DEUX EX MACHINA & 121 EPISODES OF LOST

Last night was the series finale of a groundbreaking television show that I have watched since I first saw the pilot in September 2004. There's a lot that I liked and will miss about LOST. I really like the characters, the acting, the Hawaii setting, the mystery, the twists and all the turns that kept me and the world guessing for 6 years. However, the series finale of LOST was a big cop out. It reminded me of my Greek playwriting class.....

In Greecian times they called it the "deux ex machina", which loosely translates into "the God machine." Basically in Grecian tragedies, the mother would sleep with the son, the father would kill the mother, the famine would destroy the city-state, the people of the village would burn, the priest would defy the gods, etc. All hell would break lose and after 3 hours of sitting on stones with no backing in an amphitheater at night with no air conditioning, the playwright couldn't leave the audience with an ending like that, so the deux ex machina was born. At the very end of the play, a god (usually Zeus, but any of the other major gods would do) would descend from Mount Olympus and magically fix everything, restore order, make everyone alive again as if the past 3 hours of misery had never happened, and POOF! Happily Ever After. It was a cop out in 2000 B.C. and it's still a cop out in the 21st century.

Here's why: http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/05/one_hundred_unanswered_lost_qu.html

Also, is it me, or does ever great TV show not know how to end? LOST joins great television shows such as Seinfeld, and The Sopranos with not knowing how to end a great television series.

UPDATE YOUR WEBSITES!

As the United States and the world economically continue to act like a sick patient (recovering, relapsing, rinse and repeat....), and with all the drama of the Great Recession, it's easy to forget the previous economic crash in 2000 from the Dot Com Bubble bursting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

I was thinking about the early days of the internet and how from 1995-2000 how much businesses constantly evolved and updated their websites. I have also been spending a lot of time on over 10 major airline sites, and the most consistent thing I realized about the airline websites is that none of them have changed in over 5 years. Now, almost every corporation has settled on their website design and they almost never change. And I think that's a bad business decision.

As a business in the 21st century your website should be update yearly with the latest web enhancements to make your business stand out. Consumers directly relate to your company and your brand online. It's their own personal experience with your business. What are you saying to consumers if you don't update your website for 5 or 10 years? What would you think as a consumer if you walked into a retail store and it hadn't been changed, updated or dusted in 5 or 10 years? You'd walk out.

And the airline industry is not alone in this. Most companies are not updating their websites yearly. At Warner Bros. International Television we update our business to business website every year for the LA Screenings. For some of our clients, this is the only time of year that they interact with our website. And each time they do, we want them to see that as a company, we are as new and fresh as the programming we are selling them each TV season.

On the internet, even Google is getting a little too comfortable with itself. Microsoft is building a smarter search home page than Google's. Google has recently made some improvements to its search, but there's much more it can do to stay easy, but be updated in consumers' mind.

DVR COMMERCIAL SKIPPING SOLVED

For years, the DVR has been unfairly portrayed as the enemy of TV advertising. When Tivo was invented, the television industry was caught completely unaware. There was a palatable shutter as the very foundation of the TV advertising revenue business model was under attack from a box consumers could buy online or in any electronics retailer nationwide.

The DVR is basically the next evolution in the VCR. Instead of using tapes to record your favorite TV series and movies for personal use, someone at Tivo got the brilliant idea to put a hard drive into a VCR box and record TV & movies that way. Of course, the trade off was that you couldn't just give a videotape to your friend to watch in their VCR, but who really did that in the 80's and 90's anyway? In fact, to solve the tradeoff problem, early Tivo's allowed recording to videotapes, but I digress once again....By putting a hard drive in a box and an easy menuing systems, BANG! You have a "renewable" VCR with no need to buy expensive, costly and messy piles of tapes. Tivo faced strong headwinds from a business perspective to answer the multi-billion dollar question that is largely the same businesses risks that Apple faces today, (only Apple currently does it better than any technology company currently), which is "How do you create consumer demand for a device no consumer is demanding?"

Tivo was a poorly mismanaged company that immediately came under attack from both the TV & Advertising industries. And like all small, undercapitalized technology companies, the majors attacked them with lawsuits. And to make matters worse for Tivo, the cable and satellite companies figured out how to build their own boxes to have the same DVR functionality of Tivo with none of those messy patent infringement claims. Tivo also sold its intellectual property to the cable companies for a fee, which they were then cut out of. The gospel according to Tivo with its ability to fast forward through commercials, pause, stop, replay would spell the end of the free, advertiser supported television in the United States. Or would it?

The VCR first hit mass consumer adoption in 1980 and within 10 years had gone global. In the United States VCR penetration was up to 95% in just 1 decade. DVR's went mass market in 2000 and now, 10 years later, it's only in 35% of American homes, and plateauing. What does this tell me? DVR's are a transitional technology. There's an opening for another device with 95% penetration. (Another blog on this later.....)

First, some myth busting: Big hint Advertising industry - no one was really watching your commercials before the DVR came along! Most consumers used the standard non-skippable television commercial as an excuse to grab a snack or a bite to eat, go to the restroom, make a phone call, run a quick errand, turn something off that was on, doing dishes, basically anything you could do quickly in the 2 minutes or more of commercial breaks, you did. That's what commercial breaks were for - feeling active while you were being lazy watching TV. So consumers were already "skipping" commercials.

Second, a little insight into consumer DVR habits. Studies have shown that consumers that have DVRs love them, but utilize them in largely the same way that they did before: an excuse to grab a snack or a bite to eat, go to the restroom, make a phone call, run a quick errand, turn something off that was on, doing dishes, only now, you could do it for longer. In fact, most consumers with DVRs now use them to run errands for longer than 2 minutes because they know they can just rewind what they missed. I would postulate that consumers with DVR are MORE exposed to commercials than they were before. Commercials are start/stop points in your TV viewing. As a consumer, when you want to come back to your TV program, you rewind back to the commercial to start your show, which is then your 2nd exposure to the commercial, because your first exposure is when you got up, you have already heard the brand at the start of the commercial. In fact, studies have shown that people with DVRs will watch commercials that appeal to them. If a man is shopping for a car or a woman for a phone, male or female, people will watch commercials that interest them. So the "ad avoidance" factor that everyone was worried about is largely irrelevant.

Leave it to Hollywood to figure out a way around the DVR commercial skipping problem. Consumers with HD televisions are already expecting to watch programming in the letterbox format. That leave a black blank space above and below the TV picture. And what better place to put the name of your movie and the opening date than in that blank space? So now, even if you fast forward past a Sex & City 2 TV commercial, you do see the name of the movie and the opening date, whether you fast forward through the entire commercial or not. Actually, as a viewer you see it in a much simpler form with a much more direct and simple message that you can visually process easier. See? DVR commercial skipping has been solved.

I CAN'T TELL YOU MUCH YET, BUT.....

.....here's what shaping up for next year's TV season. I can't reveal any details, only that I haven't seen any of the new series pilots yet. I will see all of Warner Bros. new pilots by the end of the month and our all of the competitive pilots by mid June. At this point I can only speak to either what's already been announced and picked up or what trends I forsee developing.

With almost its usual coincidental economic timing, with the U.S. and world trying to pull itself out of the Great Recession, the sitcom is back, baby! The #1 new one hour, Glee, is a musical comedy, and the sitcom genre was recently revived this season with the hilarious Modern Family. The whole genre seems to be reinvigorated with fresh ideas and bold concepts.

The bad news for next season, the dramas all seem safe and boring. It's another season with a "different take" on the cop show, the doctor show, the lawyer show, or the ever reliable "family drama". After the failure of Flashforward and with Lost going off the air, any show with a heavily mythologized storyline that you need to see every single episode of, is out. It seems the networks are saying the viewer engagement is not a successful ratings story. Which is sad, because I really like shows with heavily mythologized storylines. I like getting into the lives of the characters each week. For instance, one of my favorite shows of this season was Vampire Diaries and I watched all 22 hours of that show.

I also think that in a digital world, none of the networks will be making any radical time period changes with their new or existing shows. The only network in a position to move strong shows to be more competitive is CBS. And CBS should make some radical changes. I would move The Mentalist or NCIS into CSI's Thursday 21:00 time period. CSI is on the way out, and rather than allow it to die on the vine, CBS should move a stronger show into one of the most profitable time periods in television.

I will write more once I've seen the pilots and make some predictions of what shows I think will be hits.

EUROPE'S 21ST CENTURY CHALLENGE

For a continent that has been a pillar of human civilization for thousands of years and 2 World Wars, the century that seems to be causing Europe the most trouble is the 21st. First there was the volcanic ash cloud from Iceland, then the sovereign debt crisis that started in Greece and will continue to play itself out throughout this year in the rest of the PIIGS countries, and now a hung Parliament in Britain, the continent of Europe is under some stress, no doubt. But I think all Europeans would be a huge disadvantage worldwide if they decided to dissassemble the European Union and adoption of a single currency.

Despite the vast economic and cultural differences, in a globalized economy, the only way Europe even has the faintest chance of having a voice in the world is as a unified continent. Europeans are too interconnected to start the process of disentangling themselves. Rather, they should resist the easy way out and not disbanding their common currency or break themselves up into their respective nations.

The world is a mess right now. The world greatest economy collapsed and the ripple effects of that collapse will continue to be felt for years. The United States is having its own problems growing into the 21st century, but so far only Texans are considering ceding from the union. Europe should look at long term global solutions rather than the short term economic benefits.

Ultimately, the world will need to have 3 currencies to trade in: the euro for Europe, the renumbi from China as the defacto Asian currency, and the U.S. dollar for North and South America (and England). Introducing new currencies only further delays a larger global economic issue of how trade will be conducted in the 22nd century.

(Sorry I just watched Steven Hawkins Into The Universe on the Discovery Channel and I'm thinking on a universal scale: http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/stephen-hawking/ )

2,816 MILES FOR A TACO BELL??!!?!?!!

Manhattanites are truly one of kind Americans. Despite having absolutely everything you could ever possibly need in the United States on an 11 mile long island, it is amazing to me the lengths New Yorkers will go when everything is literally in your own back yard.

For example, I know this New Yorker, let's call him Brandon (since that's his name). Now Brandon LOVES Taco Bell. There are at least 6 Taco Bell's in Manhattan, but Brandon refuses to get on a train (or walk - heaven forbid!) to any of those Taco Bell's. No, no. Instead, Brandon gets on a plane at JFK Airport in New York and flies almost 3,000 miles, has me pick him up at the airport and immediately take him to the Taco Bell near LAX. Brandon loves Taco Bell, but definitely not enough to leave his neighborhood in Hell's Kitchen and travel south to Chelsea to make a "run for the border".

There HAS to be an TV Advertising campaign in here somewhere. Are you listening corporate marketing executives at YUM Brands?