IS LINEAR TV BACK!?

Happy trend report and forecasting month, to those who celebrate.

While we’ll never be the type of company to let ourselves be blindly led by every latest prediction (or else we just end up creating the same stuff as everyone else), if we want to deliver against our mission of Making Something People Genuinely Like it’s important to constantly look at, and understand, what’s going on in that old zeitgeist of ours out there.

‘26% of Brits say they won’t watch linear TV again’

‘Netflix chief says ‘the end of linear TV’ is coming ‘over the next 5-10 years’

‘Switched off: is the end of non-streaming TV on the horizon?’

After at least a decade of these apocalyptic headlines from pundits proclaiming The Death of TV and the end of audiences watching anything other than sport “live”, it’s been interesting (and kind of amusing) to see some of 2024’s standout cultural moments so far.?

A four-part TV drama. A classic 90s game show reboot. And an unscripted reality show.

Despite the on-demand, fragmented, hyper-personalised, Mr Beast-ified content world we all find ourselves in (and are told to be optimising around)… is watercooler TV back?

Mr Bates vs The Post Office, through stunningly brutal writing, casting and directing, has seen a (literally) criminally overlooked story transcend telly. A complex case, the emotional honest and human-centric execution has finally gotten people to care and take action.

6.4m tuned in live for the first Gladiators episode. The Mark Clattenburg effect? Or more likely, it’s the insight that those kids who grew up loving Saturday night TV are now craving things they can watch together on Saturday night with their own kids (instead of seeing them glued to YouTube on separate devices).

Meanwhile for three nights on the trot this week, millions of live viewers are settling in every night at 9pm to watch The Traitors. According to a BBC source, they’re choosing to do this “so they [can] chat about the twists and turns as they happen or the next day”. In this way, the unconventional programming of the show - in weekly, appointment-to-view chunks - is as much of the idea as the show’s content itself.

As we launch into a busy year here, delivering a branded entertainment series, a multi-part linear live show and exciting new TV commissions (more on these soon ??), 2024 so far has given a timely reminder that, above all, brilliantly-made, great ideas still have the power to bring folk together unlike anything else.

The best idea or Something might well be a 30-second TikTok. Or it might be a six part TV live show. Or a new football team. Or an emoji-powered online jukebox. Ideas-by-numbers isn’t what we do.

And so while we’ll continue to keep an ear to the ground and be informed by consumption patterns and shifting content trends, we’ll always be driven first and foremost by the best ideas - and it’s class to be reminded that ultimately that is what the audience craves.