“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 2013-18 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from the week of December 2, 2018
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.
TV Cancellations
It’s that time of year when the networks settle down for a nice season of Christmas specials and series re-runs. It’s also the time when they start shaking out the series that will be back for another season.
The cancellations list is much longer than it used to be. That has less to do with the quality of the shows than it does that there are more networks that are creating original, series programming. Back in the day, it was ABC, CBS and NBC. Then Fox and the CW. Now you have all the streaming networks that are discovering that no matter how great the concept sounded at the beginning, a lot of television programs never manage to pull it all together.
And, as long as we’re being honest here, most of the programs canceled won’t be familiar to any of us. They didn’t draw an audience and some were yanked after only a few episodes. As I scan down the list, I see plenty of shows I don’t recognize. On ABC there’s – “The Crossing”, “Alex, Inc.”, and “Take Two”. On NBC we say goodbye to “Shades of Blue”, “Champions”, and “The Brave”; while CBS shuts off the lights on “Salvation” and “Zoo”. Some big names get the boot, like the utterly dreadful “Murphy Brown” reboot.
Great bloodlines don’t always help either. Marvel saw several of its series dropped, with “Daredevil”, “Iron Fist”, and “Luke Cage” all being axed by Netflix. For those jonesing for more MCU television, the Disney+ initiative is looking at a whole series of series involving secondary characters from the movies.
And there will always be programs that have run the course and are ready to step out of the spotlight. “Veep” ran through seven seasons before HBO announced the end, “The Big Bang Theory” will depart at the end of its 12th season, much to some folks delight. Fox’s “Gotham” made it through five seasons before getting the ax.
Some shows even get canceled for reasons that have nothing to do with things like ratings. NBC has dropped Megyn Kelly’s show after it under-performed, and the star kept putting her foot in her mouth; while “House of Cards” collapsed after Kevin Spacey got caught up in charges of inappropriate behavior.
From my personal viewing list here is at least one show that won’t be coming back that I’ll miss. NBC’s “Reverie” was an interesting idea, with a technology that allows people to live out their dreams via a computer link-up.
It will be interesting to see if any of the next round of shows are any better.
Crypto Crooks
Life takes you some strange places. Go back, say, three years. I had no idea what a cryptocurrency was. Last year I heard some stories about something called Bitcoin and the outrageous amount of money a single one of these whatever-they-ares were worth. Then this past year, I ended working on a nine book series (I was the narrator for the audiobook versions) on all kinds of cryptocurrency and the background of the digital currency concept.
Based on my conversations around here, most people are somewhere in the range of “never heard of it” to “Yeah, maybe”. So a quick swing through the background.
Cryptocurrency is a digital kind of money. Not like Paypal, which is based in regular cash and uses a digital system to transfer that money. Cryptocurrency is entirely digital, it’s “virtual”. It is not controlled by a government or an organization. New money is created through solving problems that are in code, that where the “crypto” comes from. Here comes the two most important features that figure into this story. Anyone can create a cryptocurrency, and the values of the currency can be extremely volatile. They are not backed by any “real” assets, like gold, and there is no insurance against loss. The whole system is based on something called “blockchain technology” which is waaaaaay to complicated to explain here.
All of which means, it is a “buyer beware” environment right now. Starting about a year ago you may have seen many celebrities pushing cryptocurrencies. And that brings us around to the story for today. Two celebrities have been tagged by the Securities and Exchange Commission for involvement in fraudulent deals. Boxing champion Floyd Mayweather and music producer DJ Khalid endorsed a cryptocurrency called Centra. Because neither let their followers know that they were paid endorsers, they violated the rules. They had pushed what is called the Initial Coin Offering or ICO for Centra. That’s very similar in concept to an IPO where a company first makes stock available. The two founders of Centra face charge with raising over $32 million by fraudulent means from thousands of investors in 2017.
The lure of cryptocurrency is that if you get in at the right moment with the right currency, you can get rich. Like any investment, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Even the legit cryptocurrencies come with immense risks. This may be the currency of the future. Or it may just be another way to separate the rubes from their money.
Self Promotion
One of the great things about the internet is that just when you think you’ve found all the strange, weirdness that it can possibly possess, it surprises you with something new. This is also one of the worst things about the internet.
One of the criticisms of Twitter from its earliest days is that it tends to make a narcissist out of us all. At its worst, it becomes all about how you feel, what you think, what you’re eating, what you’re doing. Here’s a little clue from all the rest of us to all the rest of us – none of you are that interesting. But it’s possible that I have found the most self involved part of our self involvement on social media. At least the Twitter portion of it.
It all begins with a promoted post. A promoted post is a tweet that you pay Twitter to spread far and wide. Rather than only your followers seeing your brilliance, you can pay for more people to see it. For people promoting businesses, services, products or brands on the social platform this is a perfectly logical concept. And therefore NOT the topic of conversation here today. No, these are people who are paying to have ordinary tweets pushed out to the wider world.
If you want to check this out, there is a Twitter account that specializes in them. Slide on over to @advertisedtwit to see all the mundane, and occasionally insane things people are PAYING to have promoted. I must admit when I first checked out the feed my thought was “Yeah, so? I see this kind of stuff all the time”. Here are some recent tweets featured:
A tweet complaining about customer service and canceling an account.
One that reads (this is going to challenge my professional enunciation):
Real eyes, realize, real lies
Another that asks:
Hey twitter guessssss whaaaaaaat?
And several that appear to be total gibberish.
Again, I see this kind of stuff on Twitter every day. But these are tweets people have paid money to promote. The current average cost for such a promotion is $1.35 per engagement. For gibberish. Who has that kind of money?
My favorite was one by @brendonbigely which reads “hey, i’m brendon. sometimes i buy twitter ads telling people to have a good day, and this is one of those times. hey! have a good day. (or night)
Promoting a tweet about a tweet wishing everyone a good day. THAT is money well spent, in my opinion.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018
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
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