Category: Television

It is a cook off: on one side was Megan McArdle and Will Wilkinson, on the other side was Ezra Klein and Spencer Ackerman.  The five-person panel of judges includes Natasha and yours truly.  I deliver the final verdict at the end, citing Benthamite, Perfectionist, and Rawlsian standards for the food.  If there is one lesson, it is taken from the cooking of Megan: for most of you frozen cherries will, for cooking, be tastier than non-frozen cherries which in fact are not so fresh at all.

Here is one answer, here is another.  Here are 2,503 other answers.  I believe "We still don’t know" is the correct answer.  I do know I can expect to see 13 of a planned 16 episodes of Lost, which, given their long-arching plot lines, is probably a welfare improvement all around.  Battlestar Galactica should do OK.  In other words, I won the strike.

Not surprisingly, it is in the FT (or try this link instead).  Excerpt:

But when the rules changed in 1995 the four US networks – ABC, now
owned by Walt Disney; CBS; Fox, part of News Corporation; and NBC, now
controlled by General Electric
– integrated production with their broadcast, sales and distribution
businesses. The independents began to lose ground to in-house producers.

Owning
content allows networks and studios to exploit it internationally via
syndication or DVD sales. But while broadcasters have more rights, they
also have to fund production, which is increasingly expensive. The cost
of a one-hour scripted drama has tripled from about $1m in the early
1990s to $2.7m, according to some executives. The cost of a 30-minute
comedy has doubled to around $1.5m.

This, together with
competition from cable channels, explains why the broadcasters are
taking such a hard line, says Garth Ancier, president of BBC Worldwide
America, the BBC’s commercial arm. “They are fighting for their lives.
They need every last piece to come together, every last revenue stream.”

There is much more, do read the whole thing, it also explains why cable is not the only reason why TV programs have gotten better.

The [writers’] strike, Layfield noted, "is perfect timing for our January
launch.  It’ll give Canadians an opportunity to go and watch something
different rather than watching reruns of American shows. "Once (Canadians) see … the quality and the stories that they like, you win them over pretty quickly," she added.  CBC [a Canadian network] announced three new dramas, a sitcom, a daytime talk show and a reality series yesterday.

Here is more.  And on the other side of the border:

With the Writers Guild of America still on strike and no guarantee
that a resumption of talks next week will bring any resolution, this
should all be a boon for Canadian shows vying to air in the United
States, right?…but there is no
indication that U.S. programmers are looking to Canada in droves.

As for one new show, The Border, the Canadian producer remarked:

"Many test viewers who have seen this have said that it doesn’t look
like traditional Canadian television.  It’s got a whole other level of
energy, of entertainment value. There’s never a dull moment," Raymont
added.

Have you heard about cultural path dependence?  The simplest hypothesis, of course, is that once Canadian producers gain a foothold in their home market they will be able to keep it.  I’ll predict no, but stay tuned for further reports next year…

The Onion has clearly been reading Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter.

In The Know: Candidates Compete For Vital Idgit Vote

Here’s from Robert Jensen and Emily Oster:

Cable and satellite television have grown rapidly throughout the
developing world. The availability of cable and satellite television
exposes viewers to new information about the outside world, which may
affect individual attitudes and behaviors. This paper explores the
effect of the introduction of cable television on gender attitudes in
rural India. Using a three-year individual-level panel dataset, we find
that the introduction of cable television is associated with
improvements in women’s status. We find significant increases in
reported autonomy, decreases in the reported acceptability of beating
and decreases in reported son preference. We also find increases in
female school enrollment and decreases in fertility (primarily via
increased birth spacing). The effects are large, equivalent in some
cases to about five years of education in the cross section, and move
gender attitudes of individuals in rural areas much closer to those in
urban areas. We argue that the results are not driven by pre-existing
differential trends. These results have important policy implications,
as India and other countries attempt to decrease bias against women.

Here is the paper, here is a non-gated version.  The pointer is from David Zetland.

Ezra Klein has a neat argument:

…the incentives are changing.  Assume that the incentive for going on television is to raise your profile (which is about 75 percent correct).  If I went on television five years ago, a large part of my incentive would be to make the host like me.  After all, these appearances pass in an instant, and most of you would never see the program.  So if I want to reach the maximum number of people with my arguments and do the most to increase my visibility, I want to keep coming back.

Now, however, with YouTube and GoogleVideo and online archiving, a single, contentious appearance can be seen on the internet a million times.  Everyone, after all, has seen Stewart berate Tucker Carlson on Crossfire, but very few of us had actually tuned in that day.  Similarly, my segment on the Kudlow show, replayed on the internet a few thousand times, did much more for my reputation among the audience relevant to my success than have my more friendly, but bland, appearances on other shows.

Making sense often requires you to be disruptive, and not long ago, being disruptive was probably a bad idea.  Now it’s a good one.  And since the channels are wising up and putting their videos online with advertising before them, they also want widespread online dissemination of appearances, and so their incentives are increasingly aligned with mine.  Does this mean more folks will be making sense?  Not necessarily.  But it means there might be more room for sense-making.

Or is Ezra just being deliberately disruptive to get links?  How will TV hosts respond to maintain equilibrium?  Invite fewer uncontrolled guests?  Invite fewer guests period?  Or will contestability force hosts to invite more disruptive guests?

Your suspicion is correct, there is a contestant named Elmer.  The winning inventor with the best new idea, as determined by a four-person panel, gets a million dollars and national fame on this ABC show.  The jury includes George Foreman, who says yes to almost everything, and a sour but articulate British gentleman, who says no to virtually everything.  One of the panel members praises the development of an inflatable neck brace to prevent people from "drownding."

Watch on-line episodes here.  Wikipedia is here.

The ideas included a foot pedal to lift the lid on toilets at night, a funnel for toilet use, a bra with no strap in the back (isn’t that old?), a hands-free flashlight which attaches at the neck and projects upright and forward, a way to rub down the back of your spouse using the TV remote, a computer program which matches strangers in a bar according to their pre-programmed interests (didn’t I blog that once?), a jacket which helps deaf people feel the vibrations from music, and a foam cushion which holds up the heads of small babies.

The winners of this episode came from MIT and Harvard Business School.  Two nerdy guys produced and demonstrated a way of storing bikes vertically in a garage; I wasn’t impressed.

The main lessons are twofold.  First, many people pour years of their lives and love into projects which are absurd on the face of it and could be revealed as such within seconds. 

Second, when it comes to the (possibly) good inventions, it is very very difficult to tell what is a good idea and what isn’t.  Without sector-specific knowledge, how do you know if that no-strap-in-the-back bra is a novelty?  It sounded good and indeed it looked good but I just don’t have the experience (or the attentiveness?) to say.

The real world doesn’t judge inventions with a panel of four quasi-celebrities (sadly Charles Nelson Reilly is now dead) and most valuable novelties are process innovations, produced while someone is working full-time doing something pretty similar.

In my evil, wicked fantasy world I imagine economics graduate students presenting their new Ph.d. dissertation ideas to a jury of four: Paul Lynde, Fred Thompson, Charles Barkley, and Kenny Smith.

I thank several loyal MR readers for the pointer.

Why not ask me?

"A lot of school is about developing alliances, contacts and a self image," he [Cowen] says, "and if you’re a movie star, you don’t really need those things."

Here is much more.

Most bets say he will survive the final episode; Ezra agrees.  Here are more predictions.  The formal odds are 150-110 that he will survive. Via Kottke, here is a betting sheet.

The first disc of this BBC-produced nature series blew me away, buy it here.  Amazon calls it "quite simply the greatest nature/wildlife series ever produced," and no it doesn’t matter that the narrative is at a fourth-grade level and fails to mention the Hotelling rule or the tragedy of the commons.

Of course I’m not talking about myself here, Tyler is candidate-neutral.  I’m talking about other people.  Can they just say "I like his character on TV, I think I’ll vote for him"?

Surely there exists some game in which this strategy makes sense (I always chuckle when I write this line).  Let’s say many other people vote the same way and thus expect this same character from him.  Isn’t he then locked into playing this character to some extent?  Of course this means you should favor only truly popular and typecast actors, since an obscure actor, or any actor with many different roles, won’t be much locked in. 

And if he can play the character on TV, maybe he can play the character in the Oval Office as well.  The actual content of policy would still be driven by his ability to pick and heed good advisors, which presumably is not negatively correlated with acting ability or with the nature of this single character.  In fact maybe his agent told him to take the role and he listened.

Ankush has negative remarks on Thompson.