Some recent articles from other websites on TV, TV writing, and the TV biz that we think y’all should know about:
Severed limbs and intertextuality: your guide to Endeavour’s hidden secrets
by Andrew Collins
Month: August 2016
Another Way to Look at the Future of “Television”
The latest on the ongoing evolution of the home entertainment paradigm. (Well, what else are we supposed to call it? Ain’t really just “TV” anymore, is it?)
by Nellie Andreeva and David Lieberman
It’s not easy being an indie standalone channel in the era of cord-cutting and “too much TV.” Participant Media learned that the hard way, moving in to pull the plug on its three-year old network Pivot TV, writing off a $200 million initial investment and further tens of millions in costs.
Cord-cutting “continues to dominate investor outlooks,” RBC Capital Markets’ Steven Cahall said this week. Pay TV providers– cable, satellite and telcos — lost 665,602 subscribers in Q2, according to researcher Bruce Leichtman.Their annual rate hikes have become risky as consumers, especially Millennials, warm to low cost alternatives including Netflix. Many cable owners fear that cord cutting and shaving will accelerate when they face planned live streaming services from Hulu and AT&T’s DirecTV — and possibly Apple.
Web Series: “Travel Boobs”
munchman is excited to let you all know that this is currently his favorite web series.
And, no, not just because of the name.
“It’s the metaphor that appeals to me,” munchman says. “Try it and see!”
LB Sees “The Get Down”
by Larry Brody
What would Sisyphus do?
Your TV writing career gotcha down, bunky?
Feeling tired? Terrified? Downtrodden?
Dennis O’Neil: I Think, Therefore I Yam What I Yam
So, you think you exist, do you?
Okay, you probably do, but not in the way you’ve always believed you do. (And let’s be wary of that word “always.” Might be a slippery one, that “always.”) Way back when, in the seventeenth century, a brainy guy, a philosopher and mathematician named René Descartes put “cogito ergo sum” into the world’s head. A lot of you know that René’s observation means, in the usual English translation, “I think therefore I am.”
What he was trying to do, our René, was find Truth with a capital T – some fact that could not be doubted, no matter what, no matter who. He asked us to imagine that there exists an evil demon who has created a vastly elaborate illusion. We’re just a brain, or something akin to brains, floating in demon porridge or maybe suspended from a demon ceiling and everything else is a part of demon’s foolery. It just ain’t. But someone other than the demon must be on the receiving end of the demonic sniggery, or else the sniggery itself couldn’t exist. That someone is me.