Forgotten Media
What ever happened to predictability? The milk man, the paper boy, the evening TV?
Does anyone remember the show Wilfred? It aired on FX and FXX for four seasons, it starred Elijah Wood, it was about a depressed guy who saw his neighbor’s dog as a man in a dog suit who wants to have sex with stuffed animals? It didn’t win any awards but it was by a Family Guy guy, doesn’t that count for anything?
According to IMDB, in the year 2019, there were approximately 10,000 TV shows released. I reason that this number may include international releases as well, given what the “I” in IMDB stands for, but that’s a big number, even considering the shorter season lengths and smaller total number of episodes nowadays. Collider, a content farm, says that according to FX Content Research, over 550 adult scripted television series were released in 2021 which sounds a lot more believable but still a wildly high number.
What about movies, though? It would make sense that more movies are made in a given year than TV shows considering how the former is shorter in length and commitment time (unless you’re Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and even then you’ll lose the Oscar), so IMDB’s figure of 12,431 titles in 2019 sounds more believable than their figures for TV shows of that year but still, that’s a lot. Yes, there are certainly a number of fake or incorrect listings among them but not enough to justify a figure that high. A cursory Google search reveals that not many other websites are keeping track of every single movie released within a year. Even Wikipedia only lists the number one box office films and the highest grossing films, and even that for only a select few countries. Most of the movies on those lists are by American-based studios, anyway.
Remember when cable was still a thing? For many it’s a relic of olden days but for some it’s nostalgia for a time when you were a kid and you’d come home from school or wake early on weekend mornings to watch cartoons or a Disney Channel Original Series or, if your parents were too busy to notice, That 70s Show. And sometimes in the evening when you were bored or waiting for Toonami, you’d find some movie with an actor you knew or it was on a channel where the movie coming after it was something you were interested in, and you’d watch it (and flip to another movie/show during the commercial breaks), not out of a desire to watch it in specific but a desire to watch something. Penelope starring Christina Ricci, My Super Ex-Girlfriend starring Uma Thurman, Just My Luck starring Lindsay Lohan, Bride Wars, No Strings Attached, not to be confused with Friends with Benefits, every Sandra Bullock rom-com, every Ashton Kutcher movie, you get the gist. Maybe you liked these movies a lot, maybe you hate them with a passion, but more likely than not you’ve seen about a quarter of it and forgot it entirely.
Do you know how many books are published a year? A lot! A cursory Google search revealed very different numbers: 1.7 million in 2019 according to the ProQuest Bowker Report, 2.2 million according to UNESCO, six hundred thousand to 1 million in the US, 130,00 according to the Association of American Publishers according to a random person on Quora. This is even more complicated by the varying definitions of what a “book” is, as explained in this Substack article by Lincoln Michel regarding publishing statistics amid the whole Penguin Random House merger trial thing going on. Given the self-publishing systems of SoundCloud and itch.io I wouldn’t want to wager a guess as to how many songs and video games are made in a year.
So much content is being made, and yet, you only ever hear about a fraction of it and probably watch even less. How many new movies and TV shows did you watch this year — not things that were new to you, but new to the year? New to existence? Heck, how many new things did you watch this year that were new to you and not comfort rewatches of shows that aired ages ago? That’s not intrinsically bad, of course not, it just adds to my point that there’s so much out there and so little time to take it all in. Content is immortalized by the culture, or it dies from a lack of it.
In the grand scheme of human civilization, we’re probably not even out of the birthing stage of media. As anyone who’s seen Nope will tell you, the first moving picture, The Horse in Motion, was made in 1878 — 144 years ago. The first traditionally printed book, the Gutenberg Bible, was made around 1450 ~ 1455. The Epic of Gilgamesh, largely considered as one of the first narratives, dates back anywhere from 1200 BC to 2100 BC. Oral storytelling existed long, long before that. Let’s not forget Homer, Euripides, Shakespeare, Austen, all those guys. One hundred and forty four years is absolutely nothing.
A lot has been made in that period, but what remains? The oldest TV show most people today know is likely I Love Lucy, and I’m not entirely convinced it isn’t because of the press around the Amazon Original movie no one watched. I Love Lucy aired from 1951 to ’57, but shows existed before then too. The Three Stooges where on the air in 1934! I would wager a guess it doesn’t hold up now as well as it did then but hey, reboots and revivals aired as recently as the 2012 movie, which didn’t hold up then and is even worse now.
As we get closer to our time and color started appearing, more TV shows are remembered — The Dick Van Dyke show in the ‘60s, The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the ‘70s, The Twilight Show, The Brady Bunch, Star Trek, The Jeffersons, the first Batman and Superman TV shows, the Addams Family, Columbo, M*A*S*H, Golden Girls, Cheers, Frasier, The Muppet Show, Seinfeld, Friends, Sesame Street only started in 1969, and, and, and, and.
The one constant in all these shows remembered is that they were lauded in their time first. They didn’t find a second life in the future with a new generation that would appreciate its humor better, people liked it just fine in the past. Even Friends (which, let’s be real, isn’t all that good) was thoroughly enjoyed in the ‘90s before kids today turned it into vintage The Office.
If this chart were a graph, though, it would be a bell curve. Modern TV shows have two distinct problems that largely prevent them from becoming easily recognizable cultural monoliths. For one, while we can recognize the impact of older shows thanks to temporal distance, it’s the exact opposite for modern shows: who knows what will become strong enough to be a cultural monolith. The Wire was a pop culture phenomenon while it aired, but find me a TikToker making videos about The Wire the way they do The Sopranos, a show that aired just four years earlier. Were those four years that important, or was it simply a matter of luck? And does that current pop culture boon mean anything?
I’ll get to the second problem in a bit but for a moment, let’s sidetrack into movies. Movies started well before TV and are widely considered more prestigious for a number of reasons. You can name a lot more prominent directors and auteurs who redefined cinema than you can regular ol’ showrunners, just by sheer number. The 2019 Oscars had about 29.6 million viewers, while the Emmys of the same year mustered 6.9 million (nice).
Award shows like the Oscars work (at least in theory) to applaud achievements made within that year, but they also serve to immortalize films in their own way. If you won an Oscar, you will always have won that Oscar. A quick glance through the winners and nominees of the very first Academy Awards back in 1929 have a lot of unfamiliar names and while no one is out here making fanvids of Sunrise (1927) or telling people to stan Janet Gaynor, but any time someone searches for “who one the first Oscars”, there they will be.
Of course, we all know awards are fake. As put succinctly in the #OscarsSoWhite campaign and stupidly in the Avengers: Endgame awards campaign, the Academy Awards are very arbitrary as to what they think deserves accolades. Just because a film was nominated or even won, that doesn’t mean jack shit about its actual cultural impact. Former producer and noted rapist Harvey Weinstein all but paid for the Shakespeare in Love Best Picture Oscar but does that retroactively cement that movie’s place in the public consciousness? I don’t know, let’s ask the 2012 Best Picture winner, The Artist. Oh, you don’t remember that movie? Neither does anyone else.
All that aside, the presentation and cultural preservation of movies is far more extensive than that of television. There are many ways for you to enjoy older films without having a background in film from services like The Criterion Collection or Turner Classics, and there’s a broader accessibility for foreign films, considering that it’s easier to translate and distribute a one-and-a-half to two-hour video than an entire season of TV. Although there’s really no telling which films make it big in the US and which completely escape their notice. The Oscars have a foreign film category, even if it feels lacking in some years and an excuse not to give one of those films the Best Picture award, but the Emmys are exclusively for American-made television. Maybe that’s why less people watch them.
[Quick aside to say that while this whole article is from a US-centric perspective and a lot of the analysis wouldn’t necessarily apply to other countries, I think that the underlying cultural questions presented here are universal. Or maybe they’re not. I don’t know, but I would love to.]
What movies and TV do have in common is the second distinct problem: everything today is completely different from the way it was yesterday. Not just in terms of technology or the mechanics of how things are made today, but the way culture operates.
Everyone loves to talk about how Paramount’s Yellowstone is more popular than HBO’s Succession but none of the coastal elites are talking about it or whatever. Based on plain numbers, that’s true: the season 4 finale of Yellowstone hit 9.3 million viewers, while the Succession season 3 finale hit 1.7 million, using roughly the same metric. The Yellowstone article notes that this is up from the season 3 premiere, but falls short of the most watched telecast on cable, set by The Walking Dead season 8 premiere in 2017 with a whopping 11.4 million views.
People love to discuss the gap between how much (so-called) prestige television is talked about when so few are watching it. There’s also a good Emily St. James article that explores this type of discrepancy in detail but it boils down to basically this: different people are watching different things.
Back in the days of yonder, before streaming, the easiest place to watch what everyone else was watching was cable. You tune it at 8pm/7pm c, you watch for thirty minutes to an hour, then you go into work and talk about it. Now, there was enough variety where if you didn’t like something that everyone was watching, there was at least one other thing that was on that everyone who wasn’t watching the first thing was watching and you’d probably like that, or at least settle for it. There were options, but largely, TV shows were made to appeal to the widest variety of people. As time went on, more channels became available and there was more opportunity for more niche shows (unless you were HBO in which case you already had that opportunity because you’re HBO) until we got to the “golden age of television” and the dawn of the prestige show — but we’ll get to that in a moment.
When streaming came out, it was a big deal. There was this idea that on streaming, because you weren’t adherent to advertising companies and you didn’t have to follow the lowest common denominator and everyone would be paying for everything even if they only watched one thing whatever whatever whatever; there was this idea that on streaming, you’d get to make the show you wanted to make, as niche as it was, without much compromise, and your core audience would flock to you. This is a very simplistic, overly generalized version of events but hopefully you get my drift: there was this idea that for every Game of Thrones and Ted Lasso, there would be a The OA or an American Vandal.
Think about the way the internet is segmented today, the way you can curate your experience by choosing what people to follow and (theoretically) what is recommended to you based on your interests. Now you didn’t have to watch the most popular show everyone was watching, you could watch the most popular show everyone like you was watching. The rest of the world could watch whatever they wanted, and it didn’t have to affect you and your show — so long as enough people were watching your show that it made sense for the streaming company to continue to invest into it. If not, then, well… The OA and American Vandal were both cancelled in recent years, despite a dedicated cult following. The theories as to why, especially for the former, vary from middling ratings to not wanting to renegotiate salaries to even a theory from one Reddit user that Netflix is actively trying to go bankrupt. The connecting factor in all this is money: for Netflix, the cost of keeping the lights on for two great shows just wasn’t enough.
It’s easy to get cancelled, it’s hard to get renewed. What shows get renewed, you might be wondering? Oh, well, the ones everyone’s watching.
Now I know I just contradicted my whole thing here and you’re thinking, “How can a show be watched by everyone when you literally just said no one is watching the same thing?” Well, let me tell you a little something about ratings and metrics and data and streamers and studios and all that junk: no one has any idea what’s going on.
There was a very interesting article in Vulture a while back with showrunners of cancelled and currently airing streaming shows relaying what studios have told them about how well their shows are doing. In a word, bupkis. In two, jack shit. Sometimes it sounds like not even the studios know what they’re looking at and what it means. As mentioned in said article, it used to be much easier to get a general idea of what your viewership was like and now, there’s no clue as to whether viewership is even a big deal anymore. Remember Succession and Yellowstone, where one has all the awards and one has all the viewers and both keep getting renewed? On a surface level, you could make the argument that they’re very much the same: they’re both about family drama, a patriarch everyone hates but won’t let go of, a golden son who tried to escape his family but ultimately returns, a daughter with a whole lot of issues and her good-for-nothing husband, you know, the classic archetypes. Are Succession’s viewers worth more than Yellowstone’s, or its awards, or is there something about them that makes them so diametrically different from one another that they’re in absolutely no competition for each other’s viewers? And, of course, the most important question, the one we’ve been discussing this whole time — which show will be remembered?
This all gets a little more complex when you consider something I touched on briefly earlier: Disney’s Endgame Oscar campaign. I don’t think any citations are necessary for me to tell you that a lot of people watch Marvel movies. Endgame is the second highest-grossing film of all time (and number five when adjusted for inflation), and about half of the other films on the top 50 list are Disney properties. And yet, Disney is always trying to get an Oscar.
It’s not like they don’t have any, the animation category is practically handed to them every single year, but something about the lack of critical recognition in the live action department is always getting their goat. There’s a definite reason they got Chloé Zhao to direct Eternals and Barry Jenkins to direct the Mufasa prequel movie. It’s not enough for these movies to be cash cows, for them to wring out every single cent from their IPs knowing that no matter how bad it is people are going to pay to watch it. No, what they really want is critical recognition for some reason. Oscarbait movies aren’t even in direct competition with Disney films, not in terms of audience nor in box office ratings. Does Disney just want to gloat about how they can have it all, or is it something deeper? Is it because they feel Marvel’s light isn’t going to last forever so they need a monument that will stand the test of time because the culture has given it the power to do so? Are they trying to force the future?
There’s a lot to talk about TV and even movies. I could go on, as some of the articles listed above have, and try to parse through the difference between the critically acclaimed and the widely watched and hazard guesses as to which shows kids in the future will still be talking about, but let’s finally dive back into the real subject of today: the forgotten things.
The Dark Souls series is known for how much lore they’ve packed into everywhere but the storyline. There is a detailed wiki and timelines have been made to share the world’s history, but in the game, you the player care less about this and more about what the series is really known for: incredibly powerful guys with swords who try to murder you. In the first game, you are given an item called the Lordvessel, which is “bestowed upon the chosen Undead who is destined to succeed Lord Gwyn.” In the second game, you find shattered shards of it in the ground somewhere. Nowhere in the game is it explained what this is or why it was important.
It’s a natural consequence of existence that the past is slowly forgotten. The future keeps washing into the shores of the present and the past is eroded away, not out of malicious intent but because there’s just not enough room to hold everything. The future becomes the present, the present becomes the past, and the past turns to dust.
Strictly in terms of the things we’ve spent around 3000 words discussing, the things that first get forgotten are the unmemorable. The Wilfreds, the Penelopes, the Sandra Bullock movies. It’s not that these things are necessarily bad or worth forgetting — on the contrary, people really really liked this stuff. It might just be that it didn’t deliver a strong enough punch. Consider Lost and Fringe, both made by JJ Abrams, both decent shows, but one was a pop culture icon some still have questions about, and the other is a show maybe two other people I know have seen. Plenty of procedurals and sitcoms are like this — House MD, Miracle Workers, hell, even New Girl to an extent. Not every show gains a cult following or experiences a revival years down the line. Sometimes it just ends, people collect their checks, and the world moves on.
Sometimes a show is forgotten just because it didn’t have enough to be remembered. Remember NBC’s Kings? Fox’s Pitch? Shows with unique enough premises that they could’ve continued on for a decent amount of time but were cancelled after the first season. Not every cancellation results in a Firefly or Hannibal, most are just swept under the rug left to decay.
And who can forget the studio rom, plus or minus the com? Some, like When Harry Met Sally and Bridget Jones’s Diary, became classic hits. Others, like The Lake House and Bridget Jones’s Baby, were just fun romps. It didn’t matter if the movie was good or bad, it only mattered whether it was fun to watch. There wasn’t a moment in the movie where characters consider themselves and the world around them with insightfulness and depth — that stuff was left for movies that were made with a grander scope in mind. These movies were made because people wanted to be entertained and that’s okay. In the same breath, though, I have a sneaking feeling less and less people are going to remember who Julia Roberts is and what she meant to a whole generation.
It used to be that if you liked something, even if it wasn’t very popular, even if it wasn’t something made to win awards and be watched around the world by critics and snobs alike, you could make it a permanent part of your life by buying it. I own Pink Panther starring Steve Martin not because it’s one of the greatest films of our time, but because it was five bucks and my sister likes it. You can still buy things physically, but things that started out exclusively on streaming are less readily available. I can’t buy season one of The OA, it’s only available on Netflix. Alena Smith, creator of the Apple original Dickinson, said on Twitter that she has the only physical copy of her show.
She tweeted this in the middle of the whole HBO Max “scandal”, when it was revealed that HBO Max cancelled a number of shows and movies and removed more from streaming, ostensibly because it cost too much to host them and not enough people were watching them and they didn’t want to pay people money. Ryan Pequin, a storyboard artist who worked on Summer Camp Island, tweeted about how almost “every single animated thing [he has] ever worked on is apparently getting disappeared for tax purposes.” Julia Pott, creator of said show, said the following:
Imagine years of your life gone, something you put your heart and soul into completely vanished from the face of the earth, doomed to be forgotten — while you’re still around to see it happen.
TV shows being cancelled isn’t a new concept and it’s not one I’m opposed to. Sometimes shows extend too far beyond their natural life, sometimes the story they’re telling isn’t all that interesting, sometimes it’s Confederacy. But for a couple of decades now, even if your favorite show was cancelled or even if it just ended and you weren’t ready for that, there was still a way you could watch it and the creators would still be supported by it: syndication and reruns, video cassettes to DVDs to Blu-rays to digital downloads. The show may be dead, it might be fading away from the cultural consciousness, it might never come back, but its ghost could still linger around the people who loved it enough. Then, when streaming came around and all these old shows were on there in full, some people felt a sense of relief and stopped buying physical copies. Why would you pay $150 for the full Breaking Bad series when it was on Netflix? It’s not like it’s gonna leave anytime soon. Right?
The only way to legally watch Summer Camp Island is to buy a DVD of the first three seasons, or buy it episode by episode from YouTube or iTunes or Google Play, etc, etc.
A lot of people cite piracy as a cheaper alternative but even that is subject to supply and demand. A key aspect of the way torrenting works involves other people downloading the same thing you are — assuming the thing you want even has a torrent available. If you’re someone who wants to watch a niche show, like an old British show about a news broadcast station and some of the people who worked there, you’re bang out of luck because no one else is torrenting it. Allegedly.
You can argue that all the shows and movies HBO cancelled should have been cancelled, but can you really argue that they should’ve been completely erased? Yes, sometimes things reach the natural end of their life cycle, but do other things really have to be murdered?
A while ago, someone told me to read a Twilight fanfic. In it, two vampires listen to American Pie and reminisce about what went down the day that music died. At the time I thought this was out of left field and hilarious but in hindsight it’s rather poignant. The only people who could feel genuine and acute sadness over an event like that, over the loss of life and potential like that, are people who were there.
Some media stays with us for generations, and for good reason. Some media is gone almost as soon as it arrives, maybe due to circumstances out of its control or maybe because that’s what it was meant to do. But all of these things, even the critically worst among them, were made by someone. Someone put time and care into their craft, for better or worse. Someone loved them.
Maybe Stephen King was right. All that you love will be carried away.
You made me so sad about tv show murder. Loved it!
i miss the OA and American vandal sm such a shame