“The View From the Phlipside” is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Monday through Friday around 7:30 AM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moment’s notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2013-16 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from week of December 5, 2016
This Week’s Podcast:
My name is Jay Phillippi and I’ve spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Dead Show Walking?
It’s always dangerous to offer a comment on a show, movie, book, musical artist, whatever when they have a fanatical following. The following does not like having their media beloved treated with anything less than the kind of adulation that they heap on it. I’m feeling pretty confident today for two reasons. I have never watched a single instant of the show I’m about to discuss, and the fans have been heaping plenty of anger on it themselves.
So our question for today is, what’s going on with AMC’s “The Walking Dead”? In popular TV jargon, has this show “jumped the shark”?
If you are like me and are not a “Walking Dead” fan, let me run a few numbers past you. The show debuted in 2010 and has become the most watched television show in cable TV history. Averaging around five million viewers in its first season, the show went big time in seasons three through six when it averages ran from ten to about fifteen million viewers. The season five premiere is the most watched cable TV program of all time, with over seventeen million viewers. The show has been an enormous hit.
But this year in season seven, things have started to drop off. In the first five weeks of the season, the show lost six million viewers. That’s a huge loss of viewers, and it is much discussed in the industry.
The why behind that loss in viewers isn’t as clear. Eventually, all shows run their course and lose their audience. But with seventeen million viewers tuning in for the premiere this year, it doesn’t feel like the answer. My bet is that the producers have made a very simple mistake, and the fans are making them pay. The mistake is dumping on the show’s heroes. After years of watching one group overcome obstacle after obstacle, they have been reduced to broken underlings to a character that is just, well, awful. Negan isn’t badly written or acted, no he’s just a bad, bad, bad man. In a show that has specialized in gore and violence, the producers may have gone a step too far. The show is just pretty depressing right now.
For fans of the show, there are a couple of pieces of good news. Even with the audience drop off “The Walking Dead” still pulls over ten million viewers. That’s more than “Game of Thrones” or “Supernatural”. It is still a hit show, and by a large margin. There’s also a rumor that the mid-season finale (don’t get me started about that nonsense) may offer some hope.
What makes a TV show a hit can be difficult to define. Once you hit on a winning formula, messing with it can be dangerous. I think the shark is still offstage for this one.
CNN Gambles
How much would you pay for a product that never really succeeded? For a business that never really took off? Recently CNN dropped twenty five million dollars for just such a company. It’s called Beme, b-e-m-e, and there’s an interesting story behind that purchase. At least they hope so.
The purchase centers less on Beme and more on its creators Matt Hackett and Casey Niestat. Niestat is the better known of the pair for his vlogging and video channel on YouTube, plus his HBO series with his brother Van called, curiously enough, “The Neistat Brothers”.
Beme was launched in July of last year, and kind of like Vine, it’s a social media video service. It’s claim to fame was that it was designed to give you no chance to edit, preview or review your video. You took your two to eight seconds of video and it was automatically uploaded to the web. Boom. The explanation was that they wanted to create a social platform that was less self conscious, and presumably more authentic. In the slightly more than a year between launch and sale to the network, Beme managed to gain about a million users. Which is relative chicken feed by Internet standards.
So CNN spent twenty five million dollars for a company that was not much of a success. Even more intriguing is that they also announced that having bought it, they planned to shut it down, first thing in 2017. So what’s really going on here?
The reality is that CNN had no interest in this company. They had GREAT interest in the team that created it. Niestat, Hackett and their entire team is what was worth all that money. Because they have a track record of doing something that CNN (and virtually all the other legacy media companies) stink at doing. Attracting millenials. That group, folks between the ages of roughly twelve and thirty-four, are the current “golden ticket” in the mainstream media. There’s a lot of them and they consume media very differently from their elders. CNN is rolling the dice on a twenty five million dollar bet that Niestat et al can help create a new media division for the news network that will help the company connect with the younger generation of viewers.
It’s interesting that, in the video announcing the sale, Casey Niestat acknowledges he has no idea what that is going to look like. Beme wasn’t a huge success, but it brought some interesting new twists to the table. Given a much larger purse to draw on, it is going to be worthwhile watching what might be produced for the minimal cost of twenty-five million dollars. If it works out, the payoff on that bet could be legendary.
Creepy Clicking
There are a lot of useless, silly, pointless things to do on the Internet. There are things to do that you wouldn’t want your momma to know about, things that are dangerous, things that cost money and things that are just a complete waste of time. But I have never come across anything quite the same as this.
“This” is a site with a peculiar name. It is “clickclickclick.click”. Not dot com or dot org or anything you may be more familiar with. All the “click”s are spelled out, c-l-i-c-k. The “dot” is the usual period type computer url dingus.
Once you arrive, you’re not going to be impressed. Big blank screen with a flashing cursor and a big green button, labeled “button”. Almost immediately two things will happen. Scrolling text appears, and a request to turn on your speakers. To get the full effect, you will want to do that. What follows is a running commentary of what you do on the page. Move your mouse cursor around, click on the button, click other places. Do whatever comes into your head to try. You will get a running written commentary plus a male voice in your speaker discussing what you are doing. It will compliment you, question you, and occasionally criticize you. The more you do, the more achievements you will achieve. If you are the tiniest bit compulsive this site can quickly become irresistible.
As I write this, I have the site open in another window but I’m ignoring it. Every minute or so, the voice pops back up to ask what’s going on or encourage me to do something. It’s kind of creepy, honestly.
Being creepy is kind of the point. Wait a second, he just beeped at me. Let me check. Nope, just trying to get my attention.
The website was created by a Dutch design studio called Moniker. The purpose of clickclickclick.click is to show you how the data companies can track what you are doing online. Every mouse movement, hovering over certain items, let alone clicking on them, can be recorded. It was created in conjunction with a Dutch public broadcaster, VPRO (the voice is getting bored. He just said “Winter is coming” and is yawning). It is part of a larger mobile presentation called “We Are Data”.
The technology in the website is very simple. The stuff being used by data companies is a lot more sophisticated, and generates information that they can then sell about you. It’s an interesting experiment in the kinds of things that can be tracked.
Clickclickclick.click has the interesting quality of being both thought provoking and a complete waste of time all at once. In the end it will make me think about every click I make in the future.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2016
Theme music for “The View From the Phlipside” and “TVFTP – Podcast” is “Hustle”
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
Stories Are My Life 
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