SnarfVader: People watch TV with commercials?

one word: torrent

You know that's stealing, right, to watch TV without watching the commercials? And really, you're stealing from yourselves. Maybe CBS could make 2.5 Men without paying 6 zillion dollars to its stars; maybe they could make it for just whatever your cable company pays to CBS. But then what? You go to LA, and you take one of those bus tours of the stars' houses, so you can imagine the glamour and splendor of Hollywood and all you see are walkup apartments in Gardena. And you realize the stars' lives are just as pathetic as your own. Those are your own dreams you're stealing when you don't watch commercials.

Three words: Bisquick lamb anus.

I don't understand why they haven't fully embraced internet ads. They are *more* valuable than TV ads, because you can't skip them! I mean, christ people. It's not that complicated.

rumpelstiltskin: You know that's stealing, right, to watch TV without watching the commercials? And really, you're stealing from yourselves. Maybe CBS could make 2.5 Men without paying 6 zillion dollars to its stars; maybe they could make it for just whatever your cable company pays to CBS. But then what? You go to LA, and you take one of those bus tours of the stars' houses, so you can imagine the glamour and splendor of Hollywood and all you see are walkup apartments in Gardena. And you realize the stars' lives are just as pathetic as your own. Those are your own dreams you're stealing when you don't watch commercials.

I know this is satire, but advertising is what pays for everything. "Stardom" comes with a large price tag not just a large paycheck and without the promise of financial and not merely artistic success, it will be very difficult to keep good writers, actors, and other talent in the business. It will be impossible to keep productions going without an income stream.

So they've got to make their money somehow... and yes I skip commercials on my DVR and use AdBlock Plus.

FTFA: The commercials broke the tension.

That's just bad production. If you read old "how to write for TV" handbook, one of the most basic rules is to write a rhythm that incorporates the ad breaks, setting up tension just before the break and resolving it as you return. If you watch older TV shows on Netflix (etc.) you can recognize this pattern very easily: the point where breaks were excised have a brief cut-to-black interstitial.

ihatedumbpeople: Just wait until those DVRs don't let you skip over commercials.

As far back as a decade ago, when TIVO was young and DVRs weren't almost standard equipment on cable boxes, there was a Jerkoff Time-Warner executive named Jamie Kellner who came out and said that use of a DVR was stealing from the networks, and shouldn't be allowed.

So, the idiots in charge have always wanted to make the commercials unskippable. Why they haven't yet, I can't say. Must be the internet. If that whole problem hadn't popped up, I'd bet that DVR commercials would have been a more pressing matter.

factoryconnection: I know this is satire, but advertising is what pays for everything. "Stardom" comes with a large price tag not just a large paycheck and without the promise of financial and not merely artistic success, it will be very difficult to keep good writers, actors, and other talent in the business. It will be impossible to keep productions going without an income stream.

I don't know if this is satire, but it's really not true.

If actors were paid modestly rather than millions or -- in the case of the top of the pile, tens of millions -- most of them would still do the job, either because they enjoy it or because it still pays way better than anything else they are qualified to do. If he wasn't a movie star, Harrison Ford would be a jobbing carpenter. George Clooney would probably be a catalog model. Johnny Depp would be that weird bartender guy in a reality show. Between gigs, out-of-work actors go back to waiting tables, not practicing law. Most actors don't make much money -- and yet many of them persist in their careers long after the point where it's obvious they are never going to be an A List movie star.

The same is true of writers. Very few writers make lots of money, or ever expect to. Even the writers of top screenplays rarely get rich -- and by the way, Hollywood functioned perfectly well in the old days when most writers worked on contract, not on spec.

As for the whole "stardom" argument and the price of fame: celebrity in its modern form is something that the mass media largely invented because it's an artifact of their business model. If your business model is based on selling millions of copies of one thing -- a ticket to a movie, a record, a magazine -- you need celebrities, i.e. individuals that millions of people can be persuaded to agree to buy. And mass media needed that business model because of their analog/physical reproduction and distribution model: if you can't profitably print and distribute and market 1,000 different editions of People magazine with 1,000 different minor celebrities on the cover, then you need a major celebrity. If it costs a lot of money to build a record pressing factory and more money to master an album, you need to sell as many copies of that master as you can. And so on.

And of course, the premise of that business model is suddenly irrelevant in an era of digital media, although it will take a while before the world catches up.

And the fact is, "celebrity" can be entirely manufactured on demand. Some people have known this for a long time -- do you think that the half dozen young actors who were cast in Friends were magically more talented than the hundreds of others who auditioned and deserved fame and riches? Or that the casting director presciently spotted what they would become? Of course not. Throw enough actors at enough sitcoms and eventually one of the shows will become a breakout hit, at which point the actors involved have the leverage to demand a bigger share of the money fountain. Disney TV has mastered the business of manufacturing celebrities out of generically attractive child actors. Some of them get rich, all of them are substitutable.

Unfortunately for the mass media industries, they have given the game away themselves with reality TV. It's obvious to everybody that people like the Kardashians, Snooki, various bachelors/bachelorettes, and the Housewives of Anywhere have no talent for anything other than self-promotion. And although people still watch for now, the system is decaying: the clearest evidence is that the duration of celebrity status is getting shorter and shorter. Even the winners of alleged talent shows such as American Idol or Next Food Network Star are often "one and done".

The demise of the celebrity system may not be obvious to everybody yet, but once the facade crumbles, the rotten core will be obvious in hindsight.

By the way, a few posters in this thread seem to have missed one obvious point: You're not supporting the show if you're watching the commercials. You're only supporting the show if you actually buy the product in the commercials.

Advertisers -- both on TV and online -- seem to be losing sight of that too: they don't gain anything from forcing a commercial in front of us if the commercial is still annoying and unpersuasive.

/My wife hates it when I go "look honey! the husband in that commercial is an idiot! never seen that before!"
//Also when I go "look honey! it's this week's Awkward Product Placement Moment!" (and yes, I can actually capitalize in speech)
///Actually, come to think of it she rarely watches TV with me anymore...

Desquamation: ihatedumbpeople: Just wait until those DVRs don't let you skip over commercials.

Probably won't happen... Since they've just started inserting commercials directly into the scripts of most broadcast shows.

/Thanks TiVo!

This last season of House is horrible at doing that.