Is There Value in Discussion That Stops There?
Over at Tumblr I posted this quote from Rob Walker about Mad Men: “At this point I think the only interesting thing about Mad Men (to me) is the disconnect between the amount of attention it gets from the media and marketing crowd, and the number of people who actually watch it.” I’ve stated publicly that I’m not crazy about the show and am always interested in places where media attention and actual popularity are misaligned.
The quote got a very interesting response that made me scratch my head a bit, “The interesting part is that so many people still cling to the broadcast paradigm assumption that media attention is directly related to popularity. The value of a creative product as a topic of discussion isn’t necessarily attached to the value of the same product as entertainment.”
It’s really that second sentence that made me think. Most of us have been trained to think that there is little value in discussion that doesn’t lead to action, and while I still think that’s true in a broad sense, there are clearly softer measures and value to the publicity of the show in-and-of-itself that have nothing to do with whether people actually ever tune in. Ultimately attention needs to be connected to popularity for the show to continue to exist and AMC or any television station to stay in business (at least in a medium where eyeballs equal dollars). Now there are certainly longer term benefits to the attention and coverage, but these are just proxies for popularity like DVD sales down the road and viewers for AMC as a whole. Anyway, just thinking out loud, that’s all.
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You (and the original responder) may be on to something there. Think of how many books, movies, albums, etc, become part of our culture despite the fact that large amounts of people (possibly a majority) have never actually read, seen, or heard them. We reference these works all the time and they may even weigh on our thoughts and discussions despite the fact that we may not have actually sat down and engaged them as entertainment.
Reminds me of this NYTimes article, referenced in Monday’s Urban Eye (Why Literaature Doesn’t Matter): http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/books/review/Andersen-t.html?_r=2&8ur&emc=ur
From season 1 to season 2, viewers grew by 68% (.9 to 1.52 mil) and from 2 to 3 (first ep) by 84% (1.52 to 2.8 mil) (am sure that is going to drop, by 84% is still a huge leap) [from http://bit.ly/IC5M6 !
Also, two and a half men is a comedy show, has far wider appeal as a category than a show like mad men because if a random comedy show is on TV I would think one is far more likely to let it be than a drama show where you need to know the whole story. (I could be wrong about this.)
Been meaning to comment on this since it popped up in my inbox the other day.
Some random thoughts/observations:
+ There’s value in buzz. AMC has been able to strike a deal with Banana Republic promoting the clothes. The actors and writers will do well for themselves as they move on: they’ll be in demand in Hollywood because the conventional wisdom is that MadMen is “quality TV.”
+ There was a somewhat similar disconnect/controversy in the 80s and 90s about why shows like The Tim Allen Show and Roseanne got minimal media coverage compared the the yuppie comedies like Seinfeld and Friends. Lots of charges of class-ism. Shows that appeal to the “Stuff White People Like” tribe garner the lion’s share of media attention and industry prizes. Here again, a program’s appeal to the masses is seen as proof that it’s somehow not worthy. So Walker’s comments notwithstanding, there’s always been a strong connection between what appeals to the marketing and media crowd and what’s made into a trend.
+ To wit: most teenagers in the 1960s weren’t hippies and weren’t out demonstrating against the war and experimenting with drugs on college campuses. In fact, most of them did not go to college. Most of them still got married fairly young, had kids and were thus sort of surprised when their upper middle class peers, who had delayed marriage and childbirth until their late 30s or early 40s, suddenly declared that there was an “echo boom” going on in the early 80s. (Blue collar Boomers were dealing with teenagers at that point.) It’s that old NASCAR Blindness thing.
+ MadMen seemed to have hit something in the popular zeitgeist that made it okay to be into the things the show stands for (and I use that term loosely) – but the whole early 60s vibe seems to be something people feel they can partake in without actually ever watching the show. People who’ve never watched the show seem to know who Don Draper is (or at least Jon Hamm) but, to Sriram’s point, have no idea who the stars of 3 and a half men are.
Is Nielson perhaps like Arbitron is to radio. Does not offer much to participate in surveys and relies on someone answering the old-fashioned landline phone.
MadMen is very smart TV, folks that enjoy smart TV are smart and probably professionals. Not home to get the phone call, and probably watching the DVR’d version a few days later.
Think about how ‘dumbed down’ radio has gotten in the last few years.
Most fav SW parody: “The Empire Strikes Bike” . See my url.