The New Model

I am most likely the worst holder of an MBA degree you can think of, since I routinely piss and moan about the multitudinous vicissitudes and perfidy of the rentier grifter class, the shameless scamboogery with which they run this nation for their own benefit and no one else's.

But I'm always on the lookout for newer, fresher revenue models to emulate. So I'm strangely in somewhat respectful awe of this here revenue model, the ease and guilelessness with which hack comic Byron Allen has become a hack tycoon. Keep an eye on his low-ball licensing and distribution model, because it's likely to be some variant that will eventually provide your satellite, cable, and internets content.

And why not? For every Vince Gilligan or David Benioff or Kurt Sutter, there are a hundred Byron Allens, giving the people what they really want. I've often said that the corporate news exists solely to get you to buy cheeseburgers and pills and trucks and tampons, but the fact is that all media exists for that purpose.

Every football game; every talk-radio blowhard; every true-crime spouse-kills-spouse dramatization stretching twenty minutes of story to two hours; every karaoke competition that stretches an hour of material to twenty weeks; every group of inbred southerners hicking it up for the cameras, opening storage sheds or teasing alligators or whatever the hell it is they do. All of it exists for the singular purpose of distracting you long enough to open your wallet for a Duck Dynasty chia pet or some such.

Having cranked out a handful of books myself this year, I'm a part of that machine as well, albeit an infinitesimal part, and on a much different product/ad ratio. Byron Allen is just more honest about his views on art versus commerce, insofar as he has no desire or pretense toward artistry. He knows no one's beating down the doors of Jon Lovitz or Bill Bellamy, but people still recognize their names, so he gives 'em jobs making toothpicks out of logs, maybe for a notch above scale, hopefully for a couple points on DVD and syndication royalties (there is a reason Mr. Box Office is projected to the specific number of 104 episodes), but probably not.

This is basically the Tyler Perry approach to creating content -- fuck over the unions, take advantage of a surplus labor market to create and sustain downward pressure on costs, and crank out some aerosol cheddar. It has already been in play for quite some time, obviously, not just in television but movies and music as well. Allen has simply added the back end to the whole deal, monetized the licensing and distribution to an extent that even Perry most likely has not (yet).

It might be something if, instead of invoking the usual "it's a free market, they can work somewhere else if they don't like it" schtick, Allen takes a moment this Christmas season and observes that he has a Fifth Avenue apartment and a $17M mansion in Beverly Hills and a Bentley, and presumably a metric fuckton of cashola, so maybe he can pay the minions just a hair more, since they crank out an episode a day for him.

For movies, the blockbuster formula has been one of these basic types:

• Take a public domain work and do yet another version of it.
• Take a comic book and build a franchise out of it.
• Take a young-adult trilogy and make a tetralogy of movies, splitting the final book into two half-assed movies, instead of one good one, in order to fleece the sheep just a leetle more.
• Take an action or comic-book movie made ten or twenty years ago, and "reboot" it with a fresh face and CGI mo-cap technology.

Television has taken its cues from the sweeping success of "reality" teevee, and its contrived "competitions" that used to "advance" the "contestants." There are parallels at work here; where once it took at least a modicum of talent in acting, writing, singing, trivia, whatever to get on the boob tube, now it simply takes a willingness to look like an asshole. Similarly, the "competitions" are less about excelling in an actual skill, than a willingness to, for example, eat bugs or drink donkey jism for the amusement of the audience.

Notice that at no point is "art" any sort of consideration whatsoever. The comic-book franchise movies, thankfully, no longer roll with the arch campiness of (for example) the Joel Schumacher-era Batman movies. But even with the veneer of noir artsy pretensions, they're still chock-full of standard reluctant-hero character tropes, paint-by-numbers narrative arcs, predictable music-swells-shiny-thing-go-boom rhythms. So, less visually cheesy, but nothing truly innovative.

Music (as opposed to "the music industry") has suffered the least, and this is entirely due to the democratization of technology and distribution. The fuckers can't get their hands on it anymore, because pretty much anyone who wants to can get the modest amount of cash it takes to get a laptop, install Audacity, record and produce and distribute, without some piece of shit "giving" you an advance that you'll never recoup, but will bind you inextricably to The Man.

The upshot of all that is that there are more good bands out there making good music than there ever were -- the catch is that you have to hunt them down, because format radio will never touch them. There are no blockbusters to speak of anymore, unless you can tour to support it, but it's still a net win for musicians, listeners, and music itself.

If Byron Allen hadn't come along with this discount model for content creation and curation, I promise you someone else would have -- in fact, it's entirely likely that he poached much or most of it from an existing model. Allen, like Perry, like Mark Burnett or any number of crap peddlers infesting the infinite channels, get that the most important part of Sturgeon's Law is that all of it can be monetized.

It's not surprising, but it is too bad, that people like this persist in taking an inherently creative (if increasingly schlocky and self-referencing) medium, populated with creative people, and simply squeezing every nickel till the buffalo shits. On the one hand, as much as we all love and lionize the serialized, novelized Sopranos / Wire / Breaking Bad stories, with their brilliant anti-heroes and compelling narratives, having all quality, all complex story arcs and amazing acting and writing, would be too exhausting to follow everywhere, all the time.

I did catch an episode of Duck Dynasty a couple months back, mostly to see what the fuss was about, and I didn't get it. Still don't. They seem like perfectly nice folks, but aren't we all. Somewhere along the line, people decided that watching their neighbors eat dinner and blow shit up in the swamp was appointment teevee. Well, okay then. Whatever floats yer boat, pilgrim.

Based on a single view, I would guess that a large part of the DD popularity stems from the fact that it's essentially a sitcom in structure -- main and subplots; ridiculously contrived situations; standard character tropes; narrative resolution in most episodes, "cliffhangers" in pivotal episodes of the season schedule. So you get the frisson of "reality," or at least of watching "real" people do their thing, with the soothing predictability and resolution of the 22-minute narrative arc. Setup, punchline; setup catch-phrase. It's The Big Bang Theory or Two and a Half Men, without having to have a table read, or a handler for Charlie Sheen.

And again, there is a place for this sort of stuff, if you simply don't have the time or energy or inclination to sit through more demanding fare. The problem is not its existence, so much as its extreme prevalence, some of which is certainly due to low cultural expectations, but just as much can be chalked up to incessant cost-cutting, trimming way beyond fat into bone.

When it comes to the music, movies, and TV I do consume, I'd like to think that I lean toward "quality" product (again, though, don't we all), but with the understanding that, somewhere along the line, it's still product. I never quite know what to make of the "oh, I got rid of my TV long ago, I read books" (that inevitably, hilariously pop up in discussion threads for TV episodes) folks; I read at least 50 books of at least 300 pages last year, much of it during commercials. See, you can do both, and not have to be a purist about it.

It's just something to keep in mind for the future. Soon as Google gets everyone hooked on YouTube, they'll monetize it; in fact, they already have to some degree. Once they can provide content and scale the model, it's another finger in your wallet.