“I love your podcast,” someone said to me the other day, which was flattering but odd because I wasn’t aware that I had a podcast. But I was taught to be polite, so after the appropriately modest expression of thanks I ginned up the courage to ask which podcast, exactly, I was being complimented on.
And it turned out that I do, in fact, have a podcast. Of sorts. What I have is a weekly three-minute commentary on a public radio station here in Los Angeles that they repackage into audio snippets and distribute on various podcasting platforms.
Podcasting – which, for the uninitiated, is really just a form of on-demand audio programming that comes streaming into your smartphone from a constellation of sources both professional and (extremely) amateur – is very, very hot right now.
Personally, I prefer old-fashioned radio. It floats through the air on invisible wavelengths and you either catch it or you don’t. Radio doesn’t wait. Radio isn’t on-demand. But podcasting – the name derives from its earliest incarnation, as audio programming broadcast especially for iPods – is cheap and easy to distribute. And because anyone can have his or her own podcast, pretty much everyone does. Last week, for instance, I was a guest on two podcasts about Hollywood writers and a third podcast about Hollywood podcasts, which is when you know the market may be hitting a ceiling. When there’s almost as much media about media as there is media, maybe it’s time for everyone to stop for a while and take a deep breath.
On the other hand, this kind of light, low-barrier medium puts you in direct contact with audiences, which is something people in Hollywood usually try to avoid. And one of the things I learnt doing the rounds of television-fan podcasts last week was that people are watching a lot of old television shows – either on streaming video services like Hulu or Netflix, or unearthing them on YouTube – and what a lot of television audiences want is more of that old stuff. People on podcasts told me about watching some of my old series, about binge-viewing their favourite shows from the 1980s and 1990s, and they drew the comparison between listening to podcasts – which is, after all, calling up a specific kind of radio show you'd like to hear when you'd like to hear it – and clicking on an old episode of the first show I ever worked on, Cheers. Audiences know what they want and know where to find it.
They don’t want shows that remind them of the older shows, or shows that are modelled on older formats. What audiences want – at least, concluding from my anecdotal, entirely unscientific podcast conversations – are for television networks to restart some older, long-dead shows. They want them to call up the (presumably) still-living cast members, rebuild the sets, reassemble the production staff and start filming new episodes as if the show had never gone off the air, as if the characters had just aged gracefully during the intervening years and everything had just clicked along without too much change.
Netflix, the phenomenally successful streaming video service, has done just that by reconvening most of the cast of the smash-hit family sitcom from the 1990s, Full House. It is now producing Fuller House, in which everyone is a little older – except the actors who were adults to begin with, who are in this case both older and fatter. But the show is essentially the same show, with the same creative team behind every episode. It isn't a "reboot" or a "fresh take" or a "re-imagining" or any of those clever phrases people in Hollywood use when they're selling the same superhero movie over again. Fuller House is the same show, just older. And a little fatter.
What led Netflix to this decision was noticing – as only a streaming video service can notice – how many people were watching multiple episodes of the old Full House series. After some rapid financial modelling, they realised that Fuller House would be a moneymaker.
It's hard to imagine that the same calculations aren't being worked out regarding such other hits of the 1990s as Friends and Seinfeld – shows in which all the cast members are still alive and kicking, and the creative behind-the-scenes team is available. So we may soon be seeing some more old favourites resurrected from the video-on-demand graveyard and given new life. This kind of decision, which used to be based on a series of hunches or market research findings, is now rooted in actual numbers: if X number of viewers are watching episodes of Friends online, why not serve them up 40 or 50 new episodes?
What this also means, for writers and actors of a certain age, is that a dead or moribund career may not be so over. A has-been may be a not-yet, as long as there are enough clicks and streaming views of an old series to jolt him or her back to life.
If that’s the case, do me a favour. Next time you’re online and looking for something to watch, may I suggest you start with something – anything – that has my name on it? I could use the work.
Rob Long is a producer and writer in Hollywood
On Twitter: @rcbl
