wow look! A post on TV! now that is really weird, Emily never blogs about TV. Yes I know, I'm talking heaps about TV as of late, but really there is nothing else in my life going on, maybe when uni starts again I'll start posting on more achedemic and interesting things, but for now, your stuck with my major obession over TV, however today I'm going to vear from my love obession with US TV to my haterd of Australian TV, and that reason really has to do with pilots.
Ohh pilots, how I love to hate you. You are so bad, yet you serve such a critical function in making TV good, and by that I mean pilot season. Make no mistake pilot season is the best thing to happen to man, in the history of ever. Why is pilot season the best thing to happen to man, because it keeps TV good. Every season there are at least 10000 concepts of shows out there in the aether, which gets whittled down to 40-50 new shows. and while networks may like to be able to squash more hours into primetime they can't, so that means each year 40-50 new shows have to be cancelled. Admittedly usually at least 20 of these shows are new shows, and some get canned after barely making it to series, but there are always going to be veteran shows that get cancelled.
Why is this a good thing? because it keeps producers on their toes, even shows witha verage ratings routinely get axed, so there is constant pressure to keep the show up to scratch to make it good. This is the main difference between the American and the Australian market. Thanks to drama points, instead of having too many shows to choose from and having to cull, the Australian networks have too little to choose from, and thus shows can remain on the air with pretty marginal ratings, because the network needs the points. There is no culling of bad shows, or shows with bad ratings there is no pressure to be good, and so quite often the shows get lazy. I get it, making TV is hard work, and even harder making good TV, and if you know that your going to stick around no matter what, very bad TV can, and does get made.
Of course besides the lack of culling the bad shows part of the problem with Australian TV is that they are completely unoriginal, and so completely follow international trends, and over-saturate the market when I hit happens. Of course this happens in the US as well, but the difference being most of these bad copy-cat ideas get weeded out or don't make it to series, because they have so many to choose from, not to mention the fact that the market is so much bigger. Thats another huge factor in what makes Australian TV suck (or US TV so much better), ridiculously tiny market. I'll talk more about this later, but for now I'm tired and I want to go actually watch TV instead of talking about it.
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