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Classy sitcom plot?

Thursday, October 5, 2006

Here's a story-line that could fit well into one of those embarrassing sitcoms that US TV networks repeatedly serve up. In fact, it's about one of those embarrassing sitcoms ...

Among ABC's less original ideas this fall has been "Help Me Help You" starring Ted Danson (pictured left) as a troubled psychiatrist. (Well, such a role helped Kelsey Grammer get a much better post-Cheers life than Danson has achieved so far). While promoting the series to the showbiz media over the summer, ABC distributed a preview DVD that included a particular joke.

 

I suppose it was a joke. It was a line riffing on speculation during the summer (what in British journalism is known as the "silly season") over CNN anchor Anderson Cooper's (pictured right) sexual orientation. At one point in the previewed episode, a male character, one of  the psychiatrist's patients, says: "If supporting New Orleans makes me gay, then yes, you caught me. I'm gay, I'm super gay, and I guess that makes Anderson Cooper gay, too".

 

At the annual summer Press Tour screening in Pasadena, California on July 18, entertainment correspondents were distinctly underwhelmed by the comedy, and Executive Producer Jennifer Konner announced that this "joke" would be hitting the cutting room floor. Her stated grounds were that it didn't fit the show's finely calculated pace, that it was "much longer than the clip rhythm of that segment".

 

All well and good perhaps, though some critics muttered that this was an all-too-familiar trick of ABC's - to try for an insiders' reputation as edgily irreverent, but avoid alienating viewers by ever broadcasting the possibly risky material.

 

Not very classy, perhaps, but at least the network was now, with a new version prepared, publicly in the clear.

 

Or it thought it was - and here's the banana-peel in the story-line.

 

On the day (Sep 26th) the series premiered, Alessandra Stanley, TV critic for the most influential newspaper in the nation's biggest TV market, the New York Times, reviewed it. She appeared to be working from the earlier uncut DVD - and (possibly in all innocence) quoted verbatim and in full the supposedly-expunged dialogue.

 

"Oops", you might say. Or in apt words from popular TV classics of a more innocent time: "Sorry 'bout that" (Maxwell  Smart in "Get Smart"). Or even perhaps: "I meant to do that" (Pee Wee Herman).

 

 

IT MAY BE A BIT SIMPLISTIC, but among yardsticks for measuring any medium's health, the essential one of advertising revenue remains about the handiest.

 

And the current growth in spending on internet advertising continues to aggravate the worries of those concerned with other media sectors and their viability. The online marketing consultants Zenith Optimedia produce quarterly tracking studies on a global scale, so every national media industry watches carefully. Their latest survey indicates that the market share of advertising spending that goes to internet sites will, in the next year, break the double-digit barrier in at least two countries - the UK (at 12.9%) and Sweden (at 10.5%).

 

This year the internet will overtake the ad revenue share of outdoor (billboard) advertising worldwide - and if Zenith's figures prove true, it will soon outrank radio. Look out newspapers, magazines, and television.

 

 

IT'S JUST A SMALL MATTER - LITERALLY. But I can't resist remarking on it. Back in June I highlighted the development of new radio ads to be assertively marketed by Clear Channel Communications Inc that would be unprecedentedly short - right down to only ONE SECOND's length. They'd be called, perhaps appropriately, "Blinks".

 

Well, with front-page breathlessness, the Wall Street Journal caught up this week. And in a snappy writerly flourish it told us "Clear Channel is selling radio ads that are shorter than this sentence".

 

The Journal recorded that five-second and two-second ads are being sold. But, just in case I may be getting ahead of myself, it soberly warned the more impressionable among us that the corporate radio giant's stations "are also offering Blinks that are one second long, but they haven't found any takers - yet".

 

How long will be it before they do find takers, I wonder? Maybe as long as it takes to read this sentence.