The Conglomerateur is a wise man
His wisdom
compounded by a complete rejection of self-aggrandizement. Although he owns
stations, networks, and programs, Wall Street pays little attention to his
work, and 7he New Yorier will never be allowed to profile him. Access to the homeequipment9.wordpress.com On the condition
that I protect his privacy,.he was willing to reveal to me the deepest
Eleusinian secret of bad TV: The producers want it that way.
"Programs, more than any other commodity,
are nonperishable assets," the Conglomerateur told me. "But they have
value only inasmuch as you can get value out of them. And for that, you need
exhibition. And you'll need your own exhibition venues because the other guys'
will be closed off to you."
It came back to the cycle:
Networks begetting
networks. The virtual elimination of federal antitrust enforcement against
distributors who favor their own products and the demise last year of
long-standing laws that forbade the broadcast webs to own their own entertainment
programming have prompted networks across the spectrum to fill their own space
with their own material.
"The studios are looking at a situation
where access may be foreclosed to them. They're scared to death, and rightly
so," the Conglomerateur said. "And so they're starting their own
networks."
He ran down the list for me:
USA Network was
started by MCA and Viacom to guarantee an outlet for their studios' vast stable
of TV dramadies. They then created the Sci-Fi Channel, not to satisfy consumer
demand for more science-fiction programming but because they wanted a place to
park reruns of Quantum Leap and The Six Million Dollar Man. Game Show Network
is a Sony venture, not because Aunt Gert can't live without Jeopardy! but
because Sony's Columbia Pictures division has a library filled with Password
and The Price Is Right. Other studios are either selling out to network
owners--as MGM and Hanna-Barbera did to Turner--or buying networks, as Disney
did ABC.
"It gives you enormous flexibility to
present your materials!" the Conglomerateur said exultantly (for he had
done the same thing). "That's what this is all about: having enough
opportunities after you've spent the money on the first use of the program,
which doesn't make money, to make money on those back-end reruns."
The entertainment industry has even developed
a terminology to describe this new path to profits: It's called
"repurposing inventory." And everyone's got inventory. Turner's got
cartoons for his Cartoon Network and MGM movies for his Turner Classic Movies.
Rupert Murdoch's got old Fox films for his new fXM network and X-Files reruns
for fX. Even NBC and ABC have inventory; their names are Tom Brokaw and Peter
Jennings, and plans have already been disclosed to repurpose these anchors and
other news celebrities for the coming
all-news networks.
Television is the ultimate
ecosystem
A CNN executive told me. "Nothing ever gets wasted."
"But this is a crazy scheme," I
argued to the Conglomerateur as he dispassionately related the new verities of
his business. "Why would the studios risk cutting their own throats by
intentionally running bad, old shows that don't attract viewers, rather than
spreading their antennae as far as possible in search of the best original
material?"
The Conglomerateur laughed at my naivete.
"Because that's a phony argument. This idealistic notion that there are
perfect programs to be found just isn't true. You can make a good statistical
case that you've got as good a chance of finding stuff that will work within
your own stable of units as by playing the universe as a whole."
At first, I was reluctant to accept the
Conglomerateur's chilling view of the new world of infotainment. Weren't we
living in another "golden age" of television, as decreed by Time
magazine and exemplified by NYPD Blue and ER? Then I looked at the staggering
volume of programming that networks new and old are extruding and realized that
these were just sand grains in a Gobi Desert filled with Tony Danza vehicles.
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