It's a parody of soap opera, and that has its place, but I never saw it as a show that had legs for daily plots long-term. I've blogged about Passions a couple of times, here and here, but I never thought it was a show that captured what soaps do well. In light of many of my recent soap opera posts, I've been thinking about this in relation to the cancellation of Passions as well. Investing in a show, especially a serialized one, is an obligation, and no fan wants to start listening to a story that people are just going to stop in the middle of. No wonder fans don't want to invest in these shows. Instead, though, they cancel these shows before they even have the opportunity to build up enough episodes to launch onto DVD at all, and then they run fans off with getting them invested in a product, only to finish out the experience with having to read a synopsis of what would have happened the rest of the season, if the network had not decided to pull the plug. And, who knows, the show may pick up a strong following to be launched back into broadcast. After all, a substantial number of fans have already invested in many of these shows, and they are angry when they are cancelled. At the least, if a show is booted off the network, it could be finished off on one of the many cable networks these conglomerates own, or even just finished for DVD distribution. If a show dips in ratings, it could quickly become yesterday's news, and it seems the shows are becoming even more drop happy at a time when the economic model should be shifting in the opposite direction. The many ways products can live on through Internet distribution, mobile content, DVD distribution, video-on-demand, and a variety of other forms of cross-platform distribution means that television producers who are making shows are no longer producing one-time ephemeral content but rather a media property that could live on well into the future in various formats.īut the industry still isn't structured that way.
This up-front, make-your-money-from-advertising model was the way television was structured before products had a shelf life beyond syndicated distribution, but the economic model is shifting now. Instead of switching those shows to a cable network to finish out their days or aim for profitability over time through DVD distribution, these shows were cancelled quickly for fear of not getting an immediate major profit from advertisers.
I've written time and time again this fall and winter about the death of various shows that had developed a following but not up to the standards the industry wanted to see. Recently, while I was at with fellow C3 researcher Ivan Askwith, we discussed the need for a shift in the economic models for television in general, particularly in how the life of a property is envisioned.
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