Everything Bad Is Good for You (23 page)

How do the economics of repetition connect to the Sleeper Curve? The virtue of syndication or DVD sales doesn't lie in the financial reward itself, but in the selection criteria that the reward creates in the larger entertainment ecosystem. If the ultimate goal stops being about capturing an audience's attention once, and becomes more about
keeping
their attention through repeat viewings, that shift is bound to have an effect on the content. Television syndication means pretty much one thing: the average fan might easily see a given episode five or ten times, instead of the one or two viewings that you would have expected in the Big Three era. Shows that prosper in syndication do so because they can sustain five viewings without becoming tedious. And sustaining five viewings means adding complexity, not subtracting it. Reruns are generally associated with the dumbing down of popular culture, when, in fact, they're responsible for making the culture smarter. (Syndication has also encouraged another programming trend that has had a neutral impact where the Sleeper Curve is concerned: because viewers often encounter repeat episodes out of sequence—unlike the sequential viewing patterns of a DVD anthology—syndicated episodes that can be viewed in isolation have also prosperered, mostly in the form of the next-generation mystery shows like
Law & Order
and
CSI.
On the whole, the plots of these shows are more intricate than those of
Dragnet
or
Kojak,
but their insistence on full narrative closure at the end of each episode necessarily puts a ceiling on their complexity.)

Repetition's impact crater will only deepen in the coming years. Already, any given episode of a successful television show will be seen by more people in syndication than it will during its first run on network TV. As the universe of viewing options expands—inevitably to the point where you can watch anything in the entire catalogue of television history anytime you want—the shows that will prosper will be the ones that can withstand such repeat viewings, while the more one-dimensional series will grow stale. The success of
Seinfeld
and
The Simpsons
in syndication—on any given day, your local cable provider probably pipes a half dozen episodes of those two shows to your house—demonstrates that this principle is already at work. In a real sense, this stands the conventional wisdom about television programming on its head. Aiming for the lowest common denominator might make sense if the show's going to be seen only once, but with a guarantee of multiple viewings, you can venture into more challenging, experimental realms and still be rewarded for it.

To appreciate the magnitude of the shift, you need only rewind the tape to the late seventies and contemplate the governing principle that reigned over prime-time programming in the dark ages of
Joanie Loves Chachi—
a philosophy dubbed the theory of “Least Objectionable Programming” by NBC executive Paul Klein:

LOP is a pure-breed race-to-the-bottom model: you create shows designed on the scale of minutes and seconds, with the fear that the slightest challenge—“thought,” say, or “education”—will send the audience scurrying to the other networks. Contrast LOP with the model followed by
The Sopranos—
what you might call the Most Repeatable Programming model. MRP shows are designed on the scale of years, not seconds. The most successful programs in the MRP model are the ones you still want to watch three years after they originally aired, even though you've already seen them three times. The MRP model cultivates nuance and depth; it welcomes “tricks” like backward episodes and dense allusions to Hollywood movies. Writing only a few years after Klein's speech, Neil Postman announced that two of television's golden rules were: “Thou shalt have no prerequisites” (meaning that no previous knowledge should be required for viewers to understand a program) and “Thou shalt induce no perplexity.” Postman had it right at the time, if you ignored the developing narrative techniques of
Hill Street Blues
and
St. Elsewhere.
But twenty years later, many of the most popular shows in television history regularly flaunt those principles.

The progressive effects of repetition are particularly acute where sales—and not rentals—are concerned. When you're trying to persuade audiences to
purchase
a title, and not simply borrow their attention for thirty minutes, the most successful products are usually the ones that you can imagine watching four years from now, for the fifth time. It's no accident that DVD versions of shows like
The West Wing
and
The Sopranos
have sold more copies than many hit movies. If you're buying a piece of entertainment for your permanent collection, you don't want instant gratification; you want something that rewards greater scrutiny. The fact that DVD sales now figure so prominently in Hollywood spreadsheets shifts the balance away from films guaranteed to “open” big toward films that cinephiles are likely to add to their permanent collection. (Think of Wes Anderson's films, or Sofia Coppola's, or David Lynch's, or Quentin Tarantino's.) They might lose money at the box office, but they'll turn in a nice profit in DVD sales, and by virtue of their smaller budgets, they don't run the risk of massive failure that wannabe blockbusters do. For the economics of both television and the movie business, the fundamental shift here is from “live” programming to libraries. The studios now mine their libraries of old content for new sales, whether nostalgia DVDs or syndication; and they craft new programming so that it's complex enough to deserve a spot in the home media libraries of consumers. Moving from live to libraries is, ultimately, a shift from Least Objectionable to Most Repeatable.

The success of blisteringly complex narratives like
Memento
and
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
showcases the way the MRP model has infiltrated Hollywood.
Eternal Sunshine
screenwriter Charlie Kaufman—who also penned the dizzyingly plotted
Being John Malkovich
and
Adaptation—
described his writing philosophy in an interview on
Charlie Rose,
using language that perfectly contrasts Paul Klein's LOP:

Kaufman has it exactly right: not just in the sense of rewarding repeat views, but also this idea of creating a “conversation” with the audience. Conversations are two-way affairs; they're participatory by nature. But how do you create a conversation using a “dead medium”? You do it by engaging the minds of the audience, by making them fill in and lean forward. You create plots so complicated and self-referential that you have to work to make sense out of the first viewing—and by the end, all you want to do is rewind the tape and see it over again, just to figure out what you missed.

You can see the Most Repeatable Programming model at work in the narrative transformation of a genre designed explicitly to be viewed dozens of times: children's movies. Because young children have a greater tolerance for repeat encounters with the same story, and because parents of young children have an even greater tolerance for anything that distracts their children long enough for the dishes to be done, the market for DVD and video versions of children's movies is a massive one. Pixar alone has made billions of dollars from the DVD sales of hits such as
Toy Story
and
Monsters, Inc.
This is a market where vast fortunes can be made from content that can sustain ten or twenty viewings (if not more), and so we should expect to see a strong Sleeper Curve driving the complexity and depth of the storytelling as the financial incentives kick in.

And in fact, that's exactly what you find, as we saw in the earlier analysis of children's films over the past few decades.
Finding Nemo
isn't the fastest-selling DVD of all time
in spite
of its complexity; it's the fastest-selling DVD
because
of that complexity. Whenever popular culture shifts its economic incentives from quick hits to long-term repetition, a corresponding increase in quality and depth ensues.

The transformation of video games—from arcade titles designed for a burst of action in a clamorous environment, to contemplative products that reward patience and intense study—provides the most dramatic case study in the power of repetition. The titles that lie at the top of the all-time game best-seller lists are almost exclusively games that can literally be played forever without growing stale: games like
Age of Empires, The Sims,
or
Grand Theft Auto
that have no fixed narrative path, and thus reward repeat play with an ever-changing complexity; sports simulations that allow you to replay entire seasons with new team rosters, or create imaginary leagues with players from different eras. Titles with definitive endings have less value in the gaming economy; the more open-ended and repeatable, the more likely it is that the game will be a breakout hit.

There's a strange antecedent for the Most Repeatable Programming model in the history of moral philosophy: Nietzsche's idea of the “eternal recurrence,” his alternative model to Christian morality. Instead of getting people to do the right thing by threatening them with eternal damnation, Nietzsche proposed an alternative structuring myth in which our lives were going to be repeated ad infinitum. If we made a mistake in this life, we'd keep making it forever, which presumably would end up encouraging us not to make mistakes in the first place. Ever since Nietzsche proposed the idea, ethicists and philosophers have been debating its merits as a moral guide, without a clear verdict. But as a governing principle for creating quality pop culture, eternal recurrence makes a lot of sense. Design each title so that it can be watched many times, and you'll end up with more interesting and more challenging culture. And you might just get rich along the way.

 

T
ECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION,
of course, has contributed mightily to the Sleeper Curve. To begin with, most of the media technologies introduced over the past thirty years have been, in effect, repetition engines: tools designed to let you rewind, replay, repeat. It seems amazing to think of it now, but just thirty years ago, television viewers tuning in for
All in the Family
or
M*A*S*H
had almost no recourse available to them if they wanted to watch a scene again, or catch a bit of dialogue they missed. If you wanted to watch the “Chuckles the Clown” episode of
Mary Tyler Moore
again, you had to wait six months, until CBS reran it during the summer doldrums—and then five years before it started cycling in syndication. The change since then has been so profound that it's hard to remember that television was a pure present-tense medium for half of its existence: what appeared on the screen flew past you, as irretrievable as real-world events. No wonder the networks were so afraid to challenge or confuse; if the show didn't make complete sense the first time around, that was it. There were no second acts.

Since those days, the options for slowing down or reversing time have proliferated: first the VCR, introduced the same year that
Hill Street Blues
appeared; then the explosion of cable channels, running dozens of shows in syndication at any given moment; then DVDs fifteen years later; then TiVo; and now “on demand” cable channels that allow viewers to select programs directly from a menu of options—as well as pause and rewind them. Viewers now curate their own private collections of classic shows, their DVD cases lining living room shelves like so many triple-decker novels. The supplementary information often packaged with these DVDs adds to their repetition potential: if you're tired of the original episode, you can watch the version with all the deleted scenes spliced in, or listen to a commentary track from the director.