Alex Churchill

We all know the accepted orthodoxy on the ongoing demise of network television. Specifically, that in a million-channel universe, the old oligopoly crumbles under the sheer weight of choice. While I think that may very well be the case with regards to news and information, I think original programming is another matter altogether. In this regard, it is not a question of quality, nor quantity, but one of durability.
Cable outlets are allowed to explore the dark side of humanity in a way that inherently makes their product better. What if “Desperate Housewives” were allowed to be explicit in their characterization of “the slut” or “the gold digger” the way that “The Sopranos” or “Six Feet Under” are? The unvarnished qualities that make HBO and Showtime so believable, and watchable are the very same things that lend depth to their characters and longevity to their story lines. Why do we moan when they announce a third season of “Lost” but scream in outrage when we only get two seasons of “Rome”?

Simply put, the ability to say “fuck” on television makes for deeper characters and deeper characters lead to longer runs.

So it would seem that network televison is perenially hobbled by their long ago self-imposed Standards and Practices model of self-censorship. But here is where the million channel universe can help.

My wife loves hip hop. However, she hates words like “bitch”, “ho” and “nigga”. Luckily for the hip hop lover in her, the slightly prudish side of her can cruise over to the iTunes music store, click on Ludacris’ latest album and buy it in either “Clean” or “Explicit” versions. In most cases, the “Clean” cuts aren’t simply beeped out, they are rather re-engineered to scratch the “b” out of “itch” (often times, these edits are more interesting than the originals, using auditory change-ups from syncopated beats to car alarms to the sound of toasters popping to disguise the dirty).

Given that the future of original content is in $2 downloads, why can the networks not start now – simply by editing two cuts of their product: one for the way people really talk, and one for the way people in the 1950s would have liked for themselves to have talked. Trust me, they won’t run out of ideas for characters when the characters actually have ideas of their own.

NOTE: Organic, an Internet marketing firm I am interviewing at has a unique hiring process. One of the element is called “Exceptional Experience”. The premise is to cite an example of an exceptional experience from your own life and extrapolate over 500 words the hows and the whys of its exception. So, without further, here is mine:

I had a friend in high school whose father was a mining executive. My friend’s father (call him CEO) was hired to head up a venerable Canadian nickel company that had – through neglect, market conditions and downright incompetence – ridden the market right down to the bottom of the trough.

The first thing CEO did was sell the four corporate aircraft. The second thing CEO did was fire 75% of the Toronto office staff; reducing the company from six floors in a downtown building to half of one floor – roughly the same size as the previous CEOs private office complex. Finally, CEO fired half the smelting and mining employees in the company town north of Sudbury.

A year after these events, my friend and I went with CEO to the company town. We were going to spend a weekend fishing at the company lodge before it too was sold.

CEO had other plans for the weekend as well. Included were a tour of the smelter, the mining operation and the crusher. At all these locations, CEO was given a mixed – often downright hostile – reception. It was like touring the coal mines with Thatcher. Some of the looks could smelt nickel all on their own.

After the walkabout, the three of us went for lunch at the only restaurant in town – a tiny lunch counter operated out of the back of a former miner’s home.

We arrived hungry – and my friend and I slightly shell-shocked – only to find out from the sobbing owner that the place had been cleared out the night before when he was out at bingo. We got back in the car and started driving away from what we thought was going to be an afternoon of fishing. When we asked CEO where we were going – he replied that he had one stop to make.

We stopped at an appliance store outside Sudbury where CEO slapped his credit card down and told the sales guy to re-stock the lunch counter with everything he needed to get back in business, to fill the deep freeze with stock and to throw an alarm system in with monitoring paid for four years.

We drove back to the lunch counter. I have never seen one man so happy.

And I’m not talking about the lunch counter owner.

What I loved about this day was the naked contrast. Many exceptional experiences have unseen pitfalls: how many tons of carbon were released into the atmosphere so you could skydive? What percentage of your iTunes purchase does the artist get? This short-circuited the need to be analyzed. Like a Richard Rogers, part of what made it so exceptional was how one could see all the nasty duct work sticking out all over the shiny surfaces – its complete lack of sub-text and its total immersion in context.