NBC’s decision to stop putting quality, scripted shows on in the 8 o’clock hour is the pathetic and cynical act of a loser.
Instead of using that hour to try to find and invent new kinds of TV, they are just giving us what they all but admit is crap. And Biggest Loser is crap. It is the dumbest game show I think I’ve ever seen and it will not last (just as Who Wants to be a Millionnaire did not).
Is it expensive to produce scripted network shows? Yes. Does it need to be? No. LonelyGirl15 is a helluva show and I’ll bet there’s no catering truck and no gaffers and no three trucks filled with lights on their set.
If the networks wants to stay in TV, they’re going to have to get inventive about shows and creative about how to make them. Instead, NBC gave up and said it will give us cheap shit. Oh, they’ll make money doing this … for now. But it’s just like cynical newspaper executives milking their cows. NBC will end up losing more viewers more quickly when it runs out of cheap tricks and we go to the internet to watch our TV instead of to the networks.
: On the news side, NBC is cutting back and consolidating and, one hopes, investing in online. That’s what they have to do. The LA Times — a newspaper that knows whereof it moans, sees the parallels to print.
: Jossip reports from the grapevine that Tucker Carlson and Rita Cosby are axed. Crap in, crap out.
