What Content will Define our Decade?

I am taking a break  this week to think about next week's post. Big Brother was the defining show of the last decade. What will define this one? Your  thoughts would be welcome. Back next week.

Midsomer Murders: a Producer in Trouble

Typical?

This week there was a fascinating case in the British media. The programme called Midsomer Murders, known around the world as Barnaby or Inspector Barnaby, portrays a typical English village (with a very untypical murder rate!).  

I have written about it before. One of the reasons it succeeds is that it occupies very familiar territory: for detective stories about English villages are a well-known genre around the world, made famous from the novels of Agatha Christie and many others. 

Thus Midsomer Murders is different from -- but in the same mould as -- Inspector Morse and Poirot and Miss Marple, all widely shown around the world. (Midsomer Murders is actually based on the books of Caroline Graham – no relation).

There was furore last week when its producer – and CEO of its production company – in explaining how he designed this show, said he had cast no black or Asian performers since black or Asian people would be out of place in a typical English village.

In real life Brian True-May is not completely correct. Like everything else, England’s villages are changing.  I live in one and we have a black family and one Asian family in a village of about a hundred homes. They participate fully. One family member sits on the village council – or Parish Council as it is called.  Another is a doctor.

True-May has been widely criticised and suspended from his job.

So this is the issue.  Midsomer Murder is fiction.  It’s a story -- it has a high audience among older, more conservative viewers in the UK and its job is to continue to appeal to that audience. In other countries it may appeal to different groups. But it needs to be recognised for what it is, to have a clear and coherent identity, and to be part of a well-established tradition. People like to know what they are getting before they invest their time in watching something…

When a producer is casting a show, he or she will look for ways to clarify and simplify context and location. He or she is using clues to locate the work in the viewer’s minds and to make recognition and navigation easy. It is legitimate to use every trick – a story is an illusion, a simplified frame for fictional events which the viewer will need to track.

Or to put in another way, the villages in Midsomer Murders are stereotypes. Whatever their consequences for social behaviour, in cultural terms, stereotypes are a tool, a way we navigate our lives and make decisions. I have referred before to the work of Boyd and Richerson who have tried to explain why humans have “culture”. They conclude it is because we cannot research every decision: we need a way of making decisions in a way that is not as crude as pure animal instinct, but is “quick and easy”. Copying available models is one way we do that. Stereotypes are another: this looks like a kind of person or place I have met before, so I will treat them as I did then. 

Entertainment uses stereotypes – recognizable frames that provide familiarity and easy understanding for people and events that are new to the viewer. Stereotypes are almost by their nature behind the curve of reality.

So, going back to the main issue, the question is: should casting be colour blind? UK urban drama often features black and Asian actors. There is social truth in this, for minority ethnic groups live mainly in cities in the UK.  

Midsomer Murders is not a challenging work but it does its job, staying firmly within an established tradition. But even much more “difficult” works like The Wire from the US use stereotypes.

So should social policy determine the casting of a TV series? Many might say, yes, if it contributes to social or racial prejudice. But there is no evidence that Midsomer Murders has contributed to racial prejudice. Nor is there evidence that the producer himself – though he may have been impolitic – is prejudiced. You could say he was just making a professional judgement.

Others might say it would be better with a more typical social mix. The point is: should a producer have been fired for explaining his casting policy which prior to his interview has raised no complaint – except from critics who found it old-fashioned and dull?

Rosario Tijeras: A Telenovela with Attitude

Rosario Tijeras is a Colombian drama. It is an adaptation of a novel by the same name. Rosario, the protagonist, played by Maria Fernanda Yepez, was raised in the slums and raped by a local gang. After the rape – her friend was also murdered by an infamous drug lord – she seeks revenge, and gets it by killing the drug lord. Word spreads fast, and, in a reversal of expectations, a gang hires her to become an assassin and from that moment she works for the new mafia boss.

The show has murders, betrayal, fast money and beautiful women and appears to make riveting television. It was one of Colombia’s top-rated shows of 2010. When the series began airing on Telefutura in the US in September 2010 it delivered the highest rated series finale in the history of the network. (Columbia is the third largest Latin American country after Brazil and Mexico, and, sadly, one of the most dangerous places on the planet.)

There were disapproving voices, of course. Though extreme tales of drug bosses and glamorous women assassins are common on Colombian primetime television, this latest “narco-soap” has been controversial and sparked protests in the city of Medellin. The show’s posters, emblazoned with the slogan “It’s harder to love than to kill”, had to be taken down in Columbia’s second largest city, home to infamous drugs lord Pablo Escobar in the 80’s and 90’s.

The main complaint has been that the series glamorizes the life of criminals and will encourage young people to imitate that lifestyle. The main Medellin newspaper El Colombiano said that the show was a "gulp of absurdity, vulgarity, bad manners and a big dose of narco-culture". The argument also spread over to neighbouring Panama, whose president, Ricardo Martinelli, complained about the Colombian shows that air on local television there. "They exalt drug trafficking, theft, muggings," he said, adding that the shows do "damage to our country" and corrupt "moral values". 


The show has also hit problems in neighbouring Venezuela.

It’s not the first time that Columbia has seen anti-heroes like Rosario. This one is actually just the latest in a group of telenovelas, dubbed “narco-soaps”, which have caused an outcry in Colombia. There has been The Capo, which paints a wily drug boss as a sensitive anti-hero. There was a smash hit Without Breasts There Is No Paradise that glamorized the lives of the women who surround the drug lords, as did Mafia Dolls, which ended in early 2010.

Two questions arise whenever this kind of debate comes up. First, are people indifferent to the moral issues? And second, what impact do media have on behaviour?

On the first the answer is No. A huge majority of Colombians supported late President Alvaro Uribe’s successful campaign against the drug cartels. Nobody except a hardened criminal wants to live in a violent and lawless country. But such issues are seldom simple. There is sympathy and some support for the farmers who have harvested the coca leaf for generations and who do not get adequate compensation for losing their business when their crops are destroyed. There is also resentment against the United States whose drug users consume most of the cocaine that fuels the drug trade.

However, most people feel they are able to distinguish “entertainment” from “reality”. They get pleasure out of entertainment. That pleasure is a signal that entertaining stories satisfy ancient instincts, instincts that were there long before the arrival of nation states and drug lords!

Rosario Tijeras has two of the ingredients that capture instinctive attention: murder and beautiful women.

A female assassin is an interesting case, however. A female assassin goes against “nature” (killing is usually the way male rivalries are settled), so she has to be sympathetic and credible. (You will have come across other female assassins who are just cardboard characters who do not engage serious attention). Rosario gets sympathy from the back story: she has been violated and her friend has been killed. That justifies revenge, which we instinctively support, but not the role of a career assassin. I would like to watch the series to see how they have secured continuing interest in Rosario’s role as a career criminal -- for that will be main challenge for the writers of this series.

As for the other question, we still know relatively little about the precise impact of entertainment on the moral culture of a nation or community, although reams of paper have been written on the subject. Most countries have “standards”, which vary widely. But do violent telenovelas encourage young people to join drug gangs or sanction muggings?

In truth, this is a very confused issue. On balance, there is now a consensus among academics that violent entertainment does not directly promote violent behaviour -- with some exceptions, like young people and sociopaths. But media are clearly part of a culture. Culture is complex and multi-layered and it is often very hard to determine what is driving change and what is following.

However a particular culture, however pluralistic, has its own character, and its own “attitude” towards key issues.

My guess is the media debate is animated by two different types within the administrative class. One group is concerned with public order and does not like crimes such as murder and drug abuse being treated lightly, i.e. as part of “entertainment”. The other group, predominantly academic, is protective of freedom of expression. Finding it hard to get hard data on media impact, they tend to rely on a kind of acceptability test, acting when a stream of complaints gets particularly noisy.

Most ordinary people, however, know they have little influence on public issues, enjoy being stimulated by good entertainment, and don’t think a “story” is going to change their lives or opinions.

Media Strategy: Ancient Instincts, New Stories

Image via Wikipedia

Murder: Fascinated and Revolted

Last week I tried to say something about the very basics of content that sells.

You have something they want and they cannot do it themselves.

But this is entertainment. What people want is mysterious and highly personal. How can you generalize?

That’s what we try to do.

Last week I suggested that one of the things that excite people is a place where they would like to be.

One of the reasons US content is so popular – but only one – is because it has been, for the last century, a country where enterprising people could go and live, a destination of choice, a place you could dream about.

In the process it became a familiar place – which is another condition for content that travels. There needs to be some element of familiarity.

So if your location is not a familiar one, you will need to figure how to make it both familiar and interesting. For Familiarity and Novelty are both essential. Relevance is important, too. People will be interested in a location that is cool, fashionable, leading edge in some way, a place they would want to visit or a way of life they might like to be part of….

In addition, you need, in the main, to show people whom the audiences can look up to, characters who are smart, or good looking or brave or enterprising and who show it in the things they do or say. As I have said in a previous post, evolution has provided us with a need for behaviour models. It’s how we learn what to do, how to behave.

There are other things that matter deeply, so much so that you can revisit them again and again and again, concerns that come from deep in our evolutionary past. For example, we are obsessed with murder. Perhaps that is because humans only survived by living in groups that held together because the punished murder –, most of us have a deep revulsion for murder and a deep desire to see the murder caught and punished.

But that deep code of instinctive justice also drives the desire for revenge – which often comes into play when a justice system breaks down. These instinct sometimes fight one another create conflicts which interest us greatly.

By the same token we are endlessly interested in sex and love. Biologists would say that that our role is to carry genes forward into the next generation so we ha e an instinctive interest in everything to do with reproduction, finding the best mate, etc..

Media Strategy: it's about Geopolitics too

Stieg Larsson: speaking as a European...

If you are going to be an exporter of content, you need to know what other countries are looking for.

It’s quite simple really: they are looking for what they cannot do themselves. Nearly everyone prefers content from their own country, in their own language. We are all locked into our private worlds, languages and cultures.

Let us take some examples. Drama is expensive – something many countries can only afford in small quantities. Some countries produce only low-budget soaps – so they may provide a market for good-quality mid-evening series. Even countries which can afford some primetime drama will have be gaps in the schedule.

Because of the preference for own-language work, format licensing has been a huge success. The key elements of the production are locked into a format bible, which is, in essence, a do-it-yourself manual for the production of a hit show.

And some factual content is of generic interest, natural history being the most obvious example. I won’t be saying much about news here, but news footage falls into that category too.

There are also a while number of practical considerations that go beyond price. Content must accommodate a country’s viewing patterns and scheduling habits.

These are some of the questions that need answers before assessing the potential demand in a given market. This can all be done with a careful look at a given country’s media structures and outputs. I will be saying more about how to assess a given market in later posts.

However there are many intangibles, which are more interesting because they are seldom discussed in a commercial context.

Culture and Evolution; some new thinking.



Not by genes alone: The PowerPoint is available on request

This will be my last post of 2010.  I'm going to look at something absolutely basic to what we do.  We are all in the culture business. 

But what is culture?

A wide definition is preferable. Culture is simply the way we behave in a certain place at a certain time. Breakfast in Japan is different from breakfast in Britain.

Something as deeply embedded as culture must be instinctive. We acquire a large part of it without thinking about it. But then, like all instincts, it must have a use, be, as they say, adaptive.

Do other animals have cultures?  In some chimpanzee bands one member may find a new way of doing something useful, like extracting termites with a stick, and others copy him or her.  But it doesn’t seem to go much further than that. 

Yet that, according to the latest thinking on culture, we have an instinct to watch others in order to learn things, determine how best to behave.  The two academics who have articulated this viewpoint most clearly, Boyd and Richardson, use the term "fast and frugal heuristics" which simply means that a quick way to decide what to do in a given situation is to copy others. This appears in a book called Not by Genes Alone.