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How Is HDTV Changing Television?

When Marshall McLuhan cryptically wrote that television was a "cool" medium (as opposed to radio and film, which McLuhan defined as "hot") he allowed for the possibility that it wouldn't always be so. McLuhan understood that media have a tendency to evolve, to combine, and to mutate. TV technology has since obsoleted black and white television, added remote control, incorporated high capacity inputs, and now enhanced video and audio sufficiently to give meaning to the phrase "home theater experience." Is that hot or what, Professor McLuhan?

When color came in, television content libraries changed in value. Most black and white programs stopped selling in syndication. It was like when The Jazz Singer obsoleted silent movies. Today, as the percentage of viewers with big screen HDTV and HD DVR's reaches a major of homes, are we seeing a similar sea change in audience habits?

The short answer: YES. This year's Super Bowl set an all-time record, despite ttwo small market teams. Winter Olympics viewing also exceeded expectations, and the Oscars did better than in recent years. Live events are ascendant because digital HD video is the TV format best suited for the home theater experience.

An label is the new difference maker in the on screen guides. High def channels like MGM HD and Universal HD make SD movie channels look passé by comparison. All-HD broadcast networks have reclaimed the initiative. Cable laggards better wake up! Viewers are rejecting starndard def 4:3 channels like Lifetime and trying out anything in HD. Hey, at least it looks good! High defnitiion production and distribution are both needed. Shows shot in HD video (or properly digitized for HD from film) and exhibited on an HD channel have the edge.

Today, too many media industry leaders are focused on mobile media and viewers who watch television on laptops. "Cool" stuff, but these new mutations could take years to monetize. By that time, young viewers will have settled down to raise families, and will be watching the big screen in the living room. Just as the movie industry has done with 3D, the television industry needs to realize that the medium is the message. High definition's time is here, and just as with sound and 3D, the contours of the medium will shape its most successful content.

TV's Top Ten of 2009

Charles Krauthammer and Modern Family's Julie Bowen get some overdue recognition in this column for PajamasMedia.com, where I review television's top ten moments, individuals, and programs of 2009.

November: Wall Street Journal -- and Mad Men -- Celebrate Conrad Hilton

Recommended reading: John Moroney's fine article Hollywood Discovers a Real Businessman about Conrad Hilton, and the way he came alive this year in Matthew Weiner's Emmy winning drama Mad Men, set in 1963.

Mad Men is television's most impressive business drama ever. Unlike the megahit Dallas, which depicted the oil industry in broad strokes, Mad Men gets into the details of what makes advertising such a fascinating arena.

What's most fascinating, of course, are the people. Characterization is all important, and surprises abound. "Connie", a stranger, bonds with series lead Don Draper (who won't learn that the stranger is Hilton until three episodes later) around their humble origins and arrival at their place of meeting, a country club bar. Unlike ad man Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm), the Conrad Hilton we meet in the series has honestly integrated his humble origins into a self-made man's identity. Hilton leans on his Bible (vs. Bertram Cooper's Atlas Shrugged), but is in other ways he's a Randian figure. Draper still has a ways to go. While the brilliant season finale tests Draper's impulse for independence and invigorates his business life, he's no Hilton, yet. Their journey over this season is built on a joint recognition of how the American Dream is available to all willing to make the effort.

That striving is most evident in the series' Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) who in Mad Men's three years has grown from a secretarial school graduate to a recruited star copywriter. To do so she resists both the backward pull of her family cloister in Brooklyn, and the wayward tilt of immature co-workers and Cosmo girls who believe the real winners are latching on to upwardly mobile husbands in the suburbs. Pursuing the career woman path in 1963 was no easy thing, and along Peggy's slow, heroic journey we her developing a trait rarely celebrated on television: patience. There's humor too, as when Peggy, asked to turn off a dog of a focus group from behind the glass, responds "I can't turn it off, it's actually happening." We can't turn it off, either.

And so we were there for the season finale, when Draper made his appreciative pitch for Peggy Olson, and her talents, whose talents were appreciated elsewhere.

"There are people out there who buy things. People like you and me. And something happened. Something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do."

Draper knows first-hand how the Depression crushed shoppers' self-worth. He gets that Peggy feels consumers' psychological need to fine-tune their self-worth, their place in society by using cosmetics, sharing popsicles, or framing a telegram. This isn't just a slick ad man's play to retain a talented underling, it's an affirmation of the underlying social value of what advertisers do on behalf of their clients.

September: No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency released on DVD

For several years now HBO tried to recapture the magic of its original programming during the Chris Albrecht years. Finally, this year the network became an innovator again, by moving beyond the hip, edgy, industry insider mentality which has handicapped its search for a broad based hit to lure and retain subscribers.

The program is the The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, based on Alexander McCall Smith's popular novels, and it has now been released on DVD. The series is the first ever shot in Botswana, and it's a lyrical, visually ambitious, and captivating yarn with an immensely likable lead character played by Jill Scott. It's not exactly a globalized Murder She Wrote, but it is a sharp turn away from the cynical, elitist posture we've come to expect recently from HBO.

The stories are remarkably gentle, the visual presentation is stunning, and the African score infuses the series with bounce and optimism. Can't recommend this one strongly enough.

July: The Closer on TNT and DVD

Jennifer Coolidge, G.W. Bailey, and Kyra Sedgwick in The Closer, "Dial M for Provenza"

The Closer, TNT's outsanding police procedural starring Kyra Sedgwick, is now in its fifth successful season airing on Monday nights. Last year's outstanding season four has been released on DVD with 15 episodes including two of my favorites, "Dial M for Provenza" and "Tijuana Brass." My full review is up on PajamasMedia.com

Meanwhile season two Mad Men has just been released on DVD and Blu-ray, while season three will premiere on AMC in August. In terms of great television, Summer is the new Thursday night.

June: Churchill at War

Into the Storm, HBO's follow-up to the Emmy-winning The Gathering Storm, premiered Sunday, May 31 and replays throughout June. Brendan Gleeson and Janet McTeer play Winston and Clementine Churchill.

"A relentless leader is the greatest weapon of war" states HBO's publicity poster. The film covers Churchill's leadership during World War II, when his rhetoric gave Britons the heart to fight on. His marriage and his future political standing were also at risk. Revered today, Churchill was not without his critics at the time.

Steadfast leadership and the ability to communicate effectively are both required for leadership in time of war. Seventy years from now, how will this decade's American leaders be judged by history?

Click here for my full review at PajamasMedia.com.

May: Obama's Nortre Dame Speech

Leaving aside the politics of the abortion issue, President Obama taught a valuable lesson about civil discourse at his commencement address in South Bend. Click here for my full review at PajamasMedia.com.

March: CBS' Jesse Stone Movies: A Triumph of Tone

Tom Selleck in CBS' Jesse Stone: Thin Ice

In early March 2009 Tom Selleck returned to CBS for a fifth Jesse Stone movie, Jesse Stone: Thin Ice. The first four Jesse Stone movies are available on DVD and are in the Netflix collection. If you haven't seen them, you're in for a treat. Based on the Robert Parker novels, Selleck's character is a forlorn, lonesome, highly functioning alcoholic solving crimes in a New England beach village. The tone is ruminative, unrushed, absolutely perfect pacing for a series of pictures about a man who has exited life's fast lane for a country road.

Just as Selleck's (and writer Don Bellisario's) Thomas Magnum matured throughout their classic series, the actor here continues to evolve, bearing the scars of middle age with grace and wisdom. Like his character, Selleck doesn't need the pressure of the high octane action hero any more. Magnum PI was a landmark series, and did its part in history, redeeming the public image of the Viet Nam vet. It also reaped the rewards of a #1 hit, registering record breaking syndication sales for a one-hour drama. Give Jesse Stone a place in the record books, too, as one of the last quality effort in the broadcast network made-for-television movie genre. It's also one of the last broadcast programs unapologetically made for the baby boomer audience now shunned by the big advertisers.

These Jesse Stone pictures are everything broadcast network television today tries so hard not to be. It is dignified, quietly intelligent, and respectful of lessons which can only be learned by maturity. There's no pulsating pop music, no frenetic editing, no one in a constant state of sexual overdrive, no preening urban narcissists shouting into cell phones, no automatic weapons, and no references to "texting" and Facebook. There is a dog.

The Los Angeles Times review identifies its essence perfectly -- "This is a slow-moving film, especially in comparison with the often hyperkinetic pacing of today's television, but that's one of its greatest strengths."

DVD Pick: Foyle's War

When television's best programs (e.g. Mad Men) go into seasonal hibernation, Netflix is a wonderful choice for those who won't settle for anything less than excellence. One of the great gems of Netflix is the recently concluded PBS/ITV classic Foyle's War. All nineteen episodes (about 90 minutes each) are now available on DVD.

World War II is the backdrop. In the foreground is Michael Kitchen's marvelous, understated portrayal of police Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle,, a widower and father solving crimes of all kinds in the town of Hastings. The locale has strategic significance and historic resonance -- 1066 and all that -- at a time when the possibility of invasion was on all minds. Not all the crimes relate directly to the war, but all the characters bear its weight. The series is a masterpiece of tone, with no overwrought music, graphical excess, or character histrionics.

Each episode stands alone, so you can pick and choose from this excellent online episode guide and website, or do what we've been doing, watch in sequence and follow unfolding developments in the war, and in the lives of the four regular characters. Produced over several years at a slow pace, the series is meticulously attentive to period detail. Writer Anthony Horowitz read hundreds of books to capture the attitudes, events, crimes, and details of everyday life during the era. Horowitz is young, but he writes with maturity and grace.

As a war story it is no polemic. Issues such as battle fatique, casualties, treatment of prisoners, suspicion due to ethnicity, the religious perspective, conscientious objectors, political agitators, profiteers, and much more come up in this or that episode. Underneath it all is a sense of common cause, and values like duty, compassion, and valor.

Foyle's War is one of the few great television programs of this decade, even in rerun. Watch when live TV is fixated on some trivial contest of celebrity or cultural voyeurism, and you will feel like you've taken the high road.

Flashback: In Praise of Mad Men, Outstanding Drama Series of 2007

Mad Men, a drama series set in a 1960 New York advertising agency, airs Sundays at 10PM on AMC.

What I appreciate most about Mad Men is its maturity. It is civilized, intelligent, and more interested in the human condition than in exploiting facile high stakes plot points.

I love that the series refuses to pander to the presumptions of today's advertising business about the audience, even as it explores the golden age of that industry. More than any show in history it draws you gracefully into its sponsorship, and that unique ad environment is often put to good use.

Mad Men respects the emotional maturity of its audience. It doesn't pound us with a relentless musical score. It doesn't rush us along, so we wait through a long focus group for one insight at the end which will launch a career. It is ruminative, yet it celebrates imaginative energy. Sexuality is everywhere, but it's gentle and understated, reflecting the shame and inhibition which our culture has since lost, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

The scene pitching the Kodak account in the Season One finale "The Wheel" has been heralded as one of the finest in the history of television. Small wonder Matthew Weiner was nominated twice in the writing category, once for the pilot, and again for the season finale.

Mad Men is true to the period, and it's thick with contrasts between that time and these, but never as object lessons. Dangers from cigarettes and alcohol to cellophane bags appear in the foreground, then disappear without driving home an immediate lesson like some overwrought David Kelley polemic. One minute you think the ad game is being mercilessly skewered, then the hero casually one-ups a group of critical bohemians.

It's a show you have to talk about when it's over. Did young women sometimes not know they were pregnant? Did a character anticipate those combined effects of booze, oysters and a "broken" elevator, and was that a just punishment for what preceded?

Much about the show has been justly praised: its authenticity, the lovely opening title sequence, the perfect casting. One of the small things I enjoy is that the characters read interesting, provocative authors like Marshall McLuhan and Ayn Rand, and occasionally talk about what they've read. Sometimes they just talk like people who read. On what other program would a secretary be reprimanded with the line "your decolletage is distracting"?

Here's hoping this rich, engaging program inspires other attempts to transcend the conventions of today's low aimed prime time serials. And here's hoping that Emmy recognition will draw in a wider audience to this show. Frasier proved that aiming high to a sophisticated audience doesn't necessarily mean that audience will be small.

Addendum: Since this early review Mad Men has become one of the most honored programs on television in this decade. Advertising Age magazine went so far as to create a special 1960 Mad Men issue.
Here's hoping Matt Weiner's masterpiece will be with us for many years to come ... 1963, '64, '65, '66, etc.

Ladies and Gentlemen ...

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Over the last few years GSN has done something wonderful for everyone with a DVR system like TiVo. During the middle of the night the network aired, in sequence, black and white episodes of the classic CBS panel show What's My Line? Star blogger James Lileks praised the series in an article, as did the Wall Street Journal in Robert J. Hughes' piece entitled "Oh, the civility!" This is no insignificant cult.

Those of us who followed loyally saw history move forward one week per night, from the early 1950's through 1967. It was a time of cultural transformation in America. World War II references, exaggerated formalism, and gender stereotyping gave way to Camelot fashions, references to twisting the night away, and more subtle redefinitions of urban sophistication. This was a time when a publisher, a columnist, a stage actress and a news broadcaster, all well into middle age, were the epitome of the urban "in crowd."

In early 2008 GSN began the rerun process anew.(Yes, the press noticed.) So every weeknight at Midnight (Pacific time) history will move forward by one week, with the help of the TiVo and GSN. Some manners and mores of 1958 don't look so bad seen from 50 years later. Judge for yourself.

editor's note: In March 2009 GSN abruptly stopped rerunning What's My Line?, ending during the shows of March 1960. We hope for its return, and yearn to see all those JFK era fashion shifts at least one more time.

Executive perspective --

WSJ: Would you want to run a movie company today?

Mr. Diller: No. Words like "tent pole" and "merchandising" have nothing to do with telling good stories. The current process of major film companies is so different than it was 10 or 20 years ago, and I find the output that comes from it far less interesting. It's a very hard business to get into, and I don't know why you'd make that choice rather than shoe manufacturing.

Creative perspective --

They say that television and comedy in television is changing," said Frasier Emmy winner David Hyde Pierce in 2004. "And I just want to say when it changes back, call me."

.
Season 1 Season 2 Season 3 Season 4 Season 5 Season 6 Season 7 Season 8 Final (11)

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