The following is my (VV) copying of @RonenV‘s telling of the history of TV. Ronen spoke the whole thing out verbally (full audio available here), and the original transcript was by Airchat. I’ve slightly moved some stuff around (paragraphing), adding some hyperlinks for future reference, changing some fullstops to colons, adding “✱‘s” to break things up, etc.

A history of television, from the Titanic disaster to HBO Max. Made at the request of my friend, Visakan V.

One thing we can take for granted, which we will see, is the constant back-and-forth relationship between the evolution of a technology and the evolution of the content, the medium, used with that technology, and how they each affect the other in cycles that are repeatable as they both evolve.

Repeatable cycles are therefore predictable cycles.

The history of television begins with the history of radio, because television is indeed a child of radio. And the history of broadcast radio begins with peer-to-peer radio. You have a technological development, which is microphones recording audio, and you have another technological development, which is radio waves.

What emerges is something pretty cool: peer-to-peer audio networks.

This is a decentralized peer-to-peer system, still in use as CB radio, where if you have a radio it is a speaker and a microphone, and if you tune in to a certain, you know, signal, you can find someone within a certain range of your antenna and their antenna, and you can talk to each other, and that’s pretty cool. And this is unregulated, right? You can just find it.

The radio bandwidth, the signals are just these public things that you can find in the air, and so you can, if you have a bigger antenna, you can talk to people further and further away. You can meet people, and it’s pretty cool.

Then the Titanic disaster happens, and it changes the history of radio, media, and culture forever.

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It’s important to understand that the Titanic disaster was shocking to people, analogous perhaps to 9-11. Also, a lot of rich and famous people were on the Titanic, so not only was the event shocking, but people were waiting to hear which celebrated public figures had survived and which had died, right? This was a big deal.

And again, there was no broadcast radio, no broadcast news at the time outside of newspapers. So what happened was one person would read the list of survivors as they got off the lifeboats.

And they would read that list on a CB radio. And then someone else who was talking to them would then send that list on another radio to someone else.

And so in a peer-to-peer way, the first ever viral broadcast is the list of the survivors of the Titanic. And so the whole network across the country, across the world of radio systems gets realigned to just express this information everyone wants to hear.

And people are, again, doing this manually.

An industrious European immigrant named David Sarnoff sees this and has a Eureka moment. And his Eureka moment…

He works at the Radio Corporation of America. They make radios.

And his Eureka moment is radios do not need to be peer-to-peer. We can make radios that only receive a signal and play it. And we can set up giant antennas to broadcast signal to people. And just make really good stuff they will just want to listen to.

And his plan is to bring culture and education to the whole country of America. He’s an educated European man. He wants to bring Shakespeare plays. He wants to bring Mozart and classical music.

He’s like, we can just get one location in New York, bring in the greatest artists and educators of our generation, record them, set up antennas across the country, and broadcast it to people. And they’ll want to tune in just to listen.

And we’ll sell them the radios.

Now, this is an important point, because on a fundamental level, they’re subsidizing what you might today call all this content production in order to market their product. And their product is the system of distribution itself, the physical radios, which are these giant set pieces with speakers that you put at the centerpiece in your house, the way people would put a television when you were growing up or a computer.

You have this giant radio and everyone would sit down for the radio and there’s a schedule. You come at this time to listen to this show, come at that time to listen to that show, etc.

They made deals with symphonies. They made deals with playwrights. They made deals with actors. Some they were hiring them, some they were sending the mics to go broadcast them.

And again at this point all of this culture has two things in common. One is it is culture from pre-radio mediums like stage plays and orchestra shows etc. And two is it is fundamentally being subsidized to sell the radios themselves.

Now three things happen, and if you’ve been paying attention to our other threads of writing you may be able to predict what they are and in what order.

One thing is the medium itself starts to adapt to the form of the technology. So instead of putting a microphone at stage plays so people can listen to the plays, which has middling results, they start to make plays for the audience of one, and that one is the microphone itself.

So instead of the microphone eavesdropping on a stage play, a whole production exists now just for that microphone. And that means you don’t need costumes, it means you don’t need a lot of things that you used to need, but you also need to do things you didn’t used to do, so that everything can be conveyed just with sound.

And so now you have adaptations of classic works into the audio-radio format, but you also have the emergence of new works born natively to that format. You get the first superheroes, like the Shadow.

You get lots of different things happening than you used to get when you could. Let’s see it.

A second thing that happens is once they have sufficient penetration with their physical radios, it starts to make economic sense to advertise and to sell space advertising. And so the way it works is you sell an hour of broadcast time to, you know, Colgate.

And Colgate does the Colgate Comedy Hour, and then they hire an artist to do comedy on the Colgate Comedy Hour, etc. And eventually this relationship goes from binary, it’s the advertiser’s time, and they recruit talent, to something that’s more of a spectrum where maybe the artist owns the show and they have different advertisers come in.

Another main thing you’re going to get is regulation. Because the reality is you cannot do broadcast radio on public airwaves without the government stopping other people from using the very airwaves you’re using or the signal would be chaos in your area. So what the government does is they divide up the natural spectrum of signal.

And they say these areas of the spectrum, everyone can do whatever they want. These areas of the signal are for broadcast only. No one else is really allowed to use them.

But we’re going to control who can use them. We’re going to give them licenses to broadcast. And we’re going to give them some conditions on what they can broadcast.

So, for example, in order to get a license to broadcast, and there’s only limited broadcast space, you can only have a few stations broadcasting, you have to agree to do a certain amount of education, a certain amount of news, and that news needs to maybe give access to both sides, etc. And so, you do all that, you can get a license.

Maybe you can’t have too much sexual content. Maybe if you have violent content, the criminals have to get caught or go to jail at the end, right?

So suddenly things start bending a little bit in the censorship direction, but part of that reason is that it’s not a privately held thing entirely. They need access to this public good that the government restricting it is the only way that it can sustain itself.

Again, because otherwise you couldn’t broadcast on the signal without everyone blasting chaos everywhere.

The next thing that happens is, and this was more popular at the time, antitrust action, right? So, I’m not saying more popular than today, but that was a common notion, was, hey, how come RCA owns this, you know, radio space? And they also own the radios.

And it’s not fair, because we’re trying to compete with them with our radio shows. But they own the radios themselves. So, the government forces RCA to split into a hardware company and a content company that are separate.

This will be very important later. And so, the content company is called NBC, the national broadcast company. They’re doing the broadcast.

And the hardware company is called RCA, the Radio Corporation of America. They make the radios.

Now a couple things happen that will again become very relevant later because the distinction between radio and television will blind us to the life cycle and history of this path if we leave radio out of it.

I will use one of my favorites, Orson Welles, as an example of this next stage, because you have someone who is very successful on the stage, who very quickly takes to this new medium of radio. He’s doing Shakespeare plays that are popular hits and adapting them to radio.

He’s playing the first ever superhero, The Shadow, in a giant hit show. He’s starring in a lot of soap operas pseudonymously to make extra cash.

He’s killing it at this new medium. Then he tricks America into thinking it’s being invaded by Martians and gets called before Congress for it.

He basically pulls another Titanic. The first, what the Titanic was to peer-to-peer radio, he does for broadcast radio, right? He tricks America.

He covers his back. He says, we’re going to do a show where we treat the Martian invasion of War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells as if it’s real.

And so he does this. And then, you know, everyone tunes in a few minutes late because really what happens is everyone listens to the ventriloquist show, Bergen McCarthy, and then switches in during the first ad break to his show to hear if it’s good because he’s in the number two show. And so he knows that when they tune in, it’s after his disclaimer, and they’ll hear the news interrupted by an urgent bulletin about this invasion.

And, you know, there’s kind of panic across the country. He gets hauled before Congress, and America ends up passing new laws about broadcast and the norms you have to do with it.

There are a lot of analogies here today about satire, you know, perhaps deep fakes and fake news, which is whenever you have a new information ecosystem that’s driven by technology, you have to kind of test the bounds of what you need to hold in to avoid bad actors from causing destructive chaos. And it’s ideal if that’s done by a kind of harmless court jester, so people can see where the walls are before a bad actor knocks down those same walls. And so this is just a pattern.

So if you don’t recognize this as a pattern, then when merry pranksters do this on social media, you can think that they’re doing something bad rather than realizing that it’s far preferable that they do it than some dictator take advantage of it in a significant way. You know, these are like behavioral vaccines for new mediums and technologies.

Another important side effect of radio, and we’ll have two users, one is Orson Welles and the other is Adolf Hitler, who for the first time is able to really leverage this new system to take power, right? Because a lot of his leverage is just these radio broadcasts he’s doing that are just really hooking people with his words in their thoughts, and he rises to power using this new media.

To quote the Cole Porter song, anything goes, just think of those knocks you got, and those shocks you got, and those blues you got from that news you got, and those pains you got, if any brains you got from those little radios, ba-da-da-da-da. So, like, the fact that the news from Europe over the radio is causing this pain and suffering, and, you know, during the Depression, and that this, you know, it’s really kind of smart to think of Hitler primarily as, like, a radio… …a radio star, influencer, who happened to leverage that in a political way, in my opinion, more than as a politician, or, like, an evil person, whatever, who leveraged a new medium of technology, in the same way that, well, you can make your own analogies about that.

Okay, so movies are taking off. And movies are, you know, replacing vaudeville, etc.

And movies aren’t just feature-length movies, they’re also these, like, short, you know, one- to five-minute movies that people pay to play, the original Nickelodeons. And so the other thing that’s happening is everyone’s trying to figure out how to turn movies into radio.

By which I mean, how to broadcast moving pictures through the radio waves. And RCA is spending a ton of research money and scientists trying to figure out how to broadcast the moving pictures through radio waves.

The person who ends up figuring it out, the inventor of television, is a 16 year old farm boy named Philo Farnsworth. I’ve written and spoken about him in great lengths.

I’ve talked about his famous fight with David Sarnoff, who kind of stole the technology from him and they spent years in court against each other. Aaron Sorkin wrote a pretty neat play about it that’s actually the real sequel to The Social Network called The Farnsworth Invention.

It was originally going to be a movie. My understanding is that when Fincher didn’t want to make it as a spiritual successor to Social Network, he made it a play and you can you know buy the play and read it.

It’s great.

Quick little side anecdote. Philo Farnsworth, the farm boy who invented television by adapting the concept of crop lines to visual images in order to be able to break moving images down into linear sequences.

That’s why old TVs are made of these, like, horizontal lines. And spent years kind of broke, running out of money, fighting RCA in court.

The story is that during the moon landing, he was older, drunk, in a bar with his wife, bitter after years of fighting and losing. And when he saw everyone in the bar watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon for the first time all together, he turned to his wife and said, it was worth it.

It was worth it.

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So now, given what we understood about the state of radio, you just kind of flip a switch and apply the whole metric to television, with the exception of the fact that the distinction between hardware and broadcaster is already in place.

So all the radio companies, NBC, etc. start moving to television broadcasts, and all the hardware companies, like RCA, start making televisions.

Just as a lot of the stage stars moved to radio and some made it and some didn’t, a bunch of the radio stars moved to television and some make it and some don’t, and television starts adapting to more television native forms.

Again, they have mandatory news hours in order to hold on to their broadcast space and those news hours have restrictions on bias, etc. The job is to educate the public in order to, in effect, buy from the government their right to display entertainment.

Now, partially because of the decentralization of Sarnoff’s control, broadcast switches from a thing kind of forcefully trying to educate the public to a thing just kind of entertaining the public to sell ads, right? Because the content is no longer an ad.

The content exists to sell an ad. And so, because they have decentralized competition, the driving force is now the market of what the public will consume.

And so, you get a kind of devolution to the lowest common denominator of stuff, but at the same time, as we always see, that makes people better at some stuff, in the same way that Shakespeare played to the groundlings with fart jokes, adultery, and violence. That made him kind of better at when he wanted to do sophisticated things, affording him the ability to do so, right?

The Beatles started as Backstreet Boys and then became Radiohead. By focusing on appeal, it really sharpens the blade of a medium.

So you have news shows, you have interviews, you have concerts, and you have the development of what becomes the situational comedy.

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Now, a big driving force that we really kind of can’t neglect here is Jewish American immigrant culture. David Sarnoff is a Jewish American immigrant, and a lot of the early writers of these shows are refugees from Europe who are highly educated. And America is not as educated in these ways as Europe was at the time.

There’s a great scene in Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan, the big movie, where Robert Oppenheimer is building a theoretical physics department in America after having kind of starred in them in Europe. And they say, well, you know, there’s no physics, there’s no real competent theoretical physics department there.

And he said, yeah, that’s why I have to go there to build it. So if you apply that principle at a similar time period to the arts, basically, to like the highly educated arts, you have a bunch of European refugees who aren’t very satisfied with the level of education and arts in America, who want to bring the higher level of artistry that they’re accustomed to from Europe to America.

Also you have a bunch of Jewish immigrants whose parents may have been tailors or restauranteurs who are kind of gonna work their way up through this medium. Now Jews aren’t really allowed to be famous in the media unless they’re playing to negative Jewish stereotypes.

So the famous Jewish comedians are playing the like a greedy person very often. Wild and appropriate greedy because if they’re playing a stereotypical Jew they’re allowed to get famous.

But there are a lot of more nuances to Jewish humor in the arts that were ironically much more open and celebrated and welcome in Germany and they’re not really welcome in the States yet. So we’ll talk about the Dick Van Dyke show which is the archetypal first big sitcom.

So Sid Caesar had a variety show. Variety shows are a big format at the time.

They started on radio, and variety shows are you have a host, and then they present different acts who do different acts. It’s a great format because you get to try out different people, and you have a host who’s consistent who you show up for.

And if one of the people does well, you have them a few times. If they do really well, you give them their own show.

It’s a great format if you’re a radio station.

So Sid Caesar is a Jewish comedian. He does voices and characters.

He’s great. His writers are a bunch of Jewish writers who are behind the scenes.

I may get some of this wrong, but I believe their names are things like Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen. I may be mistaken about Woody Allen, but these are the writers we’re dealing with.

So, on TV, Carl Reiner wants to make a show about being a writer for the Sid Caesar show. So he has a wife, he has a kid, and he has this crazy boss at work.

He shoots the pilot, the network loves it, just one problem, the star can’t be a Jew. So they’ve recast Carl Reiner with Dick Van Dyke.

Carl Reiner still runs the show, but he can’t star in it, and instead he plays the crazy boss. Carl Reiner, you may know, as in addition to being a great director and actor, and the father of Rob Reiner, he is also a frequent collaborator and partner of Mel Brooks.

So Dick Van Dyke plays this kind of waspy everyman, but the gags he’s doing, the stories, are what we think of as the classic neurotic Jew character, right? Like a little Mel Brooks style, a little Woody Allen, a little Larry David. It’s the neurotic Jew, not the greedy Jew, which wasn’t yet like a welcomed stereotype to portray, but that’s where a lot of the humor comes from.

So in effect these Jews were leading the process of America appropriating their culture in order to both A, normalize their culture to the public, and B, gain leverage in this new society as a minority group who lacked it. You know, they still weren’t allowed in country clubs, all this kind of stuff.

They had a sign up in the writers room of the Dick Van Dyke show, which I quote often, which was think Yiddish, speak British, right? So write the jokes like it’s a Jewish guy, but then have him say them like he’s a white Christian guy.

And it was a tremendous success. And you know, literally hundreds of shows are spawned off of the template of the Dick Van Dyke show.

And then the Jewish people who worked on these shows, because of its success and because of its normalization of that style of humor, were allowed to go on and star in their own works, which again we see with Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, etc., who were able to, in the next era, go and be stars in their own right.

This is where two other things come in. One is Rod Serling. Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone, the writer of A Draft of the Planet of the Apes film, is a TV writer who’s very frustrated by the censorship of his work.

He wants to tell stories about contemporary political subjects. It’s the 50s. He wants to tell stories about racism.

He wants to tell stories about sexism and injustice in an America that has segregation and wars and all this stuff. And he can’t. And one reason is that sometimes he has to censor because of government rules.

But the other reason is that he has to censor because people don’t want to scare away advertisers. They got to sell soap. At the end of the day, the whole business is kind of there to sell soap.

And as he kind of put it, though I’m not quoting literally, you know, no one wants to buy soap when they’re watching a video of a lynching. Right. And so there’s a great YouTube video where he went like as he’s working on the Twilight Zone before he launches. It’s like a 30 minute interview you can watch with him. One of the best interviews I’ve ever seen with anyone. Strongly encourage it.

And so what Rod Serling does is he moves over to sci-fi fantasy horror because it allows him to tell the stories he wants to tell through metaphor, thereby not scaring away sponsors. And he has a huge hit show, The Twilight Zone, that kind of redefines this television-native version of drama where you’re doing different stories every week instead of a sitcom that’s on the same set. It’s almost like a variety show for storytelling.

Then you have Walt Disney. Now, as typically happens with creative geniuses, everyone wants something from them and it’s not what they want to do. In Walt Disney’s case, he was making animated shorts, he was making animated musicals, he was making movies.

Everyone wanted him to make a TV show. ABC was offering infinite money and he had zero, zero, zero interest in making a TV show because what Walt Disney wanted was to build a city.

Eventually, his brother Roy, who was shrewd, helped him figure out and convinced him, here’s how we’re going to build your city. We’re going to build a theme park. And in order to get the banks to give us the money to build a theme park, we’re going to mortgage your entire movie studio.

And we’re going to make a deal with ABC. We’re finally going to take their money. And the deal is going to be, they invest a huge amount in the studio.

And you’re going to make a weekly TV show on ABC called The Wonderful World of Disney. Well, that wasn’t the name originally, actually. The show is going to be called Disneyland.

And every week for one hour, you’re going to advertise this theme park we’re building. And ABC is going to pay for it. Not only for the show, they’re going to give us the money for the theme park.

And they’re going to guarantee us with the banks. And we’re going to build this theme park that will be the template for the city. And then once that works, we’ll expand to a real city.

And so finally, Walt made a TV show. And every week, he would explain to us what the theme park was. And he would explain to us explain things to the public.

He would do educational content. He would do animated shorts. And he would show them around the little city he was building in, I think, Anaheim, California.

And then eventually Disney World. Famously, Disney welcomed America to the first color broadcast with an explanation of color as that technology iterated.

Now some of the next major developments include rebroadcasting of old movies, but the big one is cable television. Because once the technology emerged that you could pipe special kinds of telephone wires to people’s houses that would allow you to send television signals, suddenly you don’t need the government’s permission to broadcast.

You don’t need a broadcast license and there could be more than four stations doing the broadcast. You could send whatever you want into someone’s house, because censorship is illegal in America, as long as they have this special telephone wire for you to pipe it because you can’t use an antenna.

So a few things happen now. One is that all of these cable broadcasts become advertisements for buying cable itself, right?

Because you need it installed, you need to pay a subscription. So once again, due to the emergence of a new technology, the content is subsidized to advertise the distribution of the technology itself for the technology provider to get people around the country to buy cable in their homes, which took, you know, decades for everyone to get it.

Another is an explosion of more specialized content because instead of three channels you could have 150 channels, you can have ones with pornography on them, you can have ones with violent action movies that aren’t getting censored, so the whole game kind of changes. And one notable side effect of this is that movies can now be broadcast on television uncensored, which is a huge change.

Now, in the same way that RCA and NBC were first to fork between the content and the technology provider, a similar, not the same thing happened to movies, where they were forced to separate movie theater ownership from movie production companies. And this is one reason why movie theater experiences kind of famously suck, is no one controls the whole experience anymore.

This was overturned a few years ago and I expect this to change in the next few years and we’re already starting to see it. I believe I think Paramount or Sony bought the Alamo Drafthouse, a famously great theater chain, and so we’re gonna start to see this change soon. (VV: it was Sony)

But you know the fact that when you go to a movie theater to watch a Disney movie, you’re not getting a Disney-level experience the way you might at, say, Disneyland, right? They can’t.

They’re not free to design your experience. They have to go through this intermediary.

It’s kind of similar to how, you know, car sellers had to sell their cars through intermediary car dealers and then finally, you know, Tesla was just like, we’re just gonna sell them directly. Fuck it.

But all of these were government kind of mandated regulations. Either forced or mandated through the complexity of regulation that this is the way around to avoid liability.

So suddenly, cable television becomes a great way to watch movies, right? And so the bar, the level of content that you could expect… You know, a movie, they may spend years making a movie, and a ton of money making a movie, and it can be kind of, by this point in time, the 80s, as complex and sophisticated as they want it to, right?

Movies in the 80s were way less sensitive than movies now. Movies now, like PG movies in the 80s, for 12-year-olds. Well, for context, get your whole account deleted off of Instagram today, if you post that kind of stuff.

So the world is way less censored in the 80s, and that stuff is suddenly going on television. But it wasn’t made for television, right? It was made for movies.

But now, the bar is raised. Maybe that’s the bar for my attention in this medium, at least within the realm of drama.

And so, so we start getting this huge blurring of the line now, where cinema as a medium, which is to say the moving image perhaps telling a story, becomes a lot less forked between TV and movies than it had been, as people start making TV shows that feel more like what you expect from movies.

So HBO starts as a cable channel called Home Box Office. So they make lucrative deals to just play big movies. Before you can get them on video, whatever, it’s a home box office.

Watch movies here. And then they start making their own shows with the intention that they’re at a similar level that you would expect from the movies you’re watching there. Which we can forget now, but their whole thing was these five movies are only on HBO after they leave theaters.

And then it was these five movies are only on HBO after they leave theaters. And this new show we made that also has violence, that also has sex, that also has sophisticated storytelling like you might want from the movies that you don’t get from TV shows. Or TV channels don’t make this kind of stuff.

Now, add a little AOL in there, add the internet, and now people have even more reasons to get cable, right? All the televisions are leveraged, the internet is leveraged, and pretty soon, most people have cable.

Huge sea change to where you can kind of expect people to have cable. It’s a utility.

By the way, the arc of subsidizing content to advertise technology is the arc of a technology becoming utility. And so the arts kind of move from emergent technology to emergent technology, getting that subsidy, like, one to the other.

In the same way that, like, oh, the Catholics and the Protestants are fighting, let’s have them pay us to make them paintings to promote their stuff, right? You get a good 300 years of art subsidies out of that, and then you move on to the next one.

Oh, radio stations are fighting to get dominance, let’s have them pay us to make radio shows. Same with TV, etc.

And so calling like cable television shows like they’re the same thing as broadcast television shows, it was so fundamentally different. It changed the whole media.

Right. And so there’s a level of sophistication you get from broadcast shows after cable started to get popular because they have to compete with that stuff.

The peak of broadcast television in these cases is like Seinfeld and the Seinfeld finale. Which is just like huge crazy numbers you don’t get anymore these days. (VV: via Wikipedia: In its original American broadcast, 76.3 million viewers tuned into “The Finale”, making it the fourth-most watched overall series finale in the U.S. after MAS*H, Cheers and The Fugitive)

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It’s also worth noting, to rewind a little bit, in an important way, the Beatles came to prominence as radio stars, right? They did a radio show, I think every day, where they would like play, or at least once a week, I think every day, where they would like play for an extended period, all the time, just for radio, and that’s kind of how they became famous.

Then when the Beatles stopped being early stage Beatles, the Monkees created a TV show where they were kind of mostly cast, but they were kind of doing their riff on the early Beatles shtick as a TV show. And it worked very well. And so each song got a little video with it, which was a unique thing.

During this era of cable, one of the Monkees teamed up with some other guys and said, what if we did this for all music? What if we use this new video technology to make videos for new songs, took the money out of record companies marketing budgets, and broadcast them on our channel, and turned every band into the Monkees, or into the Beatles, instead of just us being the Monkees.

Needless to say, it was a huge hit. I had a chance to pick the brain of one of the other co-founders of MTV, and he told me that they were kind of Sarnoff style.

He’s like, we weren’t technically the producers of the videos, but we were producing most of the music videos on MTV for the first few years. We were going and hunting down video artists and directors and pairing them with musicians. We were curating the vibe.

And that production was happening for free in order to get content to subsidize to promote their channel and the ads on it. So you get the same format we discussed in this kind of nested way as entities rise.

Now you have the internet, and a few wacky things happen. You can watch short-form videos on the internet.

So music videos, it starts making more sense to watch them on the internet than on MTV. And a bunch of stuff starts moving there.

Notably short-form videos, with Atom Films at first, and then YouTube. And you just see this kind of migration as everyone moves from having internet to having broadband, etc., etc., etc.

Now this continues up to the point where broadband is so prolific that it starts feeling relatively trivial difference to watch something on the internet as to watch it on, say, a DVD or on a TV channel. So you get, like, recording devices that you can program it to record a show that’s being broadcast, like TiVo, that starts to feel not that different but a little more inconvenient from, you know, getting the DVDs, but maybe a little more convenient because it’s fresh stuff.

And then once you kind of get the Netflix interface, which integrates the YouTube Atom Films thing with the TiVo thing with the DVDs thing, so it’s just like I can just watch anything on demand that I want to from within this list. And all the content forms suddenly merge.

Now, by this point, HBO had a history of creating a certain style of show that was a sophisticated drama that often favored writers. So writers would very often want to make an HBO show over making a play or making a screenplay, because there’s a real outlet for a lot of them, right? You have, I think, David Chase, who did Sopranos.

You have Larry David with Curb Your Enthusiasm. You have… Oh, God, what’s his name? Who did The Wire? David… Fuck. (VV: David Simon)

Okay, anyway, you have a bunch of these. Here’s where it gets fun.

So now Netflix has leveraged some technological innovations to have a new way to watch what they might call content. Based on our precedence, what might we expect to happen?

That’s right, they go after A-level talent and subsidize the creation of content exclusive for their platform in order to promote it, right? And so they get big movie directors like David Fincher and big playwrights like Bo Willimon.

I think he’s a playwright. He definitely made hit shows, I think.

And they pay more money than would be reasonable or profitable except for the fact that they’re promoting their distribution system. Again, like we saw at every earlier stage of this cycle.

Now, upon realizing that their technical infrastructure is relatively trivial, once it’s been innovated, the larger players who are producing content start to say, wait, why are we making deals with these guys to distribute our stuff and they own it? Why don’t we make our own way for people to consume the stuff we make?

So now you have what are called the streaming wars. Now, in the streaming wars, you get this great subsidy, again, because they’re competing.

So all the people making media are like, hey, why don’t we just go make shows? Because they’re fucking throwing money at us that we would never get to make the stuff itself because it’s worth the cost of them to advertise their streaming platforms.

And you have a similar boom, and I don’t want to say bust, but like leveling off that happened in the last few years.

Now, one of the other interesting things that I kind of left out during radio and accelerating into television is the conversations thing. I mentioned it, but you really can’t undervalue talk shows.

Short form, like Johnny Carson and, you know, my favorite is Dick Cavett, but or long form, like the Charlie Rose, etc., because you get this significant overlap, for example, between books and conversation shows, right? So you can read Joseph Campbell books, but you can watch The Power of Myth, the 12-part PBS special where someone interviews him.

Now, this form ends up kind of splitting off into podcasts and YouTube, which has been interesting to watch. This is kind of legit.

Since the request was the nature of television and its arcs, I feel like this is a good kind of thread.

Another thing kind of worth noting is that Twilight Zone employed lots of great sci-fi writers and very often would adapt sci-fi books or short stories into Twilight Zone episodes. And then, kind of because of that, would publish book anthologies of the stories they’d adapted for. You also see this with Alfred Hitchcock, who made a show (Alfred Hitchcock Presents) to do the stories that he liked but didn’t want to make movies out of.

And he would host it, he would direct a couple episodes a year, and then they would publish books that are anthologies of the crime fiction he liked, some of which was on the show and some of which was not. So the reason I’m pointing out that trend is you see emergence of formats that are fully adapting to where the people are while taking systems that may be suffering economically to subsidize them by being the gateway between them.

Which is obviously increasingly relevant both in an era of social media and in an era of AI emergence.

There’s a talk that I would encourage watching, which is Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message. (1967, 1977) There’s an interview version and a talk version that were both on TV, where he talks about some of this stuff. He talks about it a little more one-directionally rather than bi-causal, but it’s still very good and foundational.

By the way, you see similar patterns happen even like just within the YouTube era. So for example, the gentleman who started MTV with the former Monkee built the first network of YouTube channels ever, which ended up getting bought by YouTube as their creator program. And so I’m just kind of pointing out that these cycles are somewhat universal, agnostic to medium and technology, occur somewhat reliably and predictably, and you can observe their impact on formatting.

Some other fun examples. The teaser is how William Goldman writes famously that in a movie, because you have a captive audience, you can take 10 minutes getting to know someone kind of before the story starts. But in a TV show, every TV episode has to start with someone running through the woods, being chased by someone with a knife, and then the title card says one week earlier, and then you start your story because you need the tease and the hook.

Now, again, because of the barrier between them, because again, they could change the channel in the theater, they’re not going to leave for a few minutes. Well, now that the line blurs, the mediums merge, and you’ll find teases at the beginning of movies and hooks much more often if they want to succeed.

There’s another fork I didn’t mention explicitly, which is the distinction between the live studio audience and no live studio audience. But that’s one of the big changes that comes with cable and a more movie-like approach to television and drama is it starts getting kind of weird to have laugh tracks in audiences, or at least it’s a different thing. Which, again, was kind of inherited from live plays and then they brought it in.

This has been a history of television from the Titanic disaster to HBO. There’s a lot more that can be discussed.

I will leave this as a kind of skeleton. Most of the lot more would be things within the medium of cinema and how it was used differently through the evolution of these cycles.

Visa, feel free to ask follow-up questions and I’ll delve into them. I’m using the word delve as a self-referential AI joke about conditions that we see emerge with new mediums and technologies because people talk about the word delve being an indicator that something was written by AI and so I am implying that I am an AI subsidized content machine even though in this case I am not.

I’m walking around Williamsburg talking off the top of my head in response to your question.

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I should also add that as the cable and internet subsidized television cinematic drama became a popular medium for channels and streamers to promote themselves and therefore getting subsidies, you also see a cycle of people adapting their unproduced film scripts into TV shows. And this comes with a storytelling trope where the pilot is the movie with the ending cut off, and then you spend the whole show kind of drawing out, redoing the cycles, and then at the end of the show, they have to get things in the plot kind of back to where they were near the end of the pilot so that they can do their ending.

One of my favorite examples of this is Mad Men, which was originally a movie. Another funny example of this is Succession, right, where you read the end of the pilot.

And then you see the father has like a health incident as there’s a question of whether his son or a tech company is going to take over. And then, you know, by the end of the show, at the final season, they’re like, all right, we have to figure out a new tech guy to be in conflict with the son.

We have to give the father a health incident. So like, you know, very often you see the situation where a writer is like, oh, if I go to television, I’ll be in charge.

And I’ll get to do this for years with a lot of money in creative control. It’s notably with HBO or like DC.

And so then they kind of have to reset all the chess pieces at the end to where the pilot ends. I tend not to have a lot of patience for this, but I appreciate it.

And many of the works are often good. I think breaking that also is an example of this trope.

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I’ll also just add here that like teenage Steven Spielberg’s first directing gig was TV shows, episodes. And then he got work, you know, he did the Columbo pilot and he did lots of TV shows.

And then he did a TV movie that was so good that they distributed in theaters as a movie. And then he got to make movies.

So you also see a lot of kind of upcycling and downcycling of people between movies and TV. And that relationship changed over time.

It used to be a big step down to move to TV. And then for writers, after streaming, it became the opposite.

It was like, why would I get kicked around and rewritten and have no control? In TV, I’m in charge.

The directors work for me. So it’s also an interesting arc there.

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By the way, one other very wacky side effect of the decentralization of media on the internet, which tech people loud and loved, is that now tech platforms do not have, for example, the equal time political rules that broadcast channels have, right? Because they’re less regulated than broadcast channels.

So you end up with a kind of, you know, wild situation. You know, for example, this week, if you Google Trump, you’ll just get results of Kamala Harris, whereas a broadcast television channel would be in violation of the law if they do that.

They have to kind of be more subtle about that sort of thing. The internet can theoretically kind of do what it wants.

But again, lacking those explicit legal levers of control, we see more implicit mafia-like ones where, like, companies may get regulated for other things unless they play along, etc. I’m not suggesting that that’s what happens with Google.

I think they are ideologically aligned with doing that. But you see many such examples and cases.

Very often it is preferable to have the means of powers leveraged against gatekeepers be explicit and therefore legible and theoretically modifiable by the public whereas the absence of it often just means it will be implicit behind the scenes and in shadier ways. But that’s another tale for another day.

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I have some very specific predictions about the future that relate to some of the work I did with Kenyatta Cheese promoting Doctor Who in America in the early days, which included how leveraging GIFs and moments and social feedback loops can promote shows, gatherings, including theatrical gatherings, etc., which are all things that I think people underestimate and are naive about the directional switch that’s occurring there. Especially as the legal barrier to theatrical access is dwindling and disappearing. But all of this is kind of another story for another day.

Also, I think it may have been Amazon that bought the Drafthouse, I’m not sure. Anyway, have a nice day!

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I’ll add one some more if it wasn’t clear that there’s an interesting relationship between the Alfred Hitchcock, Rod Serling, and Walt Disney shows. They occurred during similar eras in the, you know, 50s, or I think in the 60s, sorry, in the 60s.

But what they all represent is a creative person who wants to control their own destiny, becoming the host of a variety show where they create the content and curate others towards it in their style. Rather than natural performers and entertainers who are primarily that, being the face for other people’s creativity or naturally being both.

And so there’s a more general trend there worth kind of discussing and thinking about that I also consider a little analogous to futurist visionaries becoming startup founders instead of sci-fi writers. Where there’s this point where you kind of bite the bullet, swallow your pride, and say, oh fuck, I’m going to have to go be famous and stand on a stage every week if I want to control my own destiny, don’t I? Which is kind of similar to what you see with tech people starting podcasts and getting active on Twitter.

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Another important tell about the Sarnoff slash MTV thing is that when you have a decentralized open ecosystem, the value of curation skyrockets because suddenly you have 10,000 times as much stuff. And to the value of someone who’s able to curate good stuff and who you trust to curate that good stuff, excuse me, goes up so much that one good curator can be as impactful to an ecosystem as a new technology itself. And so being willing to engage in a heavy handed act of curation behind the scenes for free again and produce this stuff yourself can be so valuable.

As to nourish decades of an ecosystem again with David Sarnoff curating NBC to Fred curating MTV, etc. And I’ll just add to that notion.

Picasso said, give me a museum and I’ll fill it. And it sounds very arrogant, but the reality is there are more than eight museums around the world full of just Picassos.

And there are museums that have hundreds of Picassos in them that aren’t Picasso museums, but could be if they were a little smaller. So Picasso, when he says, give me a museum and I’ll fill it, and he sounds so cocky and arrogant, is actually being very humble compared to the reality.

And so I believe that you can apply this to ecosystems where it’s like, it really just takes kind of one guy, the right guy, to make an MTV happen. Or one guy, the right guy, Sarnoff, to make a radio happen.

And being willing to make your own stuff without thanks or applause. Man, it can nourish decades of culture and institutions and technologies.

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I realize I took one of the major steps here for granted rather than citing it explicitly. Just as radio switched from peer-to-peer communication into a broadcast medium, cable is a side effect of telephone, right?

So in the literal sense, you’re getting it from the phone company. So literally, you’re also seeing a peer-to-peer medium develop a broadcast version of its technology.

And then streaming on the internet. The internet was also a peer-to-peer system for computers to talk to each other, just like CB radios.

And then it developed into a broadcast medium with reliable packet switching and server farms, et cetera, until you had streaming models. So each of these technologies emerged as a peer-to-peer medium.

But then the marketplace of attention and some small technological developments to accommodate the natural marketplace of attention curated a few people to curate and broadcast for other people. So even though communication remained…

The primary layer, once a technology matures from its adolescence, is broadcast just because you get so much information that curating it becomes invaluable. And that’s a reliable cycle.

I realize I took that for granted at the beginning, but didn’t call it back explicitly when I noted the later technologies into which the artistic medium kind of swam and then evolved and adapted itself towards. And this phenomena is a…

It is as reliable as undersea bugs turning into crabs or plants in dense areas evolving into trees. It’s just a natural information cycle in dense information ecosystems.

You know, you see it with social media platforms that start for people to talk to their friends. But once they hit a certain density, saturation, and competition, it becomes about what some platforms call influencers. You know what I mean? Once everyone’s kinda there, people don’t actually super care what their friends ate for lunch. They wanna see what interesting people have to share. And that’s what’s up. It’s a universal format.

It’s kind of the mimetic cultural informational equivalent of folding a samurai sword to increase its density and pure purity. And the more times you fold it, the stronger the sword, becomes.

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I realize also that I took this for granted but should say it explicitly that Seinfeld, the last biggest TV show before streaming but also really just ever, is literally an NBC show. It’s produced, paid for, and broadcast on the National Broadcast Company, which is the broadcasting arm of RCA after it split off. So the history line is direct and runs through.

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I’ll also add now one really funny kind of yin-yang inverse relationship between medium and message, between form and format, between content and technology, is that just like as we mentioned, the technologies tend to start peer-to-peer and then evolve through an information overload into broadcast, even with writing itself, which people would write to each other, and then it became a medium of broadcast with the printing press. Again, that’s a stable cycle. The opposite is what happens to the mediums themselves.

So, for example, what used to be a medium of broadcast becomes, ironically, a medium of communication once that curation and technology of broadcast kicks in. So writing starts peer-to-peer, but then it’s a big deal, and it’s books now. Everyone texts, everyone texts to each other, writes books worth of text to each other every year, which would have seemed absurd.

It’s absurd sci-fi in the Middle Ages, and you can just kind of see that applying forward to everything. We’re starting to see art no longer really be, like visual art, a broadcast medium just. People use it to communicate.

They use it to communicate event flyers to each other. They use it to communicate memes with each other and jokes. So we’re watching mediums move from broadcast earlier in their life cycle to communication later in their life cycle.

As we watch technologies move from communication early in their life cycle to broadcast late in their life cycle. And the flip that happens in there is that when the technologies start, they don’t really have a native medium. The medium evolves to adapt to the technology.

Then the technology adapts back and becomes broadcast. And then the medium adapts back to that broadcast technology, because now unless you’re at the level that you would be the curated broadcast, it’s just over. It’s all communication.

And it’s so much easier to make now. And everyone is so accustomed to the language of the medium now that we use it to communicate with each other. And so yesterday’s art is tomorrow’s communication.

Yesterday’s religion is tomorrow’s art. And I’ll leave you to imagine what tomorrow’s religions might be.

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While I’m here, I should add a follow-up to the Dick Van Dyke thing, which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, which is the destigmatizing minstrel sitcom formula. So very often, when there is a demographic that doesn’t yet have mainstream acceptance, right before they get mainstream acceptance, and I would argue it furthers their adoption in mainstreaming, you have a sitcom that’s kind of derogatory towards them. And I’ll explain.

So the trope is, the sitcom embodies every negative stereotype about this group of people. But you like them.

You’re not scared. It’s not bad that they have these stereotypes.

You still like them. They’re still your friend.

I’ll now give examples.

So you have the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, right? You have Will and Grace, you have the Big Bang Theory, and, you know, they all may kind of look bad in hindsight.

You certainly have Seinfeld. They all may look bad in hindsight when we look back at them, because they’re full of all these stereotypes and tropes, but they also help normalize, you know, let’s say, like, urban African-Americans, Jews, the gay community, and autistic people.

And in each case, you have two characters. One who embodies all the negative stereotypes of the demographic and is from the demographic, but you still love him.

And another who’s from the demographic and defies all the stereotypes about the demographic, right? So you have Will Smith and you also have Carlton.

In Will and Grace, you have… I don’t remember their names because I didn’t really watch it that much, but you have the two gay characters (VV: Joe and Larry), one of whom is super gay in all the stereotypical ways, and the other of whom is functionally, in stereotype-wise, a straight guy who just happens to date men.

Similarly, with the Big Bang Theory, you have like Sheldon and Leonard, and Sheldon is like an extremely autistic, rude, etc. character, and Leonard is kind of just a nerd. And so, yeah, I don’t know.

I find it to be an interesting formula for mainstreaming things. I think it applies not just to demographics, but to concepts generally, and I’ll leave it there.

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One other note I’ll add here, based on some context from a DM from Visa, is I didn’t mention sports or athletics at all, but we saw a huge shift in the 20th century, primarily because of television, but also because of radio, from athleticism and sports into a real form of entertainment. And that has created a huge shift in athletic capability.

Like the Olympics a hundred years ago, I wish I were exaggerating, it was like drunk people who showed up who were like, all right, oh, they’re doing the Olympics, let’s go try, and they would win medals. And now it’s a hardcore thing with the best of the best, largely because they’re sponsored and it’s a big televised event, etc.

And if you extrapolate from that example to athletics and sports generally, I feel like… That’s just a whole other subfield of television’s impact on society in a lot of ways.

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I should also add, in terms of craft and medium, one reason for the renaissance of televised drama after the internet, pre-streaming even, but also during streaming, is that once people were using social media as their turn their brain off when they get home from work, television, even though it lost that economic subsidy of that, was freed from the burden of doing that. So it was allowed to get sophisticated.

An analogy here would be once painting was relieved of the duty of showing what things realistically look like. Once photography relieved painting of that duty, painting explored what is more native to itself.