We Interrupt This Lecture To Bring You A Football Game
You know you’ve just blown a wad of dough on a Super Bowl commercial when @washingtonpost is talking about how Bruce Springsteen hawking your Jeeps is killing the planet. In the middle of a blowout win by Tom Brady.
It was two-for-one for viewers at #SuperBowlLV . You got a football game and a lecture on Wokeness from Springsteen, BLM and the NFL. A little bit of sports and a lot of coercion. But as Time magazine tells us, the ruling class has made an alliance with people like the NFL to keep the 2020 election campaign going forever.
Sunday was Exhibit A. You could’ve cut the faux-gravity with a butter knife, The Super Bowl LV commercials on Sunday were mini moral parables from gigantic global corporations that were long on Joe Biden talking points (unity, climate, BLM) and short on actual products like beer, cars and Cheetos.
(We played a drinking game. First one to guess what product they were hawking got a free shot. There were many occasions when no one knew the product even after the commercial finished.)
The Bruce-Springsteen-as-Pete Seeger spot was typical. Only at the end of the Boss’ litany of Woody Guthrie dirges about the soil and churches in Kansas did we find out this paean to Woke America was for Jeep— a company owned by French and Italian interests.
The guy who was Born To Run now cruises the streets of privilege. There were plenty more such lectures to a population that has been isolated and incarcerated for much of the past year. Tone deafness understates the effect. No wonder the public has retreated to watching Netflix to get away from the hectoring of network TV and its howler monkeys.
If there’s one consolation it may be that binge watching may kill off this legacy network hold on public expression. I remember the first time I binge watched. I was stuck in my parents’ home because of 9/11. With nothing to do, nowhere to go, we were left wth the TV for diversion from the tragic events.
Someone suggested a new TV series called The Sopranos. But this show wasn’t on any of the channels we grew up with. It was on something called HBO, a network that didn’t interrupt the program for commercials. No matter, we decided to give it a try. Five episodes later it was almost 2 AM and we were hooked. We woke up the next day to get more of Tony, Sal, Pauly Walnuts and Christopher.
It was liberating. TV watching has never been the same since. Appointment viewing— Seinfeld and Hill Street Blues on Tuesday night— was dead. If we couldn’t see the entire five seasons of a show in sequence we weren’t interested. We had plenty of company.
The Canadian TV networks never knew what hit them when binge TV showed up. Not only were they dependent on U.S. (and some British) programming but their profit model was based on dropping Canadian commercials into the imported programming. For decades it had worked, the lucrative profits supporting their news operations and Canadian content.
But subscription networks like HBO, Netflix, Prime and Apple have destroyed the redistributive model. Canadian audiences bypass the networks to go directly to content providers. Funds for expensive news operations dried up, and they concentrated their resources in all-news operations.
For a while revenues from televised sports programming kept the “cut the cord” wolf from the door. But gradually, other outlets appeared to bleed sports revenues. Governments weakened the commercial substitution model for events such as the Super Bowl. DAZN siphoned off NFL revenues.
A reckoning was coming. The networks and cable industry in Canada demanded that government tax the Netflix etc. This in spite of Canadian government and unions doing their best to bail out media giants. The Trudeau government gifted the media business with billions and Unifor, the union representing many media employees, actively campaigned against the Conservative party.
The Canadian networks have fought back, imitating the subscription model. In fact, Bell Media's fall 2020 revenues rose by 3.5 per cent to $716 million thanks to subscriber growth from The Movie Network, its Crave TV streaming service and TV Everywhere— and a captive home audience waiting out Covid-19.
But the traditional network concept is as dated as bell bottoms. So we saw almost 100 employees at Bell’s outlets getting the pink slip last week in the latest cuts to the old empires of TV and radio. Newsrooms at legacy radio stations such as CFRB, CJAD and more were decimated. Sales forces at radio and TV were likewise slashed.
At TSN, which remains a money maker for Bell, prominent on-air figures such as Dan O’Toole, Natasha Stanisziewski and Brett Wallace were let go. A number of off-air figures were also pink slipped.
These cuts came after Rogers Media, burdened with the enormous NHL rights package, eliminated big names such as Bob McCown and slashed its morning TV shows and publication business. These are not the final cuts, either, as the Covid-19 panic has reduced disposable income and ad revenues. Whatever the old network model represented in our culture is now a museum piece.
Whether a grizzled Bruce Springsteen as Jeep spokesman is the future remains to be seen.
UPDATE: https://broadcastdialogue.com/bell-pulls-plug-on-tsn-radio-format-in-vancouver-winnipeg-hamilton/
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx