Decline of Television

Entertainment media in the recent years has changed dramaticly. From the birth of cinema and television, Entertainment available at the touch of a button, with hundreds of movies and television shows being created every year, each to suit the interests of most demographics.

Recently, film and television has gone through a change of quality. Trading artistic integrity for advertising revenue, networks choose to cancel television shows if it doesn’t meet the revenue requirements. Though. Fantastic are cut before their blossom. Shows like ‘The Ben Stiller Show’, ‘Firefly’, ‘Arrested Development’ and ‘Deadwood’. Many of these superb shows were cancelled, for their lack of viewers for the networks.

As these television shows integrate some remarkable story telling, and deep characters, the majority of shows that are cancelled before their prime. On the other side of the spectrum, certain shows are have far gone past their expiry date. Examples of shows that are guilty of this are; ‘Scrubs’, ’That ‘70’s show’, ‘The Office’, ‘X-files’, ‘Two and Half Men’ and most famously ‘The Simpsons’. These shows have been clung to, straining the writers and then becoming shadows of what the shows once were.

The shows like the Simpsons had characters, which were once  deep, multilayered and reflected the stereotypical American, middle-class, white family have become a bunch of two dimensional characters (pun intended) who become stupider every year. The term invented to describe this transition, is aptly named ‘Flanderization’, Named after the The Simpsons, Ned Flanders, who was originally just a kind, clean-cut and quiet, somewhat religious fellow (contrast to Homer), before becoming the passive-aggressive, religious fanatic he is today.

Other examples of ‘flanderization’ in film come in the form of Yoda's speech in the original Star Wars trilogy, simply swapping nouns and verbs in certain situations in a manner as if it were not his first language. This was exaggerated in popular culture leading the writers of the prequels to invent lines such as "Not if anything to say about it, I have!", which makes the once great wise character, a green monster with a speech impediment

.

However, there are some successful television series that have avoided ‘Flanderization’. Doctor Who, which has survived for longer than 26 seasons and is still going strong. The writing and lore of the show is the key to this, as they can go through characters, due to the fact that when the doctor dies, he regenerates as a new person, new personality and a new face, allowing the creators to change actors and writers, producing some of the best television to date.

While worthwhile television shows being created every year, such as ‘Community’, ‘Modern Family’ etc. there are still some hope to redeem the industry, but the television executives need to learn how to give a new series a chance and to stop older series from stagnating.