Screwing Over Your Colleagues - Tuesdays At 9

As someone who works on shows in this genre, I am thoroughly disgusted by this one:

"You're fired" -- but for real.

Fox has ordered a one-hour unscripted series that turns real-life company layoffs into a reality contest.

The show's working title is "Someone's Gotta Go." Employees are called to a meeting and informed there will be layoffs, but with a reality show twist: The staff will be allowed to determine who is fired.

The employees will have access to the company's internal information -- budgets, HR files, salaries, etc. -- to help make their decision.

It's the anti-"Apprentice": Instead of contestants vying for a dream job, they're fighting to keep the lousy one they already have.

Each episode will focus on one small company (less than 20 employees). The host is a business expert, not yet named, who also serves as a consultant to the companies featured on the show. There's no word yet when "Someone's" will air.

I hope never.

Far from voting someone "off the island," in this case you're pitting people against one another in a life-changing event, with severe consequences for the individual. This is the stuff of a GAME?

Maybe if the company in question was the entertainment division middle management at Fox and the production company that dreamed this up, I could go along with it. Because that's who deserves such humiliation.

The Truth About Ratings

The conventional wisdom is that Rush's ratings have doubled since he became the leader of the Republican Party. In actuality nobody really knows, because radio ratings are about as accurate as Bill Kristol on Election Night.

Limbaugh is widely acknowledged to be the most popular talk-radio host, as evidenced by the record $400 million, eight-year contract he signed with his syndicator last July. But estimates of Limbaugh's nationwide (and overseas) audience are exercises in guesswork, slippery methodology and suspect data. Limbaugh himself has muddied the water with the claim that he reaches 20 million people a week, although there's no independent support for that figure.

Arbitron, the radio industry's dominant audience-measurement company, has never publicly released a national estimate for Limbaugh, and it says, in effect, that the job is too complicated, expensive and time-consuming to bother with [...]

The ratings service can say with some precision how large Limbaugh's audience is in a particular city and at a particular time. In the Washington region, for example, Limbaugh's program -- carried from noon to 3 p.m. on WMAL (630 AM) -- attracted an average of 167,700 unique listeners per week during January. Limbaugh has never been a huge draw in Washington; his show ranked 14th overall during January, far behind ratings leaders WTOP-FM (567,500 weekly listeners), soft-rock station WASH-FM (526,300) and Top-40 station WIHT-FM (349,300).

Premiere Radio Networks, Limbaugh's national syndicator, estimated last year that 3.59 million people were in Limbaugh's audience during an average quarter-hour of his program, based on a review of Arbitron's piecemeal data about hundreds of stations.

Because people typically tune in and tune out of stations, however, that number doesn't reflect how many individuals cumulatively listened at some point during the week. What's more, Premiere's figure is based on data from the first three months of 2008, a virtual lifetime ago in the fast-moving radio business [...]

Figuring out the size of Limbaugh's flock "is an art, not a science," says Michael Harrison, the editor of Talkers magazine, a trade journal about the talk-radio field. "It's very hard to come up with an exact answer. It really reveals the embarrassing state of radio ratings."

I'll take it a step further. Nobody knows who really watches television, either. With TiVo you can get a more accurate picture of what's being taped, but the sample sizes for Nielsen families is so large that the margin of error is enormous. They actually have the technology to make that more accurate, but it would involve putting a set-top box on every television in the United States. Right now they're on 25,000. The rest of the monitoring is done with hand-written diaries.

TV and radio ratings represent a shared faith between broadcasters and advertisers. They each believe that the numbers are real, and make their transactions on that basis. But it's as fictional as Rush Limbaugh saying he has 20 million listeners. Which is good enough for the media to report, I guess.

They Should Have Added A Morning Zoo

Nobody can resist a morning zoo.

Al-Hurra -- "The Free One" in Arabic -- is the centerpiece of a U.S. government campaign to spread democracy in the Middle East. Taxpayers have spent $350 million on the project. But more than four years after it began broadcasting, the station is widely regarded as a flop in the Arab world, where it has struggled to attract viewers and overcome skepticism about its mission [...]

Since its inception, al-Hurra has been plagued by mediocre programming, congressional interference and a succession of executives who either had little experience in television or could not speak Arabic, according to interviews with former staffers, other Arab journalists and viewers in the Middle East.

It has also been embarrassed by journalistic blunders. One news anchor greeted the station's predominantly Muslim audience on Easter by declaring, "Jesus is risen today!" After al-Hurra covered a December 2006 Holocaust-denial conference in Iran and aired, unedited, an hour-long speech by the leader of Hezbollah, Congress convened hearings and threatened to cut the station's budget.

"Many people just didn't know how to do their job," said Yasser Thabet, a former senior editor at al-Hurra. "If some problem happened on the air, people would just joke with each other, saying, 'Well, nobody watches us anyway.' It was very self-defeating."

Wow, I've worked at stations like that.

I know Radio Free Europe was a success, but can anyone think of an antecedent over the last 60 years? I think the idea of boosting your image in foreign lands by implanting propaganda is outdated. Radio Free Europe worked because citizens in Communist-controlled areas had no other options. Arabic-language TV stations are numerous in the Middle East and many were well-established before al-Hurra. It was an alternative where nobody thought one was needed.

This is not what you want to hear about your channel:

Arab journalists and viewers say al-Hurra has a basic problem: It is boring. Investigative pieces are rare, and critics say the channel generally doesn't make waves [...]

Unlike some Egyptians, Mohamed Ahmed Mohamed, a 67-year-old contractor, said it didn't bother him that al-Hurra was financed by the U.S. government. But he, too, complained that the programming was dull.

"I've clicked on it, but nothing's stopped me," he said. "Whether it's American or French or Israeli, good shows attract viewers. And I haven't seen anything interesting on al-Hurra."

The fact that practically nobody who put the channel together spoke Arabic is another issue.

Measuring the Wrong Costs

A new study has determined that the 100-day writers strike cost Los Angeles $2.5 billion dollars. I was actually working the entire strike, so I didn't feel the impact. But there are so many moving parts on a film or television set - grips, gaffers, cameramen, focus pullers, craft services, drivers, construction, hair, makeup, etc. - that the number seems plausible to me.

What they ought to track is how much money will be lost to writers and industry workers AFTER the strike. Because the studios took the opportunity of the strike to hit the reset button on a lot of bad development deals they had. They took a fresh look at a bunch of shows and after determining that they had all kinds of leverage over them, put the hammer down:

LA Weekly's Nikki Finke reports that NBC has thanked Carson Daly for crossing the picket line to resume taping his late-night show during the writers' strike by slashing his budget and firing nine members of his staff, including three of his four writers. The network insists its decision has nothing to do with the strike. Finke says Daly became a scab because NBC threatened to cancel him unless he went back to work.

And Daly was one of the few who COOPERATED.

More important, the studios began to change the way they do business and cast aside the outdated model of previewing new shows in the fall, with NBC making the first move. What this means is that eventually there will be no pilot season. And that likely means a lot less pilots. We're already seeing the networks buy shows from other countries wholesale (instead of just reproducing them) and filling the schedule with a lot more reality and nonunion programming. This will probably spell the end of the upfronts, the annual event where networks preview the fall schedule to advertisers.

This had to happen sometime, the fall preview model was a relic. But the cost to writers is going to be significant. By neglecting to grow the union membership through gaining jurisdiction over everything on television, the Writer's Guild will see opportunities for their current members dry up. Despite this, the strike was successful because it showed that a labor union can still drive the agenda in Hollywood. But financially? I'm not sure it was a victory.

Full Circle

“Go back to bed, America, your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed America, your government is in control. Here, here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up, go back to bed America, here is American Gladiators, here is 56 channels of it! Watch these pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on the living in the land of freedom. Here you go America - you are free to do what well tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!”

-Bill Hicks, 1991

American Gladiators: A Breakout Hit?

Is “American Gladiators” the unexpected hit of the 2007-08 television season?

It’s far too early to say anything definitive, but Sunday’s two-hour premiere of the NBC reality competition “delivered the highest ratings among adults 18 to 49 of any new show this season on any network,” Benjamin Toff noted earlier this week.

The program drew an average of 12 million viewers on Sunday, gaining viewers during each half hour, and another 11 million when a second episode was shown in what will become its normal time slot on Monday night. This week a repeat will be shown on Sunday at 10 p.m., in a time slot originally filled by the Golden Globes.

Ah, progress.

The Slow, Creaky Machinery of Cutting-Edge Television

I started a new show for Wired Magazine and the workplace isn't exactly, er, WIRED, so posting will be a drip rather than a spigot for the next few days while I figure this thing out.

I SWEAR I'll get to posting some stuff about Yearly Kos. I didn't post a lot while I was there because a) navigating the place hindered the ability to sit down for even a moment, b) it was $12 a day to use WiFi from the room and I wasn't in the room that much anyway, and c) I spend the other 362 days of the year buried in a laptop, I thought it'd be nice to TALK to people rather than reply to comments with them.

Flight Of The Conchords

Was pretty goddamn funny. It's in the genre of "quirky and ridiculous acoustic music comedy" a la Tenacious D, but without the self-consciousness, and the jokes in between are quite funny. It was also good to see Arj Barker, who was the funniest man in San Francisco back when I was doing comedy there, getting some HBO quality-comedy love.

I do sense that their main joke might get old eventually. They have a conversation which hides a crucial bit of information, then releases that bit as the punch line. For example, the one guy saying "I think my girlfriend was weirded out by you turning off the light," and the other guy saying "Yeah, maybe, and also that I used to date her for, like, six months." It's kind of what a lot of improv comics fall back on, adding something gratuitous that changes the whole scene. Eventually you're going to see that coming. But for now, funny. Plus, every premise gets old after a while (the Curb Your Enthusiasm preview snippet they showed last night had the EXACT same joke - a woman thinks Larry gets an erection because of her - from the premiere episode seven years ago). And since the show is WAY too weird for broadcast, it again shows why HBO is an oasis in a desert of quality television.

Latest Sopranos Blogging Ever

With the reason that I left town happening at the same time as the final episode of The Sopranos, I wasn't able to see it until now.

Why does everybody want closure on our cultural artifacts? That was a great ending because, in a sense, the show never ends. It lives on with the different scenarios that the audience will place on it. I have absolutely no problem wondering whether Tony looked up to see Meadow or the guy who's about to whack him. Although I always had trouble with the fact that Lorraine Bracco was paid money to act, The Sopranos was a big jumble of triumphs, tragedies, laughs, tears, obsessions, fluff, superstitions, rivalries, outrageous cruelty, and family. In other words, it was like life. And life isn't neat.

It was a fitting end.

UPDATE: This, however, is very true, and perhaps one of the cooler things that can only come from the blogosphere, as Ezra Klein takes issue with the study that caused Dr. Melfi to kick Tony out the door - for SUBSTANTIVE reasons. Awesome.

Fooled Me

The "Who Wants a Donated Kidney?" reality show, it turns out, is a hoax. I think the real story here is how the standards of television have sunk so low that this kind of show was completely plausible.

Reality Outpaces Satire, Ex. CXXXVIII

I distinctly remember, back when I was doing comedy more, that somebody had a joke (maybe me) abut a new reality show called "Who Wants My Kidney?"

Yeah, that's totally happening now in the Netherlands.

I thik the M.O. for anyone who wants to sell a show these days is to think of something so outlandish that there's no way any studio exec could possibly accept it. And then, watch them accept it.

This is approximately how we ended up with Shear Genius.