Food TV these days

This was posted over on the eGullet forums by the user "project", and I thought it was worthy of reposting.

Net, so far, in practice, in the US, if it passes through a
motion picture camera, then nearly always it has to be from
the I Love Lucy crowd.  Yes, in Jurassic Park,
Spielberg got the DNA science okay, but he is a rare
exception.

News?  The same.  Food?  The same.  Sports?  The same.
Science?  The same.  That crowd has only a hammer and
sees nearly everything as a nail.  E.g., science programs are
nearly never about the science but all about the drama
that can be contrived — geology becomes the violence of
volcanoes, the weather becomes the threat of hurricanes,
tornadoes, and global warming, ecology and nature become the
rape of nature by evil humans, planetary motion becomes the
risk of a "global killer" asteroid, rocket engineering becomes
"Will they all be killed in a big explosion?", etc.

Endless, pointless, useless, worthless,

dra ra ra ra ra ra-ra ra ra-ra ma ma ma ma-ma ma-ma ma-ma

Sickening.

Once again on eG we are trying to change what Food TV does.

In a sense, some changes are promising:  There are remarks
from their executives that they do not have all the answers
and keep trying new things.

We need to agree:  Their financial support is from
advertising.  Really, the business they are in is
advertising.  So, they need to attract an audience that will
do well for their advertisers.

There is a big problem with TV advertising:  For a program
with an audience as narrow as is common on Food TV, an
advertiser really does not have very good data on what good
their advertising expenditure does.  Or, the situation is
likely as it has long been:  The advertisers know that 50% of
their ad budget is wasted; they just don’t know which 50%.

Google gets nearly all of their revenue from advertising and,
thus, is also in the advertising business.  Advantages of
Google include (a) better ad targeting than TV and (b) better
information on what ads did for the companies paying the
money.  That’s part of why, financially, Google is doing so
well and some old advertiser media efforts are declining.

But, I claim that the situation on Food TV should be much
better than it is now, that Food TV is making some big
mistakes.

I claim that US TV has a narrow culture and, thus, has
content that is much more narrow than it should be.  That is,
in US TV, there is a relatively small group of people who, as
executives, producers, and directors, control the content.
Further, these people have nearly all had their careers in the
same system and, thus, adopted essentially the same ideas.

This narrow culture has a very narrow foundation in very
traditional TV and movies based essentially only on the
techniques of formula fiction.  The main goal is to grab the
audience by the heart, the gut, or lower still, always below
the shoulders, never between the ears, mostly by creating for
the audience a vicarious escapist fantasy emotional
experience (VEFEE), hopefully with passion, pathos, and
poignancy, and the main technique for doing so is just drama.

Or, if the only tool a person has is a hammer, then they tend
to see every problem as a nail.  The narrow culture sees all
the potential of TV only as different versions of VEFEE drama.

The influence of this narrow culture is so strong that, in
practice, nearly anything that passes through a motion picture
camera must be under the control of this narrow culture.  Here
is a telling example:  Sometimes on late night PBS TV, I saw
some programs on high school mathematics and physical science
being broadcast so that teachers could record the material and
play it in class.  I have a solid background in mathematics
and physical science, watched these programs, and was just
horrified.  No high school student trying to learn should ever
watch those programs.  The programs were mostly filled with
fluff intended to be entertaining; for the actual content, it
was far too often just wrong, incompetent.  The content was
just what one would expect from some movie people who had
forgotten everything about mathematics and physical science
above the fourth grade — literally.

There was no reason at all to put movie people in charge of
educational programming for high school students, but, since
the programs did have to pass through motion picture cameras,
and since the influence of the narrow culture was so strong,
all the high school students got was worse on mathematics and
physical science than I Love Lucy since at least Lucy
didn’t actually mislead anyone on mathematics or physical
science.

Right:  Intended to teach high school students mathematics and
physical science but, in fact, worse than I Love Lucy —
literally.  A serious source of rot in US culture.

Since the narrow culture controls even programs on mathematics
and physical science for high school students, there is little
hope for food and cooking.

Net, so far, in practice, in the US, if it passes through a
motion picture camera, then nearly always it has to be from
the I Love Lucy crowd.  Yes, in Jurassic Park,
Spielberg got the DNA science okay, but he is a rare
exception.

News?  The same.  Food?  The same.  Sports?  The same.
Science?  The same.  That crowd has only a hammer and
sees nearly everything as a nail.  E.g., science programs are
nearly never about the science but all about the drama
that can be contrived — geology becomes the violence of
volcanoes, the weather becomes the threat of hurricanes,
tornadoes, and global warming, ecology and nature become the
rape of nature by evil humans, planetary motion becomes the
risk of a "global killer" asteroid, rocket engineering becomes
"Will they all be killed in a big explosion?", etc.

Endless, pointless, useless, worthless,

dra ra ra ra ra ra-ra ra ra-ra ma ma ma ma-ma ma-ma ma-ma

Sickening.

This situation of this narrow culture is unique in all the
world.  No other field is so consistently ignorant, oblivious,
and incompetent in its content.  If airplanes were designed
like TV, then they would never get off the ground, but, if
such airplanes ever did get off the ground, then that would be
a very bad thing.  If medical doctors were trained with
content like on TV, then no one would go to a hospital no
matter how bad the pain.  If bridges were designed as on TV,
then no one would risk driving across.  Highways would fall
into canyons; electrical systems would go snap, crackle, and
pop; bad food would kill millions of people a year; cars would
rarely start, rarely reach their destinations, and fall to
pieces spontaneously within a few months; on and on throughout
our civilization.

For the US educational system, TV drops out somewhere in the
fifth grade and gives up on anything more advanced, except for
mathematics at the second grade or lower except for sex
usually somewhere in high school.

In particular, the assumption of the narrow culture that the
audience is all below the fifth grade level is just that
narrow culture looking at themselves and in wildly strong
contradiction to the simple fact that nearly everyone else
functioning in our society is far above the fourth grade.

Yes, TV wants an audience that dribbles, drools, and drips,
has throbbing heart, boiling gut, pulsating groin, and a hard
vacuum between the ears, sucks up silly products like a giant
street vacuum cleaner, and is awash in money and eager to
spend it.  Hmm ….

For those TV programs on high school mathematics, there was
one exception:  I got into the middle, of a program on plane
geometry, quickly noticed some rare excellence, eagerly
watched to the end to see the credits.  I did notice a lion by
his paw:  The main contributor was A. Gleason, long in
mathematics at Harvard, with some help from T. Apostol, long
in mathematics at Cal Tech.  Any high school student
interested in plane geometry should rush to see that program
and watch it several times.  It was excellent, even beautiful,
elegant, polished, both simple and powerful, good fun, kept me
right on the front of my chair.  A crown jewel of
civilization.  Wonder what Gleason had to do with the TV
narrow culture to keep them from ruining his program!

What passes through a motion picture camera really can be
terrific stuff.  Expensive?  Not necessarily.  One necessary
condition is to make absolutely positively totally certain
that no one from the narrow culture of old US TV and movies
has any role at all in the effort — maybe an exception for
Spielberg.

Actually, there is some science programming from England that
is okay.  Curiously, the world center of drama is better at
good content on science than the US which ruins science
programming with low grade drama.

The problem with US TV, then, is just that narrow culture
that somehow has a stranglehold on everything that passes
through a motion picture camera.

My guess for the reason is intellectual laziness:  It takes a
little thought to see clearly (A) what is wrong with the old
narrow culture and (B) in particular cases, something better.
So, in practice, it is just so much easier to pass projects to
that narrow culture and forget about it than to buck that
system and create a new path.  Easy, yes, but it also promises
to be increasingly costly; it cannot last.

So, TV slowly goes downhill.  Eventually, when parts of TV
reach bottom, maybe there will start to be some changes, some
real content instead of just more brain-dead, below fifth
grade, I Love Lucy, VEFEE, formula fiction drama.

For food, maybe eventually Food TV will start to consider that
it is possible to have programs that are mostly about food.

But, at the Web site of Food TV, we can see

Food Network (www.foodnetwork.com) is a unique lifestyle
network and website that strives to surprise and engage its
viewers with likable hosts, personalities, and the variety of
things they do with food.

While I am interested in food and many things, I have no idea
why I would ever want to watch anything like what is described
here.  I don’t care about lifestyle, I don’t really want to be
surprised or engaged, I have no interest in the "hosts" being
"likable" or "personalities".  Absurd.  Worthless.  Nonsense.
For me, totally irrelevant, useless, waste of time.

I don’t get anything from it; it’s a half hour or an hour of
my time, and I leave with nothing to show for that time.  I
learn nothing useful, and instead of entertaining it’s
infuriating.  Advertisers, take note.

So, I shouldn’t watch it.  And mostly I don’t.  Occasionally I
can watch some of Alton Brown, look past all the weird camera
angles and efforts at novelty and humor and concentrate on the
information he has.  Sometimes he does have some okay
information although too often when he covers something I do
know about his information is a bit weak.

Food TV has some awesomely good expertise in cooking, but the
narrow culture wins out and makes sure that essentially all
the value of the expertise is ruined.

Apparently the narrow culture is so brain-dead that they are
unable in their own minds to see the value in anything except
their VEFEE drama and much of anything beyond the fourth
grade.  So, that narrow culture is just oblivious to
everything else that might be on TV.  They are like deaf
people at an orchestra concert, blind people at an art
gallery, or some naughty fourth grade boy in a high school
course.  Except for variations on their old VEFEE drama, they
just don’t get it.

There is a really good reason US TV was called "the great
wasteland".

For what Food TV should do?  First, they should do the same
thing nearly all the rest of TV should do:  Kick out the old,
brain-dead, narrow culture.  Next they should wake up, look
around, and see the rest of civilization and notice that there
is enormous variety and content there.

In particular, and totally beyond the understanding of the
brain-dead, narrow culture, there is a very long list of
reasons people would want to watch something on TV; some of
these reasons are above the fourth grade and above the
shoulders.

For me, in food, near the top of the list is instructional
material so that I can be a better cook, with my hands, in my
kitchen, for my table.  To me, this is a big thing.  Getting
VEFEE drama instead of such instruction is sickening,
something I deeply, profoundly, bitterly, resent, hate, and
despise, something I very much wish I never see again; I feel
used, insulted, deceived, lied to, manipulated — advertisers,
take note.  I’m not pleased or entertained; I am
TORQUED.

Yes, the narrow culture will roll their incompetent eyes,
believing that anything at all instructional has to be boring,
tendentious, pedantic, insulting, pompous, pretentious,
offensive, etc.  Well, to the brain-dead narrow culture and
how little they know, such will have to be their conclusions.
But, these conclusions are all totally false.  And, the
solution is not rock bands, fast-cut video editing, haw-haw,
he-he, beauty queens, cleavages, or more from I Love
Lucy.  There is nothing, nothing at all, wrong with
learning something, especially something one could use.  Sure,
too many producers, in the VEFEE they wanted to create, wanted
to use pretense, pomposity, etc., but that garbage was just
more sick, useless, worthless, pointless VEFEE.

I do complain to my cable TV company and at each opportunity
tell them that their Internet service is terrific, their
telephone service is okay, but nearly all the content on their
cable TV is just awful.  When video on the Internet
gets a little better, I will drop cable TV service — I’m
looking forward to it.  TV really is a "great wasteland", and
I hate it.  Advertisers take note.

E.g., for the most recent Super Bowl, I watched one play.
They wouldn’t let me see the details of the pass defense at
which time I concluded that their coverage was worthless and
clicked away and never returned.  But, on the Internet, I did
watch all the ads.  They were much better than the game.

I kid you not:  I HATE nearly all of TV, yes, including
Food TV.  And I watch very little of it.  Advertisers take
note:  You are nearly always paying for junk, and I
HATE it.

I’m not against all of drama; while nearly always I would
prefer something informative, a little drama occasionally is
okay.  But, there is a lot of drama already recorded.
Actually, it does appear that the movies made between about
1935 and 1955, from only 21 years and including several years
of the Depression and several years of WWII, still are about
the best drama anyone knows how to do.  Turner Classic Movies
(TCM) transmits some of the best 24 hours a day.  I have a
personal collection of old movies, e.g., all the old
Rathbone-Bruce Holmes.  I’ve got plenty of drama.

My guess is that nothing will change Food TV, the rest of TV,
the narrow culture, or their stranglehold on TV.  Typically
that is what happens with ossified cultures; they don’t
change; instead, they just die off.  Eventually from some
other quite different sources there will be some good content
of much greater variety on video, and the old narrow culture
and their stranglehold and work will just be set aside.
Maybe we can get them jobs dusting camera lenses or mopping
the floor from food spills — finally something somewhat
useful.

My guess is that the Internet will be the big change.
Generally, the Internet is putting some severe financial
pressures on old media.

In particular, anyone with a digital video camera, personal
computer with some video editing software, a good Internet
connection, and some good ideas for video content can develop
such content and upload it to some video hosting sites that
will pay based on number of views.  When enough people notice
that there is some money to be made here, then we will get a
river of new content, some of which will be quite good, and
very little of which will be from the old narrow culture.

And we will get some means to find the content we like
(working on it!).

In the meanwhile, I can watch some America’s Test
Kitchen, Rick Steves, Burt Wolfe, BBC science programs,
old Rathbone-Bruce Holmes, or, better yet, get some
videos of lectures from Princeton, Xerox PARC, Kavli, etc.
The lectures on asymptotic freedom and the strong force were
terrific.  Given that Intel is promising processors with 80
cores each, it was good to see what Microsoft is doing about
concurrency.  It was good to see what Google’s P. Norvig is
doing in machine processing of English.  So far, for cooking,
the situation is poor.

I’m interested in food but am rarely willing to watch anything
on it at all on Food TV.

Don't be shellfish...