Bravo nabs popular TV Web site: Television Without Pity bought by cable station.
[Co-founders Tara Ariano and Sarah D. Bunting] will remain as editors of TWOP, overseeing all content. Bravo execs said the site will maintain complete editorial independence, despite now being a tiny little division of General Electric.
I feel quite uneasy about this takeover. Having a multi-billion, multi-national corporation like GE owning a previously independent forum for speech and ideas sounds very, very wrong. How can we snark on the TWOP boards about
30 Rock riffing on NBC being owned by the Sheinhardt Wig Company when the boards we are snarking on are now owned by
the very same company?
"If Television Without Pity didn't exist, we would have built it," said Bravo exec VP Jason Klarman, who's at the center of Bravo's online strategy.
Then why didn't you build it four years ago, when
Queer Eye for The Straight Guy took off and pretty much made your network?
[Bravo President Lauren Zalaznick] said she wants the cabler and its Web sites to speak to people who, like many TWOP visitors, don't necessarily watch a lot of TV--but who get worked up over the shows they do watch.
"They have to get smart and rich by reading a lot, going to movies, going to school and having big jobs -- therefore they have less time to watch TV sometimes," she said. "But they seem to have infinite bandwidth, so to speak, to love television, talk about television and go places and spend time deeply with their kind of most essential core television connection."
Um (which is a word forbidden on the TWOP boards), doofus? I learned about TWOP from my fellow TV obsessed friend three years ago, when both of us were
unemployed.
While searching for more news about this development, I stumbled upon this article in the LA Times:
'Real Housewives of Orange County' eye greener pastures.
I don't really care about the battles between those fame-whores in Coto de Caza and the cable television network they are contractually obligated to obey. What I am concerned about is the passage that appeared towards the bottom of the article:
"Internet blogs have blazed with crass and incendiary comments about their looks and their past and present personal behavior. After attorneys for one participant contacted Television Without Pity, the fan-based website shut down a "Housewives" thread. (Bloggers on the Orange County Register's website complained their negative comments were not published on Bravo's website in favor of more favorable ones.)"
So supposedly,
"No massive changes are planned to the site in the near future," but TWOP coincidentally shut down the Housewives thread last month because people were speaking about negatively about the show. I thought maybe this was a temporary closure, as is done from time to time on the TWOP forums when discussions get overly heated. But no.
The still locked Housewives thread states: "In response to concerns raised by various show participants' lawyers, we're no longer hosting a thread about the show. Don't start one." posted by Wing Chun (aka Tara Ariano), on "Feb 8, 2007 @ 1:58 pm."
This sucks.
In even creepier, more twisted news:
Halliburton will move headquarters from Houston to Dubai. For those of you who aren't what the words "Halliburton," "Dubai," or "Houston" mean, please look them up, then tell me your take on this story. There are as many theories floating around as there are blogs on the interwebs. The Halliburton discussion is still going strong at Daily Kos.
This news is bad, but not at all shocking to anyone who owns a working television set: Black leads still absent from network dramas. And network comedies. And non-syndicated comedies on cable.
Here is the excuse given:
"There is a feeling that the vast majority of the audience is not black, and having a black lead dominating the show makes most viewers feel shut out since they don't work with an African-American in a dominant position in their daily life," TV historian Tim Brooks says.
Who is having this "feeling?"And can this person or persons back up that feeling with any statistics proving their racist theories?
Furthermore, this theory that "black people don't watch black dramas--therefore they fail" is ridiculous.
Happy Hour and
'Til Death and
20 Good Years didn't fail because "white people don't watch white comedies." They failed because the shows sucked.
Lastly:
Latinos, who overtook blacks as the largest minority in the U.S. in 2003, have a good chance at landing their first drama series on commercial broadcast TV this year with CBS' untitled family drama pilot featuring an predominantly Latino cast, including leading man Jimmy Smits.
So let me get this straight. Latinos (all of them, regardless of their countries of origin) have been the majority minority in the United States for four years now. And they have
chance of getting a drama on broadcast television for the first time ever. Over 35 million people in this country identify as "Hispanic or Latino," and this is the first drama series that they
might get on the air? It's not definite, even though Jimmy Smits has starred in three of the biggest network television series in the
past three decades?
Yes, I'm sure that they're aren't many black people or Latino people on primetime because black people and Latino people obviously never watch TV. I obviously don't. And don't get me started on the lack of Asian people anywhere in the media, and yeah, having Hiro on
Heroes and that guy on
Lost is great, but that's two people.
It's nice that these articles never question how many non-white people have Nielsen rating boxes in their households. I don't know anyone of any color with a box on their TV. The articles also never mention that most of the people in charge of writing, directing, greenlighting, producing, casting, and advertising on these television shows are
straight white men. Not that the race, gender, ethnicity or orientation of the people who control corporate media would have anything to do with the type of people who are shown on our television screens. Clearly these issues are unrelated, so there's no need to bring them up.
