“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 2013-17 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from week of July 30, 2017
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.
Spin and Bang
I’m going to wander into some minefields this week. But, to borrow from Bruce Springsteen, that’s where the fun is.
I stand outside the issues that surround the fame and the furor of CBS’s hit series “The Big Bang Theory”. After eleven seasons, five them as a top ten program in the ratings, “BBT” as it is known, is about to try something that highly successful shows do. They are planning a spin-off.
Spinoffs aren’t anything new, they’ve been around for a long time. The generally accepted first one was “The Adventures of Champion” which spun off from “The Gene Autry Show” for the 1955-56 television season. Since then there have been dozens and dozens. Normally they are the progeny of very successful shows. “Maude”, “The Facts of Life”, “NCIS” and all its spinoffs, even “The Simpsons” were spinoffs of other programs. “The Simpsons” stands head and shoulders above any other spinoff, becoming one of the most successful and long running prime time programs of all time.
So I am interested in the fate of “Young Sheldon”. Focused on the character of Sheldon Cooper, it is set to debut in November. While BBT has an enormous fan base, it also has a large and vocal group of critics. Especially in the nerd community, which is the center of the show, they don’t find the hit program funny at all. The focal point for a lot of that criticism is Sheldon himself. Critics feel that the show is making fun of their culture rather than having fun with them. That characters like Sheldon, Leonard, Howard, and Amy are cruel caricatures. Given that a lot of self-identified nerds were the subject of bullying during their school days, it’s not surprising that they don’t see any reason to sit by quietly and put up with it as adults. I can appreciate that. On the other hand, nerd culture is notorious for being hypersensitive about any form of criticism.
The show follows nine-year old Sheldon whose intelligence pushes him into the ninth grade in East Texas. Meanwhile, his very average family has to try and figure out how to deal with him as well.
TV children who specialize in sharp edged dialogue aren’t new, but the Sheldon character will need to find a “second gear” if the show is to succeed. “Young Sheldon” will also face the problem all shows with children as primary characters confront. What is cute and funny at nine isn’t always as enjoyable when the star is now thirteen, fourteen or fifteen.
“Young Sheldon” gets the benefit of following BBT on Thursday night, which will give it a good initial rating. I find myself unconvinced of the long term staying power of the concept.
Bazinga.
Week of Death
Forever more shall the last week of July be known, at least on this program, as the Week of Death. In this case not the deaths of people (although we lost a legendary voice actor with the passing of June Foray, the original voice of Rocket J. Squirrel among so many others. Foray was 99). No, what stood out for me this past week was the number of media related technologies whose ends were announced. Four in a single week is more than I remember ever happening before.
Apple led the way by announcing the end of two iPods. The iPod Shuffle and Nano were pulled from the Apple product line after long and profitable runs. Both debuted in 2005, and are descendants of the original iPod (which was discontinued in 2014). That was back in the heyday of the gadget. Back then we were fine with gadgets that just did one thing. A cell phone, a PDA, a music player. But gradually we have wanted to simplify our lives by having one device do it all. Or at least more of it. Unsurprisingly, it would be Apple who launched the product that put the iPods out to pasture with the iPhone just two years later. The last remaining iPod is the Touch, which got some upgrades announced along the way.
In some ways, a far more important announcement was the one saying that Flash was finally going to be laid to rest. What was once the hot system that seemed to power the internet, is now a clunky, security nightmare that folks have been trying to kill for years. Adobe has announced that they will pull the plug by 2020. Flash long ago moved from innovative to irritating, so this was long past due. Most major browsers made blocking Flash the default starting a year or two ago, so it’s been largely irrelevant to most of us for a while.
The death that probably got the most attention was Window’s announcement that they were discontinuing the MS Paint app with the next operating system update. After thirty-two years it seemed reasonable to move on to something newer because let’s face it, Paint was never a state of the art graphics application. But here’s the reality. According to a Microsoft internal study, there are still something like one hundred twenty million users every month for the venerable app. And they were quite upset. Which resulted in a media miracle! Paint rose almost immediately from the dead! The app will now be available as a free app from the Windows Store.
And there was much rejoicing.
So in true Hollywood fashion, even the week of death gets a happy ending.
What Is Good?
The advent of the internet has created a lot of change in our lives. Change both good and bad. Recently I’ve been thinking about a change that we may be overlooking. It’s one that is beginning to concern me just a little bit.
I spend a fair amount of time hanging out with fellow indie authors online. There are some really fabulous communities out there for writers, where questions can be asked and answered, you can find a new set of eyes to read over your work, or just a shoulder to cry on during those long hard days when the writing is just not flowing the way you’d like. Recently, an author asked about the impact of reader ratings on the sale of her latest work. Her first rating had been five stars, the second a three-star rating. She was positive that the “bad” rating was killing off her sales. The discussion that followed was first reassurance to her and second, a little discussion of what ratings should actually mean.
It dawned on me that we seem to be moving toward, if we haven’t already arrived, to a system where ratings were basically thumbs up or down. It was either a “good” rating of five stars or a “bad” review of anything else. One through four stars were “negative” reviews. The more I thought about the more insane that system seemed to me.
When I review movies and books on “The View From The Phlipside” website I use a five-star system. The largest percentage of my reviews fall into the three-star range. And that’s the way it should be. Five stars are reserved for those transcendent, brilliant examples at the very pinnacle of the art form. Four stars are for very good examples with elements of brilliance. Three stars are for movies and books that are well done but may have a flaw or shortcoming. Two stars are movies with shortcomings that still have some elements of interest. One star ratings are reserved for those books and movies that, in my opinion, simply lack anything of real interest. For the record, I have given a zero rating exactly once. I can’t explain how much I have to dislike something to give it a zero.
Here’s the reality. Having a rating system that is binary, five stars good, everything else bad, is both useless and irrational. There are few, if any, places where 100% success 100% of the time is the accepted standard. To try and apply that standard to anything as subjective as the arts is simply useless.
So the next time you are looking at the ratings for books, music, movies or whatever, please keep in mind that you may find something you truly enjoy among the items that rank in the middle ground.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2017
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
Stories Are My Life 
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