Wired’s Chris Kohler writes today about “Nintendo President Satoru Iwata’s conviction that what consumers really wanted out of video games was simpler, more accessible entertainment — not the photorealistic graphics and massive online worlds that the company’s competitors were chasing,” and how that led to the Wii, now the top-selling games console.
While I’d say that they might want both, it does show that fast, smart, or just fun, can be a winning content strategy. I’ve always been a fan of TV in countries like Japan, where the MO seems to be big laughs, inventive but cheap costumes, meaningful documentaries, and fun conversation and gags, over big-budget fare.
Maybe that’s just because I have little hope that the big ticket items will speak to me, and stuff like Twin Peaks, or Freaks and Geeks, is just random, and usually quickly cancelled. When I was a kid I used to watch PBS for Big Blue Marble and animation festivals from around the world, as much as other Hollywood children’s shows, and was riveted by the cheap but inventive animation that was produced in other countries.
I suppose that the rise of reality TV is one side of this, and one that I’m usually not into, at least in practice. But I like it in theory, and have a ton of ideas for reality TV that could be great. Part of what keeps it from being interesting in most of its current manifestations, I think, is what seems to be an intrinsic force to copy whatever is successful, producing endlessly formulaic shows, or farce that comes from copying the rules for those shows that have quickly become so obvious that they are ripe for parody.
That seems to be a side-effect of desperate survival instinct. Such a desperate need to make something a hit, or at least a dependable source of revenue, that the producers are afraid to take a risk. This is one of the effects of capitalism-turned-to-11 that I think we could do without. Is it an accident that one of the most inventive shows ever — Monty Python’s Flying Circus — was a product of Britain in the 1970s, where the forces of capitalism and socialism were both in play? (Resulting in a bureaucracy that the show sometimes parodied, but no doubt benefited from.)
We are in an era when many observers wonder if the great albums that groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones made in their heydays could happen again, because record companies won’t bankroll those kinds of careers, or allow artists to develop over the course of several promising but not-hugely-selling hits. The irony is that the studio costs to pay for a string of albums could be much less than in those days. As cheap, digital production tools are becoming superfluous, the price of nurturing talent could be lower than ever, whether for TV, music, cinema, or whatever.
What if a producer or director were given a small, but steady, budget to make a bunch of cheap but inventive TV shows? Enough security to be inventive with small enough budget to avoid catastrophe. Let an audience build over time. That kind of incubation could produce the film or television equivalent of the wii: content that is comfortable enough with itself that it could eschew the shock and awe, and win an audience on its own charm.
