Reply To: ABC cancelled the podcasts with Adam/Eddy

[kfchimera]

The thing with the podcasts isn’t that it was full of spoilers.  It was full of explanation.  We have a fandom that interprets things in wildly varying ways.   It was nice to hear the authors being more candid about what they meant, where they could be without spoiling.  It was better than Adam on twitter, and more composed.    So as a fan, I miss it, but I can see why they cancelled it as a “fan” of entertainment as an industry.

ONCE is just one  show being  produced in an industry in flux.  Television and scripted entertainment is still reeling from all the reality/competition shows drawing away viewers, and on top of that, the way entertainment gets delivered and measured has been changing.  Online viewing, cable and such are taking up more and more eyeballs, and advertisers pay for eyeballs.  We don’t pay to watch OUAT.  Advertisers pay the network and the network pays the studio, and the studio funds the money to make the show.  They used to do things on a very seasonal basis but recently Fox announced it isn’t doing “pilot season”.  Netflix put out House of Cards, an original show of its own putting the whole season up and has seen BOOMING profits.  They’re doing a kids show next.  People use tablets more and more, along with downloading things digitally so lots of time-shifted viewing.  It is all adding up to a change of “must-see-TV” in the old days of a family sitting down to one of the 3 big networks and recording in their Nielsen books what they saw.   Twitter has become one part of the strategy for networks.  Get people tweeting to measure live viewing, as advertisers only  are mainly interested in live + 7 I think it is.   They’re trying to create “water cooler” moments on twitter, which is why they’re encouraging the cast to tweet live and react there.

So I think in part the podcast is kind of “outdated” in the sense it’s not serving the need of driving live views.   It helped intent fans like us to understand the show and keep it on our minds, but it isn’t as effective a tool to make sure we’re watching live +7 so Adam’s swapped his strategy a bit.  As a producer, he wants his show to do well of course, so blocking out some time here and there on twitter is possibly more effective than an entire hour or two with he and Eddy and a host to record a “podcast”.  He can fit in twittering with fans whenever, then try to be on his twitter after or during a broadcast to encourage live views.

Television isn’t “fanfiction”–not so indulgent a thing, nor even is it a published novel where maybe someone might make more effort on plot, character development and structure and some kind of meaningful thing to say.  It’s entertainment for the masses in a certain demographic desired by advertisers.   A lot of what we see with OUAT necessarily reflects all that and we’ll never know what things A&E would do if they only could but can’t.   I suppose we’ll hear on the DVDs on audio commentary some more BTS type things, but I really did like those podcasts.

It does strike me as funny though given that Adam and Eddy love Star Wars, and one thing Lucas was a genius at doing was the marketing and cross-promotion of his product–all those toys!  Disney also of course is the master at it, and it now owns Star Wars! So OUAT has not really tapped into the fandom’s desire for things, and while that’s great for fan artists who use things like Redbubble or whatever to make up their own swag, it is kind of funny and seems like such a missed opportunity.  In other words: The marketing strategy in general for this show has never really seemed cohesive and as well-thought out as you’d think given its influences.