Reflections on Watching Three Seasons of LOST in Three Weeks

In the last few weeks I spent the equivalent of TWO FULL DAYS watching Lost. And that’s even stripping out the “previously on Lost” bits.

I enjoyed it a lot, though I would not say I enjoyed it thoroughly and completely. My only dings at all are that it got a little bit too weird towards the end of season three (though I may change my mind on that when season four rolls around). Also, I feel cheated out of the back story on Libby, because before killing her off, they made it clear that she was in the psych ward with Hugo for a while, but they never pursued that story line.

I understand the appeal of the show, which I distill down into three areas.

It’s a story about people. People who are multi dimensional and have their own issues but, regardless of their issues are still “basically good.” This appeals to the Anne Frank in us all. Plus, this is somewhat like an Internet chat room or Craig’s List (except for the characters being FAR more interesting) in that you’re left feeling like, “I might have my issues, but I am not as f***ed up as these people!”

Secondly, like another favorite of mine, Heroes, the underlying premise to the whole thing is that there is meaning in life. Humans love, love, love looking for meaning and this show is based on the premise and entirely crafted from the point of view that everything means something.

Finally, as an offshoot of the first two, there’s this underlying premise that God and/or the Universe is somehow screwing with you. One of the reasons I tend to numb myself with TV at times is because I experience plenty of this in my everyday life and have had a few Lost-esque experiences in the last couple of years alone.

But at the end of the day, I still prefer Boston Legal to Heroes or Lost. While BL is sometimes a little out there, it’s a story about people who struggle to find meaning where it’s in no way obvious that there actually is any. This mirrors the true human struggle, the thing most people turn to TV to get away from. But the beauty of BL is it sucks you in and makes you laugh anyway. Two words: Denny Crane!

Nonetheless, I look forward to Season 4 of Lost in ’08.

Because Egos are Sooo Fragile: Les Moonves, You’re #1: Really!

Not just because I'm a chronic suck up at all. Moonves really is #1 in the thing networks care MOST about: primetime ratings. We live in a world where you can really make a boneheaded decision and totally undervalue the worth of the Dan Rather brand and still be…#1. Les Moonves lives in exactly that world. A world where America LOVES, LOVES, LOVES CSI.

That America isn't loving on Miss Couric on the CBS Evening News – this I believe isn't Miss Couric's fault at all, but instead just how the whole transition from Rather to Couric was handled (which is to say, very, very badly). Again, I don't think that's a really function of anything to do with Katie Couric.

It doesn't matter. Primetime ratings matter. And here, Moonves or at least CSI in all its variations are killing. While CBS didn't have any of the top 5 programs, either for the season or the May sweeps, CBS still dominated with 13 out of the top 20 shows being CBS products and EIGHTEEN OUT OF THE TOP TWENTY-FIVE shows in the May sweeps. That's dominance. The highest value to the networks come from its ability to score during primetime, so Moonves probably views himself (and correctly so) as the winner.

I wouldn't fault him for that. Except I have no idea what role Moonves had in CSI and its variants or any of the other programming running during primetime. If those decisions were his, I'll give him all the credit for it (and even if they weren't his, I'll give him the credit). What I am sure of is, the Dan Rather/Katie Couric thing was all his, and it was completely botched: not just in execution, but in terms of how he thought about it to begin with. The fact that CBS is #1 during primetime has no bearing on how poorly this was handled, except that I'm sure that Moonves is not under any kind of pressure, say…compared to NBC, which came in last in the primetime sweeps.

Les Moonves is #1 in the thing that really matters, the primetime ratings. But if the goal is to make the most money for your firm possible, and if it isn't, I kind of think it should be, I hold Moonves completely accountable for botching the Rather thing. Because he's #1 where it matters he won't feel any heat for being accountable here. That's human nature, but it's the kind of human nature that usually eventually comes around to bite you in the butt.

Les Moonves vs. Mark Cuban: Who ya Got?

Thinking can sometimes be a very synergistic process for me. There are a multitude of subjects I am interested in thinking about and sometimes in the process of thinking about one thing, I wind up understanding another. It turns out in some weird way almost everything is at least tangentially related in my mind. I understand that often the output of all that is probably some “crazy thinking”.

Things are not always what they seem. I saw record low Nielsen Ratings for the (Stanley Cup) and wondered why my pal Ted Leonsis wasn’t selling the Washington Capitals as fast as he possibly could. On the surface, my approach made a lot of sense. But TV is a place where things aren’t always exactly what they seem, and indeed in the case of Ted Leonsis and the Washington Capitals and the NHL, I was very wrong.

Thankfully I had that all sorted out and didn’t wind up needing to binge on any kind of e-mail exchange with Mark Cuban where I was freaked out looking at the Nielsen Ratings for the NBA Finals and saying, “Oh my God, you’re as crazy as Leonsis!” It’s a good thing too, because I don’t think Mark would have gone nearly as easy on me as Ted did!

Fortunately I do have a gift for self-correction. I can learn.

One thing I am trying to learn is what’s really going on in the television business. I mean what’s really going on. The television industry itself faces the exact same challenges as the major sports franchises. Television bumps up against the same real limits. And there is definitely one real limit: that’s the amount of available free time. You can check out some of this data by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The bad news is, there’s definitely not unlimited free time. The good news is, as of last summer, TV still won the highest concentration of free time (about 2.6 hours per day). And as you know, on any given night there is way more than 2.6 hours of programming available. All of the programming is fighting for the same free time.

I watched the Dan vs. Katie/Cuban vs. Moonves frenzy the other day and it definitely got me thinking that I was missing something. Something was not right about the whole thing in my mind, but I couldn’t figure out why.

Then, in a somewhat unrelated bit of curiosity, I was looking at the Brand Keys “Sports Loyalty Engagement” (more or less a measure of which sports franchises have the highest loyalty from their fans) and saw all the other “brand loyalty engagement” studies Brand Keys does, including this (rank of evening news by loyalty in 2007):

Evening News Shows
ABC
NBC
FOX
CNN
CBS
MSNBC

Then I understood the something I had missed in this whole thing. The short version of that thinking is, “Ouch, Moonves is dope!” The truth of it is, here he was a complete and total dope. He’ll never admit it. You won’t likely hear the Les Moonves, “Mistakes were made…” speech. But one very, very, very big mistake was made.

First, it is true that the program “brands” do have some loyalty and you can measure it. That’s true for both the Today Show and the CBS Evening News. There is data that I am missing and this data would be helpful. But there is data that I am not missing, and that’s the actual results (which are not good). I like to focus on results. Also, I wanted to start thinking about this in these terms: “What would I do if I ran a television network?”

There’s a secondary truth as well: the stars themselves have some “loyalty engagement index”. Which shows have the most loyalty and which stars have the most loyalty very often crossover. The data I am missing is the crossover between people who are loyal to both Katie Couric and Dan Rather, and people who are loyal to both morning AND evening news programming. Based on the actual results, and admittedly this is still pretty speculative there wasn’t all that much crossover.

Moonves made a key mistake, I believe. The evening news market was already in a free fall (and that trend will NOT change), the mistake Moonves probably made was that he thought he could change this trend. Given that mistake, I do understand how he made the second and big mistake. Let me be clear: when you have a brand, and the sky is kind of falling (ratings across all evening news viewers combined are down more than 50% over the last 25 years) but there is still value in the brand to be milked out of it – you milk it as long as you can. Creating a “new brand” in the environment of Network evening news is as complicated as launching a new beer brand. Beverage companies spend years with rollouts of new brands and the main reason (in my opinion) the rollouts of “new beer” are handled as slowly as they are is because they don’t want the success of the new brand to come at the expense of any existing brand.

There was an existing brand at CBS News. The brand to be exact, was “The CBS News with DAN RATHER”. Dan Rather actually was the brand and I think in a shrinking market where you have a fairly good brand – killing that brand off and trying to launch a new one is just…absolutely insane. This has nothing to do with Katie Couric. I do not believe there was anyone CBS could have put on aside from perhaps bringing Walter Cronkite back that would draw MORE viewers than Dan Rather. Because Dan Rather was the brand and getting rid of him pushed out the millions of people who were loyal Dan Rather evening news fans.

Katie Couric had loyal fans too – but that was for something else. So one lesson here is that brand loyalty does not (certainly in Network television) cross over from morning shows on one network, to evening news shows on the other.

As a result of the way Moonves went about this – again probably a result of thinking he could change the overall trend, one very, very critical mistake was made. Moonves thought about CBS News as the brand. It wasn’t. Dan Rather was the brand and in this case Moonves completely underestimated the value of the Rather brand.

I really don’t find it surprising that without ever thinking about any of this I hadn’t figured it out. What’s vastly more surprising to me is Mooves didn’t figure it out either. There are studies on brand loyalty by the stars themselves. I would not be shocked at all to find out that programming decisions for smaller networks, whether it be USA or Mark Cuban’s own HDNet are being made by trying to create programming around stars with high brand loyalty that happen to be out of work.

I also won’t be surprised that when it comes to network television, that no matter how steep the trend line down is, that the egos like Moonves will think they can reverse the trend, fire more stars with high brand value and…how long can it really be before Dan Rather and Katie Couric are hosting together a nightly news show on Cuban’s own HDNet?

I’ve got Mark Cuban.

Heroes vs. is 24!

If somebody else has already written about this, I couldn't find it. Not because it's not out there but because since Heroes ran head-to-head vs. 24 in the Monday 9pm slot, there are a lot of documents of the "Heroes vs. 24" ilk.

Typing a Google search on the phrase "Heroes is 24" produces a few results, but so far as I can tell not related to what I am about to write.

The shows are the same show. One takes a fantastical approach and one uses terrorists.

Both shows work from the premise that a particular disaster, scheduled to happen by X time must be averted at all costs.

Both shows use the same basic formula: ensemble cast, plot-lines-o-plenty (some way more interesting than others), good people vs. the evil people, with simply preposterous twists and turns along the way.

Both shows have people with special powers. Heroes takes the superhero powers approach, whereas on 24 it's mostly fists, guns and guile. But when Jack Bauer says, "I'm not CTU, I'll go after Walt Cummings myself" with a look of contempt on his face, he IS pulling off a power most of us wish we could pull off: the power to say f-u, I'm going to do what I want anyway.

I like both shows largely for the same reason. Heroes is the more moving tale, but Heroes is also a tad more fictional.