When you're with a big TV channel, there's a sense of having to behave in a certain way in order to get audience figures.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
In day-to-day commerce, television is not so much interested in the business of communications as in the business of delivering audiences to advertisers. People are the merchandise, not the shows. The shows are merely the bait.
Because when you watch U.S. television, all the presenters and reporters, they're all out of central casting.
What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is 'all it does' - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.
The one thing that TV is bad at doing is preaching. There are two extremes, you either turn the people into a punchline or turn them into hero, and both of those things suck, because most people are neither in real life.
YouTube clips get millions, billions of hits. Reality TV programs have their own channels. How can movies attempt to compete with these kinds of numbers? And do we even need to? Are we scaring ourselves by unnecessary comparisons, by not comparing apples with apples?
The secret of doing well on TV is to understand that it's not too important. A lot of people watching doesn't change anything.
Viewers don't care how big media companies are. They care whether they can dump those they don't like, whether because of lousy service or because of crummy shows.
Television is a powerful medium that has to be used for something better than sitcoms and police shows. On the other hand, if you don't recognize the forces that play on what people watch and what they don't then you're a fool and you should be in a different business.
Most of the big money people don't know what would interest an audience if you did it. They only know what interested the audience last time.
We're in this entertainment business really to give the audience what they want.
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