This is one of the best articles I’ve read in a long time. I’ve used so many of these arguments to defend my TV habit over the past few year, but never as clearly or as eloquently as Emily Nussbaum makes them. Mostly I just called people retarded for not watching Lost.
Great article. It just reinforces what will most likely happen. Down the road, quality television will still be made, but just like the 60s for music and the 70s for movies, the classics will remain from the 2000s for television.
Also, while reading this, I wondered aloud, when is the golden era of Internet entertainment going to happen? In the 1890s, people would line up down the block to see footage of a train pulling into a station in Lumiere’s L’arrivée du train en gare de La Ciotat. In the 1990s, millions of people viewed an animated gif of a dancing baby.
As much progress as we’ve seen in Internet entertainment—and there has been a lot—it has clearly not reached its full potential yet. As of now, the most successful internet entertainment stars either a) eventually move to TV and/or movies, a la Aziz Ansari, Don Glover, Whitest Kids U Know, or b) attempt to build a successful Internet series with the support of the integrated ad model, like CollegeHumor or FunnyorDie. What possible advancements will we see down the road in Internet entertainment, and when will they happen?
Or, as another tack entirely, will the Internet simply become the technology du jour for all entertainment mediums, making the label “internet-only” obsolete? The music industry has already moved to the powers of the Internet, with record labels fruitlessly trying to keep up with frivolous lawsuits, like the one filed against Vimeo. Television has made a move online as well, not only with sites like Hulu, but with new technology gauging Internet ratings to set ad rates.
Whether Internet entertainment will have its own era of creative breakthrough remains to be seen. However, with the consensus of TV having its golden age now, it seems unlikely the Internet will have its breakthrough for a long time.
