1. FASTS Crash The Emmys

It’s funny, Barry, the HBO comedy series about a conflicted hit man, has become a meme of sorts about the types of streaming TV series that are wildly popular with critics and writers but which the general public does not always seem to get. 

And yet Barry was nominated for 11 Emmys this week, including Best Comedy Series, Best Actor in a Comedy Series and two Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series nominations, while the popular Yellowstone franchise was shut out.

Which gives you an idea about where Television Academy members’ heads are at, but is that really a surprise?

What might be a surprise however, is that three original programs from FASTs were among the nominees—Jury Duty from Amazon’s Freevee and Weird, The Al Yankovic Story and Die Harter from The Roku Channel.

That’s a good sign in that they’re getting recognized and they’re able to attract top notch talent like Best Actor nominee Daniel Radcliffe.

Another not-unexpected development was that ABC’s Abbott Elementary was the only network series nominated for a major award. (It’s sort of the new This Is Us in that way.)

And of course HBO, which had the year’s three most buzzed-about series (well, in certain circles anyway) - White Lotus, Succession and The Last Of Us, dominated the nominations, but again, that was not a huge surprise.

Which is the thing about the Emmys—they’re a good way to read the industry’s tea leaves and figure out where things are headed.

So let’s start.

Why It Matters

Right now, Hollywood’s biggest problem is that it keeps trying to make programs that appeal to about 15 percent of the population while simultaneously trying to take the subscription dollars of the remaining 85 percent.

Not exactly a path to success.

The “why” on this is not all that hard to figure out.

For years, television was widely derided as the “boob tube” and it duly churned out mostly mediocre series aimed at capturing a mass audience. Every so often a M*A*S*H or an All In The Family would break out from the pack, but they were few and far between. 

As a result, serious actors would not do television. Nor would serious directors or writers. Compared to movies, it was a big step down.

Then, about 25 years ago, that all started to change. 

HBO, which was not beholden to advertisers, started to make original TV shows. And starting, more or less, with The Sopranos, many of them were good. Very good. They changed the way Americans regarded TV and, more importantly, they changed the way the industry regarded itself.

As in, if Streep and Spielberg were making television series, then TV was every bit as blue chip as film. 

That was a big deal.

But now, having basked in that success for over two decades, the market is telling the industry it needs more family sitcoms, more heartwarming dramas, more TV that feels like network prime time. 

There’s been an ongoing debate among artists from time immemorial as to whether the masses can be made to appreciate the finer things by refusing to feed them crap. But that’s an elitist position that assumes that the speaker is the sole determinant of what is good and what is crap, and for many viewers a traditional workplace comedy like Abbott Elementary stands head and shoulders above a dark comedy like Barry.

So there’s that too and it’s why, as noted last week, the Andy Jassys of the world are beginning to question the wisdom of spending so much money trying to create this decade’s Sopranos, when what will really drive revenues is this decade’s Saved By The Bell. (The fact that The Lord of the Rings was shut out while Jury Duty cleaned up, will make Jassy seem even more prescient.)

It’s a tough road to hoe, because at some level you need the buzzworthy shows to draw in that initial round of viewers, but once they’re there, you need more mainstream shows to draw in the remaining 85 percent, only that’s not going to go over well with all the writers and actors and directors and recappers who want to keep making the award winning shows.

So there’s that too, and it is one of the big things the industry will need to come to terms with in the next several years: how not to kill off prestige television and all the good things that came with it while simultaneously managing to create shows the masses will love.

Or as someone put it to me recently, “I need shows I don’t feel compelled to read multiple recaps of the minute the episode ends.”

Bingo.

What You Need To Do About It

If you are most of the streaming services, you need to remember that creating the sort of shows that mass audiences will love is its own art form as well and there are people who are very good at it. 

This was a lesson I learned back when I was a junior copywriter at an ad agency: the people who created successful jingles and heartstring-tugging spots with cute children actually thought those commercials were great. That was their taste level. They never wanted to make snarky Apple ads or cool sneaker spots. They wanted to write funny songs about shampoo that rhymed. 

And those songs resonated with their intended audiences because of that.

So that is your charge: go find people who would rather write the next That 70s Show than the next Barry and hire them to do the same thing for mainstream TV.

Your shareholders will thank you for it even if the critics don’t.

2. Roku Goes Shopping

One of the great things about Friends doing so well on streaming is that I no longer have to explain the concept of “Jennifer Aniston’s Sweater” to people under 30. Or the part about who Jennifer Aniston is, anyway.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, it is the idea that viewers would someday be able to click on the sweater that Aniston was wearing in a scene and have it show up at their doorstep. 

That the idea has been bouncing around for some 30 odd years speaks to the challenges around actually making this happen, the biggest one being that viewers seemingly had no interest in hitting “pause” to stop and buy something.

The new thinking though has been to make shoppable commercials. Because (surprise!) consumers don’t seem to mind pausing those to buy things.

There’s been a lot of movement in this space as of late, mostly due to advances in AI that allow companies like KERV and AiBUY to identify products in a particular show.

Roku has long been a big proponent of shoppable TV. They’ve launched a new test program this week that allows Roku viewers to buy a product directly from an ad by clicking “OK” on their remote, payment and processing being handled by Shopify with an assist from the credit card most Roku users have on file. 

The fact that one of the three items being tested is a $2500 computerized rowing machine is likely to skew the results some ($2500 computerized rowing machines not generally falling into the “impulse purchase” category) but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.

Why It Matters

As the media economy shifts, everyone is looking for new paths to monetization. Being able to buy directly from a TV commercial is a great way to enable this.

The issue then boils down to “Remote versus QR Code.”

Meaning that while Roku is betting that consumers would rather use their TV remote to make a purchase, others see QR codes as the road ahead.

This does not have to be an “either/or” option though. There’s no reason both formats can’t work.

Ditto something launched by Brightline this week, a shoppable overlay product called the “Proteus Experience Engine. Which, despite sounding like a device used on Star Trek ” (Lt. Uhuru—load the Proteus Experience Engine! Scotty— warp speed 11!) is actually a way for brands to integrate a shoppable experience directly into a program.  

Point being, different formats will work well with different consumers—my remote tends to disappear under 50 pounds of goldendoodle, but others may have trouble finding their phone in time to line up the QR code. So why not experiment with an eye to doing all of them and seeing what sticks.

The bigger issue, for me, is whether viewers will buy directly from within a show, whether they will buy directly from a commercial or whether it really doesn’t matter.

I suspect much of that answer will depend on what genre the show is. Meaning that viewers of am HGTV-style home makeover show will be happy to buy the coffee table that featured prominently in the home’s new look directly from within the show, whereas fans of a police procedural may want to wait until the criminal is behind bars before making a purchase and may prefer to do so during a commercial break.

What that means is a whole lot of experimenting over the next few years to see what works and where it works. 

The upside is that we will see an uptick in opportunities for retail media in the years to come. That’s a good thing, as Ms. Stewart might say, because it should help to make TV viewing a better experience by reducing the number of actual commercials.

Or not. Given the industry’s history, especially on broadcast TV, it will take a great deal of self-control to ensure that viewers are not assaulted by a sea of pop up “Buy me now!” banners during a show. 

That’s why I suspect that shoppable commercials, of the sort Roku has on offer, are the way forward. It would be easy to tie them in with the actual programming too. So that the ad right after the cooking show is actually an ad for Whole Foods that includes an offer to buy all the ingredients just used to cook Pasta alla Norma on the show.

What You Need To Do About It

If you are a retail brand this is a great opportunity to experiment. I would suggest that lower priced items (say under $100) are more likely to become impulse purchases, but beyond that, go crazy. You have a chance to go in and help to shape this nascent ecosystem and boost sales and collect important data at the same time.

I’m just not seeing a down side.

If you are a streaming TV service, resist the urge to make every single ad and show clickable and/or to overwhelm viewers with “buy this!” options. To begin with, you need to give them time to get used to it. That, and user experience matters. Viewers will just go elsewhere if your UX sucks. So view this as an experiment and limit the number of times you make use of it until you iron out all the kinks. 

Here again, your shareholders will thank you.

3. Threads, Week 2

There’s a lot of ink being spilled about how Threads might suffer the same fate as Google+, another big tech company social app that got off to a fast start.

That’s not really a valid comparison though, given that Google basically forgot about the app once they’d launched it, neglecting to update it or add features, and so users quickly forgot about it too.

The issue of Thread's fate is more existential: is there really much of a market for a Twitter-like app?

I’m thinking there’s not. Or that it’s fairly limited at best.

Despite the preachings of the Terminally Online™ that Twitter was some sort of magical Town Hall that provided breaking news and insights for the masses, most people seemed to be on there to follow genre news—sports, entertainment, music and tech—rather than politics.

They quickly learned to avoid clicking on replies to their favorite NBA team’s official account’s tweets because they knew it would just be angry drivel.

And they flocked to Threads, not because Twitter had become overrun by hateful right wing Nazis, but because the people they had come there to follow had cut back on the amount of tweeting they were doing and because all the negative news stories about Musk and Twitter made the place sound unhinged to the point that they were embarrassed to be part of the train wreck.

Which brings me back to my original point.

Despite all the chatter about “engagement”, few people actually want to engage, at least not publicly. It’s just not something they find enjoyable. They’d rather observe and I don’t think there are massive numbers who want to do that either. Decent sized numbers for sure, but Twitter’s user base had been fairly static for years before Musk took over and I suspect that is because it had hit the limits of its potential audience.

So Meta will either need to find additional functionality to draw people to Threads or be content with 300 million or so users, many of whom are journalists and will thus give the platform stature above its punching weight.

The latter may turn out to be the preferred option, given that Meta can sell Threads to the advertisers on its platform as a way to reach all those people they are missing on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.

But then again, it’s only week two.