What is to become of the traditional Television Show?

Years ago, back when glaciers provided a land bridge to cross Pangea… sorry, let me rephrase… When I was in film school, I had a professor who used to become irate when we would refer to movies as “films.” “Unless it was shot on celluloid film,” he blustered, “IT IS NOT A FILM!” I’m sure it was a common musing he dropped year after year to remind the sophomores of how know-nothing peasants we were. But, in the end, there was a point: there are different interpretations of what exactly a “film” is. The same can be said for television. ?

Is a TV show a “TV show” if it’s no longer viewed on a television set? When I first entered the entertainment industry as a production assistant, a television show was either 22 minutes (or TRT: 42:30 for hour-long) of content mixed with advertisements broadcasted within a set block of programming. But then the iPod, YouTube, and streaming services struck our well-packaged broadcasting hive with the bat of innovation.

But as the dam of media burst and tsunami of creator content flooded the airwaves, so many of us in the industry desperately clung to quality control to separate the official merchandise from knockoffs. Over a decade later, the onslaught of saturated media continues to erode at the classical interpretation of a television format. Industry execs hopped on board and “alternative tv” was born.

Soon all digestible content with some semblance of network approval was to be earmarked as television programming… and then, everyone beyond the traditional network was in the production game. Brand name corporations set up their own studios, something named Quibi poked its head out of the app store, and everyone who record on an iPhone was suddenly a producer. I mean, let’s be honest, there’s YouTubers who get more views than cable shows nowadays.

But, to play my own devil’s advocate, how do we de-clutter the noise and address what makes up a “show”? Like so many of these new producers are self-labeling themselves as CEO of their online brand -you quickly catch the first whiff of stank when you ask these chairmen: “exactly which board elected you?” Seriously, what is legitimate anymore and who plays the gatekeeper of legitimacy? Have we reached a point where everything has become so much of a “unique snowflake” that you can no longer see authenticity in this blizzard?

I digress, not every self-produced piece of content cannot be a masterpiece and not every content creator is genius storyteller. But going back to the subject of “film” there was a subtle sense of irony. A year after my professor clarified his celluloid vocabulary, Kodak, our school’s supplier of film and a company that prided itself on quality over quantity, closed its doors in Rochester, NY. forever. What Kodak never realized is that you didn’t have to be Ansel Adams to have an impact on your audience. It was never about the quality of the product, but the connection a photo was able to the person viewing it.

In short, all of this content that floats around fiber optics have something that every TV show so desperately wants: an audience. So, in the end, it’s not about time, platform or content. A “TV show” about a good story that can be told on a screen with a controlled narrative. As we march towards the oblivion of obscure consumable video content… what’s going to separate good TV from bad TV? Answer: whoever can tell the best story in the most captivating way possible. ???