack Galifianakis, Ted Danson’s been my hero since 2nd grade and I have nothing bad to say about Jason Schwartzman. Jonathan Ames wrote a few funny columns for Playboy and I always support novelists as they figure out new and unusual ways to diversify their paltry scribe-earnings. Still, the muted self-loathing tongue-in-cheek humor only seems to work for Wes Anderson (and even then, how many people REALLY liked DARJEELING LIMITED?) Most of the situations were easily-escapable, leaving weak plots and when that happens, along with somewhat stale and predictable writing, even the combination of talent couldn’t keep me interested. I imagine HBO just realized it wasn’t really going anyhere. Even more, the stoner-humor thing has kinda come and gone. With marijuana all-but-legalized in several states and more easily accessible than prescription drugs in every other (and that’s saying a lot with the widespread trend of prescription drug abuse) weed has lost its intoxicating effect. What’s funny? Cocaine (see EASTBOUND ANDDOWN).
HOW TO MAKE IT IN AMERICA: The problem with this show is they’re trying to garner the hipster self-emulation vote (how many straight men outside the hipster community do YOU know who are giving their all towards their dream of making designer jeans and t-shirts?) without realizing that hipsters would never want to be seen hustling like that. Even more, that hipsters don’t want to identify with anything so mainstream as an HBO show about them, that the key to hipsterdom is hating anything when it becomes too popular? Even more, these kids are full of shit, fully and eternally. It’s this NYC thing trying to pull a fast one on everybody, sexy high society yacht parties and Gina Gershon and the art world and it’s all so 2010. And even in 2010 these kids just got on my nerves. For some reason, I found myself hoping they failed. Maybe it was my personal experience with various hustlers in NYC in real life that showed me the ugly truth, that these kids were, in the end, two more idiot douche-bag bullshitters who think they’re entitled to the high life because they grew up with the cool society kids. Yeahhh…
Bummer because Luis Guzman is golden.
Of course perhaps none of these are the actual reasons why these shows were cancelled. Maybe it was because HBO realized it no longer had a female-driven TV show and for a network essentially built around a Girl-power Weekly Comedy (SEX IN THE CITY), that’s unacceptable. Showtime has dominated the female-driven market for the last few years (WEEDS, NURSE JACKIE, recently-cancelled UNITEDSTATES OF TARA) and HBO has had . . .? They have their new SOPRANOS in BOARDWALK EMPIRE. Now they need their new SEX IN THE CITY. While I doubt very much that ENLIGHTENED will have the legs those other funny girls had, they have to start somewhere. And who knows, maybe I just need to open my mind to the possibilities. Isn’t that what enlightenment’s really all about?
Oh yeah, and happy New Year.
- Ryan
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