Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Monday, December 11th, 2023.
A PROGRAMMING UPDATE
A shorter than normal newsletter tonight and there won't be one tomorrow (Tuesday). My wife is going in for knee replacement surgery Tuesday morning and I'll be offline all day. She should be back home on Wednesday and sleeping. So expect a newsletter Wednesday night, although it might be another shorter one.
THE GOLDEN GLOBE NOMINATIONS WERE ANNOUNCED TODAY AND I HAVE THOUGHTS
Today brought the nominations for the new Penske Media-owned Golden Globes and the various Penske-owned trade outlets treated the announcements with the restrained approach we've come to expect. Deadline only posted 16 Globe pieces in a 15-hour period, and I am sure all of them were journalistically worthwhile and restrained.
I posted a piece earlier today on AllYourScreens about my take on their approach and how the return of the Golden Globes marks their evolution from awards show to media sales funnel:
Another common use of the word synergy - and this is the one that matters in this story - is when executives talk about acquiring multiple businesses in a specific vertical market. There is a great deal of talk claiming this is happening to take advantage of "market efficiencies" and "synergistic opportunities." But what synergy really means in this case is consolidating enough market power in order to create a near monopoly that allows you to dominate advertising while simultaneously squeezing the nuts of anyone trying to compete against you.
If you're talking about the Hollywood entertainment press, the chief nut squeezer is Jay Penske's Penske Media Corporation which in the past 15 years has rolled up an impressively evil collection of iconic Hollywood entertainment news outlets.
APPARENTLY, I ALSO HAVE SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THOSE YEAR-END TOP TEN LISTS
If you're a TV and media critic, your workday is likely split into three unequal parts. There are the pieces you write without anyone asking for them, the pieces that you'd like to write but probably won't have time to tackle and the pieces you don't really want to write but have to for pageview and/or business reasons.
"Best Of" lists fall more into the latter category and they seem to exist in part as an opportunity for critics to show off their exquisite tastes and partly for readers to hate-share the pieces on social media.
But as I wrote in a piece yesterday, they are pieces that don't actually provide guidance on what people should be watching..and why:
But if the "Best Of" lists reflect a tour guide approach to TV criticism, I would argue that most readers are really in need of a park ranger approach to covering television. Rather than distilling choices down to the "best," it's more useful to provide context and choices and a larger perspective. Does anyone really need to be reminded The Bear or Reservation Dogs were great shows? I don't think so. I think it's much more useful to talk about some of the good shows that didn't get as much attention, the under-viewed ones that audiences missed and even the shows that are the best at delivering a solid 30 or 60 minutes of entertainment.
PERHAPS I AM JUST OVERLY CRANKY TODAY
For all of the pushback I direct towards the Penske-owned trade outlets, they employ experienced journalists who are capable of doing the sometimes boring work of verifying stories and doublechecking sources.
This is increasingly important at a time where the entertainment news space is filled with half-ass aggregation machines. They stumble across some random clicky factoid and quickly crank out some tweets and a story or two. There might not much to the story - it might not even be true. But that doesn't matter. What matters is that someone said it and they can Frankenstein a story together pointing to the original source.
Earlier today, several people posted on social media that the HBO original series Watchmen had suddenly disappeared from the service. That quickly spiraled into a bunch of faux outraged tweets, each building on the story a bit like some moron's version of telephone.
This went on for a bit until some journalists such as Vulture's Joe Adalian contacted WBD PR and discovered that while the show had temporarily been dropped off of the service, it was due to a technical error. However, as Joe discovered, getting outlets to correct the record can be a bit challenging:
It's even worse when the rumors inevitably spread to those web sites who seem to exist primarily to monetize slipshod reporting and the sharing of questionable social media posts:
The original version of the story above is an absolute aggregated piece of crap. It is literally a two paragraph story, padded out with hundreds of words of explanation of the show, what it means, if it's coming back for another season:
One of the most buzzed-about DC series in recent memory is no longer streaming on Max. As of Monday, December 11th, the television spinoff of Watchmen has been removed from the streaming service. The nine-episode series, which made its debut in the fall of 2019, quickly became critically-lauded, earning multiple Emmys and even a Peabody Award.
It is unclear at this point where Watchmen will stream next, but there is a chance that it could land at another platform, especially with how Warner Bros. Discovery has utilized short-term deals with other streamers. In particular, a number of their original DC movies have made their way onto other platforms, such as Netflix and Prime Video.
And then, when the story turned out to be false, the headline was changed to the passive-aggressive "
Max Removes Then Adds Award-Winning DC Series From Streamer," along with this one-sentence correction:
UPDATE: Watchmen's departure from Max appears to be some sort of glitch, as all nine episodes of the series are once again streaming on the platform. The original story is as follows.
No wonder so many people hate journalists.
ODDS AND SODS
* The HBO Original documentary Daniel premieres Wednesday, December 20th.
* HGTV’s newest competition series, Battle on the Mountain, will pit three teams against each to upgrade similar mountainside homes in Breckenridge, Colorado. It premieres Monday, January 22nd.
* Sara Sidner and Cari Champion are taking over Don Lemon's old spot on CNN's live New Year's Eve broadcast.
WHAT'S NEW TODAY AND TOMORROW:
MONDAY, DECEMBER 11TH, 2023:
* A Very Barry Christmas (NBC)
* Big Brother Reindeer Games (CBS)
* Candice Renoir (Acorn TV)
* The Billion Dollar Goal (Paramount+)
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 12TH, 2023:
* Born In Synanon (Paramount+)
* Kevin Hart & Chris Rock: Headliners Only (Netflix)
* 1000-lb Sisters Season Premiere (TLC)
* Season Of Light: Christmas With The Tabernacle Choir (PBS)
* Single's Inferno (Netflix)
* Sister Boniface Mysteries Christmas Special 2023 (Britbox)
* sMothered Season Premiere (TLC)
* The Farads Series Premiere (Prime Video)
* The Masked Singer Holiday Sing-Along (Fox)
* Trees And Other Entanglements (HBO)
* Under Pressure: The U.S. Women's World Cup Team (Netflix)
* WW2: Saving Norway's Gold (Viaplay)
Click Here to see the list of all of the upcoming premiere dates for the next few months.
SEE YOU WEDNESDAY!
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Too Much TV: Your TV Talking Points For Monday, December 11th, 2023
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- By Rick Ellis
