We’re talking about the cursed viewership “metrics” that suck the life out of corporate entertainment, the metrics the advertisers demand to close the three-sided loop of their twisted economic arrangement. Those metrics are no different than Facebook’s “Like” button. Nielsen et al metrics are reactive, because they measure what people choose to watch out of the crapchoices before them; and the Like buttons, everywhere, record people reacting to what’s placed before them on the Internet.

A Like button provides an immediate readout on the user’s emotional state, the thing advertiser care about to choose the “content” to back that best disarms the rational faculties of the viewer. They love the immediacy of Like buttons, because with viewership metrics they had to wait weeks and watch the trends to see if people “liked” the crap they chose from the menu.

The debasement of entertainment and the debasement of news and information, I think, both owe a lot to the blind and mechanical use of this simple-minded “metric”, in both arenas.

People talk about how Facebook’s “algorithm” produced “fake news”, but I think the problem is deeper, it’s literally garbage in: One single bit describing an emotional state. They can tinker with the algorithm all they want, but the solution is to ditch the Like button.

And for TV to ditch the advertisers and go full a la carte. Eff the corporations and their “free speech rights”. Let viewers directly influence what gets produced, not corporate third-parties with an agenda of avarice.

The current renaissance in American TV shows that our technical and artistic people are second to none, and those individual entrepreneurs and producers who actually take risks because they believe in something and because they truly love their work (as opposed to their jobs) can certainly outperform the drones even in their own arena, the marketplace.

As always, the problem isn’t necessarily with American Capitalism, it’s with the inbred and degenerate blow-dried wimps who have taken it over.

Come to think of it, perhaps this inability of traditional metrics to accurately gauge the value of program content is the reason why TV is so much better now than it used to be.

You know, you’ve got a point there. One of things that’s notable about the approach taken by Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu to producing their own content, is that they’ve returned to the first Golden Age practice of trusting a (hopefully) gifted programming executive with a big pile of money to spend on productions, with instructions to “follow your gut”.

We should bear in mind that it may not be a matter of better quality, but a large quantity of shows produced this way, with a greater probability that some of them will work out. Go digging deep in Netflix sometime, and you’ll stumble across dozens of “Netflix Originals” you’ve never heard of, sunk without a trace. But that’s to be expected when you let creativity off the leash. Sometimes the muse is a dog.

In contrast, CBS’s Star Trek:Discovery seems like the apotheosis of the cold-blooded corporate style of TV programming, one that does cling to “metrics” because that’s what corporate drones are taught to do. Safe proven concept, digested through years of focus groups and marketing studies, producing a chaotic production with cast changes before production even starts as focus groups weigh in, a mutating story line as the marketers “fine tune” it, directors coming and going, years-long delays, and a general incoherency. I’m expecting pretty much a dog’s breakfast when the unfortunately-monogrammed ST:D finally airs.

The rating services may be totally obsolete now for the reasons you mention and many others which have been becoming clear over the decades, but they will continue to be used to determine the value of entertainment programs simply because the business end of TV can’t think of any other way to sell their eyeballs to advertisers “objectively”. Without a means of assigning a precise value to that which they peddle, the suits would be out of a job. They are parasites that produce nothing of value themselves.

In today’s complex arts environment, and with a saturated media-savvy public increasingly immune to commercial persuasion, the actual effectiveness of advertising is probably highly overrated. Nobody really believes any of that shit any more, but Madison Avenue has to justify its existence somehow.

Come to think of it, perhaps this inability of traditional metrics to accurately gauge the value of program content is the reason why TV is so much better now than it used to be. The advertisers have less incentive to dumb down the content for commercial purposes.

I watched the second season a while back, paying for it as episodes dropped to see it in almost realtime. But I’m doing that less often these days, content to wait for new seasons of past favorites like “The Americans” and “Orphan Black” to trickle out to the “free” venues like Prime and Netflix. I may well do that with “The Expanse”‘s third season.

It does worry me to think that Nielsen and the other rating services can’t effectively track delayed viewership. They might conclude that a show like “Orphan Black” has seen its ratings suddenly go into the toilet just because people aren’t so eager to keep paying for immediacy, but love the show nonetheless.

This scenario of wanting to talk about a show long after it premieres is going to become more common, and I’m going to have to adapt to it somehow. Nothing every stays the same.