I really need to blog more often. What better excuse than the imminent start of a new television season, complete with lots of yummy paratexts to analyze and criticize?

So, without further ado, let me start by discussing the websites for the new network shows.

Overall, they’re a pretty boring lot. You have the standard elements – cast information, character profiles, “sneak peaks” and “exclusive” video that actually seems to be everywhere online, and encouragements to “Friend us now on Facebook!” (when, sorry, Last Man Standing, I don’t want to be your friend) or to follow some or other cast member on Twitter. Most of the sites look like they were put together at speed, too, with little interest in doing anything other than saying, “Hi, look, there’s a show. Wanna watch?” So, overall there’s not too much to discuss.

Terra Nova proves the only true exception, and I’ll get to that in a future post. But in the meantime, I’ve been fascinated by the quizzes and polls that a few lone sites have (The Secret Circle, Playboy Club, Whitney, Prime Suspect, and Up All Night) in addition to the other elements. The quizzes and polls interest me, since they’re subtle ways of suggesting what the show is all about, disciplining our understanding and (since they’re quizzes) “knowledge” about the shows before they hit the air. What do they say?

Sub-dividing, Secret Circle has a “Which Type of Witch Are You?” quiz, in which your answers determine which character you’re most like; Playboy Club and Up All Night have quizzes with actual correct or incorrect answers; and Whitney and Prime Suspect have polls on favorite past shows and characters. Let’s take each in turn.

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What Kind of Witch Are “You”? Secret Circle

Secret Circle’s quiz makes it absolutely clear what kinds of issues the show will cover, and who should or should not be watching. It makes it clear, first, that the intended audience is female and straight, or at least someone adopting that viewing position. While some of the questions use gender neutral language (asking about your “significant other” and “their” issues), all of a sudden, you’re then hit with “Your friend’s boyfriend has a crush on you, what do you do?” with the first possible answer being to “Tell your friend and convince her to dump him” (emphasis added). The once gender-neutral responder is now assumed to be female and straight.

As the above question suggests, moreover, many of the questions concern themselves with one’s dating life and with managing friendships. Indeed, there’s an interesting irony that a quiz about what kind of witch you are includes only one question that might seem witch-ish (“My favorite insect is …” alludes, to me at least, to possible familiars), as instead it redefines a witch’s life, and witch types as being determined by how one responds to a partner’s infidelity (where turning him into a newt isn’t offered as a possibility), deals with the new girl in town, gets home from a party when one’s ride has disappeared (no, broomsticking it isn’t an option), and interacts with one’s friends.

On one hand, this prepares the audience for the show. If you thought Secret Circle would really be about cauldrons and such, you’re given a quick wake up call that at its heart it will be about dating, being a good friend, and whether you’re being totally rude to your peers. On the other hand, though, the questions therefore subtly start the process of redefining what a witch is. After all, the quiz doesn’t ask what kind of witch you would be – it asks what kind of witch you are. When juxtaposed to the poster campaign’s tag line of “What’s your power?”, powers are redefined as social, and relationship-based, not about changing the weather or so forth. “You” (as the young straight female or presumed young straight female wannabe) are already presumed to be a witch – both a statement about your own powers as young woman, and a welcoming in to the secret circle of playing witch on which the show is about to embark.

And one more thing about you – apparently, “you” are white. All of the witches who you might be are white. Me, I’m a white woman called Diana. I have a strong moral compass. Glad we got that sorted out.

Finally, I have to note with amusement that one of the questions seems there wholly for audience research purposes:

Now that we’ve all agreed it’s D, let’s move on …

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“No, Honey, I Watch it for the History. Honestly”: Playboy Club

Both Playboy Club and Up All Night, by comparison, offer quizzes at their sites with actual correct and incorrect answers. About 15 questions are fired your way, with extra points awarded for speedy answers, and since you’re also not told the correct answer, you’re left needing to take the quiz over and over again if you want to know the answers.

Playboy Club’s quiz is all about the history of Playboy, asking questions such as what Hugh Hefner wanted to call his personal jet (The Big Bunny, for those of you playing at home), when the magazine started (1953), where the first Playboy Club outside of America was (The Philippines), and what animal Hef had wanted to use as mascot at first (a stag).

Its purpose seems to be to frame Playboy Club as Historical (yes, there is a capital H there), while also building up the mythology of Playboy as corporation. I imagine that anyone playing this quiz will have never written a quiz on Playboy before, but that’s sort of the point – there’s something of an act of defiance against Playboy’s detractors here, to turn Playboy into a legitimate, interesting entity worthy of questions, and about which one should know some trivia. This would seem to be one of the hurdles the show faces as a whole – Playboy on network TV? Tsk, tsk, tsk. But the quiz plays its part – small and probably quite inconsequential though it might be – to render Playboy an object of interest. Judgment is neither passed on the company nor called for by the quiz, which instead models a position of curious engagement. If generations of men have excused their interest in the magazine by insisting that it has “great interviews,” the quiz here tries to give a little veneer of intellectual, historical interest to a show that is otherwise selling itself with bunny tails and curvy blondes.

Meanwhile, since all the questions are about history, and none about the seemingly fictional world in which the show is set, we’re encouraged to elide the two, and to see the show as entirely historical, and as interested in documenting a part of American history and culture. It stakes a firm claim of realism.

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“Starring the Straight Star of Arrested Development”: Up All Night

Up All Night uses the same question engine and style (versus the next two NBC shows, which both use another engine), but here to test the player’s knowledge about three of the central cast members, Will Arnett, Christina Applegate, and Maya Rudolph. Up All Night goes all-in on making its cast its selling point. Questions test our knowledge of their comedy chops. Tellingly, Arrested Development features in two questions, while the soon-cancelled Running Wilde is conspicuously absent. We’re also invited to see Rudolph as multi-talented, with questions about her famous musician mother, and her own musical abilities. These are three pretty special people, the quiz tells us.

Interestingly, too, the quiz asks us if we know Arnett’s famous spouse (Amy Poehler) and how many children they have together (2). Presumably, these questions are designed to help set up his authenticity as father of a newborn in the show. I do find myself wondering, though, if they’re also there in part to counter a more recent role of his (which is not asked about), as the gay executive Devon Banks in (NBC’s own!) 30 Rock, and in general to counter his rather camp style as a comedian, to give him straight credentials in time for a role as father.

A final thought on this one: why doesn’t Nick Cannon rank as worthy of even a single question in the quiz? Insert your own answer here.

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“Wow: All the Best Shows Ever Are from NBC and the US!”: Prime Suspect and Whitney

The final type of quiz is actually a poll. Prime Suspect has one of these, asking viewers about their favorite “Leading Ladies of the Law,” while Whitney offers two, one that posits the comeback of the sitcom, then asking readers about their favorite sitcom, the other that asks about favorite television couples.

All three polls attempt a not so subtle move of muscling in on the category in question. After all, why would Whitney ask what your favorite television couple is if it honestly believed you’d show no interest in the couple that stars in this show? In this respect, they’re all pretty forward in pretending that Whitney is already “a classic sitcom” with a fantastic small screen couple, and that Prime Suspect has already provided us with one of television’s “leading ladies of the law.”

On that last note, I’m personally ired by the choices on offer, and those not on offer. Because, you know, I’m actually quite keen to agree with the poll that Prime Suspect has indeed offered us one of the very best female detectives (can I not use the lingo of “ladies of the law,” please?). That is, the British version did. Amusingly, though, Jane Tennyson is nowhere to be seen in the list of possible picks! Is it any wonder that some of our students just don’t get how and when to cite things when cases like this work as their models?

That leads to a larger issue, though, of what selections are offered. First, let’s switch over to the Whitney polls, where the desire to fly the network flag is obvious. All of the options for both questions are NBC shows, leading to what to many television fans would seem the blasphemy of listing, for instance, Just Shoot Me! and Third Rock from the Sun as possible classic sitcoms, while leaving The Simpsons, Roseanne, All in the Family, and I Love Lucy off the list. And yet the preamble for this particular poll – “The sitcom is making a comeback!” – tells us what’s going on here: namely, that NBC is insisting that it is the top location for truly fantastic, “classic” sitcoms, and that it’s “back” with another one.

There’s an amusing tension between the two Whitney polls, at the same time, however. See, many of the suggested favorite couples are from recent or contemporary NBC shows, including The Office, Chuck, Community, 30 Rock (more on that later), Friday Night Lights, Parks and Recreation, and Parenthood. Yet its slate of current sitcoms is wholly absent from the suggested list of “classics.” Especially when the sitcom poll announces that the sitcom is making a comeback, this poses the question of where NBC posits its current shows. Do they not rank highly enough? Perhaps Whitney is a different style of sitcom (“classic”), to be distinguished from 30 Rock and co., and hence we’re being warned of the fact … yet then why are those other shows invoked so readily in the other poll? A little bit of muddiness in the marketing message here, methinks.

Trying to gauge intended audience by the picks on offer works slightly differently with the Prime Suspect poll, which offers Cagney and Lacey, Kono Kalakaua (from Hawaii Five-O), Shakima Greegs (The Wire), Julie Barnes (The Mod Squad), Stacy Sheridan (TJ Hooker), Tina Russo (Hill Street Blues), Olivia Benson (Law and Order: SVU), Anita Van Buren (Law and Order), and Suzanne “Pepper” Anderson (Police Woman). First, I’d note that NBC is willing to acknowledge non-NBC greats here (all hail Kima Greggs!). But it’s also quite an interesting group, mixed in time period and (to a small degree) ethnicity in a way that contrasts quite loudly with Whitney’s all-white, mostly contemporary favorite TV couples. The assumed viewer here seems to be a fair bit older than Whitney’s (s/he knows Police Woman and The Mod Squad, not just Saved by the Bell and Facts of Life), and there’s an explicit pitch to the “quality drama” viewer through references to The Wire and Hill Street Blues. As with Secret Circle, then, the quiz works overtime to summon a specific audience.

To get back to my earlier ire, though, note that all three polls restrict the choices to American shows. Jane Tennyson may be missing, but so is any other acknowledgment of a TV world outside the US, even when an appeal to high cultural quality drama viewers is being made, and even when some options have traveled the Atlantic anyways (if Jim and Pam from the US Office make the cut, why don’t Tim and Dawn from the UK original? How about Basil and Sybil Fawlty?). This is yet more evidence of the American television industry just simply not getting what it means to be international or to address anything but an American audience (or to imagine its American audience as anything but painfully unaware of the rest of the world).

And if our analysis of the Secret Circle quizzes began by noting the gendering and heteronormativity there, it’s still here and going strong. Leading “ladies”? Really? And how telling that all of the “favorite couples” are opposite-gender pairings. Will from Will and Grace makes the list … yet not with any of his gay partners, as he’s disciplined into being straight for the purposes of the list (though, to be fair, that’s kind of the vibe the show went for). And the only slightly non-straight couple on the list – Jenna and her cross-dressing boyfriend Paul from 30 Rock – are tucked away neatly in the very last available spot.

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Conclusion

The great thing with writing a blog entry instead of an essay is that it doesn’t need a stirring, brilliant conclusion. So I don’t have one here. But I hope to have shown how these most banal of extras — quizzes and polls — do quite a lot of work to hail a specific audience, and to assign preferable race, gender, and sexuality to them.

I think all of us (and I’m talking about everyone- not just cast) are sad that something we invested our time, effort and talent into was thrown away so abruptly by the network but the reality is the ratings were VERY low. Nobody knew this show was even on. The advertising campaign for TBL was small to non existent.

We were the last pick up of the season and that’s just the way it goes sometimes. The CW had Melrose Place and Vampire Diaries and had already allocated the publicity budget to those shows. We were on after Top Model and we had the draw of Mischa. They never had any plans to advertise us. I guess we were an experiment to see if ratings can fall out of the air…… um, they cant.

Okay, first off, based on what I saw I’m not ready to defend the show. But I agree with her in blaming the hype, or lack thereof. After all, let’s be clear about something: if a show is cancelled after one or two episodes, it cannot be because it’s bad (even if it is bad); it can only be because the ads were bad or insufficient. Its cancellation is a sign of poor marketing. It’s a massive fallacy of stat analysis in film and TV that poor opening numbers equate to a poor product. If, as with TBL, only one million people tune in to see a show, we’d be foolish to think that all the others didn’t because they know it’s bad. How do they know? They haven’t seen it, and let’s not flatter the TV critics too much to suggest that all of America is waiting to hear what they think, so as much as reviews matter, they can’t be the all and end all. Rather, viewers who aren’t watching haven’t been given a good reason to do so, and/or have been given reasons not to do so. At this early point in a show’s life, they’re responding to the advertising.

Admittedly, a really bad film or TV show will make the trailer or preview maker’s job all the harder, and I don’t mean to suggest that all shows should open with good numbers. And maybe we could be kind to CW and say they’d seen further episodes and knew how truly horrific the show was becoming, hence the early cancellation. But if we’re analyzing the stats, Medekwe’s right.

Which brings us to Brothers, which also experienced rather anemic ratings, especially for FOX. Last Friday, it received 2.82 million viewers with an 18-49 demo ratings/share of 1.0/4. When it replayed on Sunday, it received 3.73 million viewers with a 1.7/5 in the demo. When you consider that first week hits Flash Forward, Modern Family, and Cougar Town all enjoyed solid yet still much lower numbers for their replays, Brothers’ ability to garner better ratings in the second week is impressive. But it also tells me simply that the show had insufficient advertising and/or a crappy timeslot. FOX hurt its chances, in other words. When given a better slot, and perhaps the benefit of some word of mouth, Brothers did better on Sunday. Once more, so much is about the extratextuals – hype and timeslot.

A month from now, I’ll feel better evaluating shows’ life or death based on ratings. And it does give me faith in the human race to see that Melrose Place is getting shamefully low ratings despite an ad blitz. For now, though, and after only 1-3 eps., if a show’s ratings are poor, we really have to blame the nets for doing a bad job at advertising them, and/or at placing them. An ad campaign may capture a show’s essence perfectly (as did MP’s with its trashy feel), but it’s still the ad campaign that’s being reacted to more than the show itself at such an early date.

I’ve been intrigued by the degree to which, in the wake of Gossip Girl’s past success, The CW has pounced upon the guilty pleasure label as being a great one with which to sell (and, of course, design) a show. Consider the following posters, for GG, Melrose Place, and The Beautiful Life, starting with GG. Analysis after the fold…

The Gossip Girl ones are slightly older here, setting the bar. The network revels in the bad press it’s received, turning it into a badge of honor. Teens having sex or having just had sex aren’t just hinted at – indeed, both female leads look semi-orgasmic in two of the posters. The message is quite clear, “yeah, we’ll go there,” and it seems designed to speak both to a teen rebelliousness against adults telling them what they should do, and to GG’s older audiences shirking “quality television” declarations of what they should and shouldn’t be watching. There’s also a gendered element, as that which is a “parental nightmare,” a “nasty piece of work,” and “mindblowingly inappropriate” seems to be female pleasure. While it’s hard to gender the Parents Television Council as male – given how often “parents” is a synonym for “moms,” especially when values are concerned – it’s perhaps significant that the PTC’s criticism is attached to the less gendered of the posters, whereas the two orgasmic posters offer criticisms from two right-leaning, somewhat masculinist papers, the New York Post and the Boston Herald. The viewer is thus hailed as someone who is sick of being told what to do by patrician, paternal forces, and as someone who wants sexy television regardless of what’s being said about it.

Note that there is virtually no narrative or “story” to the posters – GG’s nominal interest in a pair of kids thrust into this upper class urban environment is completely absent. The network isn’t trying to sell story, character, or much else. It’s selling the show as sexed up, voyeuristic, and something that others will chastise you for watching. Guilty pleasure advertising.

Taking several pages from that book is the advertising for The Beautiful Life. The singular palette of black, white, and red now suggests a certain style to the show too. Moreover, since the characters are looking directly at the camera, since they’re in black and white, and since the lighting is crafted meticulously, we’re obviously looking at fashion photography, so the posters give us a clear sense of the show’s premise. (Gossip Girl provided less, partly because those posters were released after the show was up and running).

And yet, once more, there is no sense of plot and little sense of character. One might recognize Sarah Paxton or Corbin Bleu from earlier projects, and project their star images onto their characters here. One might also glean that Ashley Medekwe’s character has a lot of confidence, perhaps even arrogance, while the others seem a little softer, but otherwise there’s little to be said about character. Instead, voyeurism is once more for sale front and center. Here, too, the viewer’s even being challenged on such voyeurism – the characters look straight at us and enquire “What are you looking at?” While on the surface a rebuke, since it’s spoken on an ad that clearly wants us to look at The Beautiful Life, the suggestion is actually that we shouldn’t feel at all embarrassed about looking. Look as much as you want to, it turns out to be saying. And so again we have ads that do not dispel the myth of guilty pleasures (after all, none of these ads need wrap themselves in the guise of the inappropriate), but rather invoke feelings of guilty viewing yet encourage the viewer to harness that guilt and make it pleasurable: “you probably shouldn’t be staring at these naked figures, but you know you want to,” these ones say.

And finally we come to Melrose Place, which of course has the distinct advantage of being a re-envisioning of a show that is one of the more notorious guilty pleasure shows in television history. Thus it comes pre-wrapped, and all the posters need to do is remind us of the place (hence the pool, the palm trees, and the signature condo style), and ensure that we’ve got a modern 2009 spin, not just the guilty pleasure of the nineties. Toward this latter end, they do the job by draping themselves in voyeurism and by employing “mind-blowingly inappropriate” (as the PTC might say) language.

The picture on the left shows a man mauling a woman who looks at the camera with a come-hither invitation to join in or enjoy the view, and just in case we missed that last part, there’s another guy who is both watching them and watching us. It’s all very Eyes Wide Shut, aiming for weird erotic tension. And the bad pun in the text aims to shock, quite literally suggesting that there’s a whole lot of fucking going on in this show. The middle one has all three women rehearsing the Beautiful Life “what are you looking at?” question/invitation, it offers a revealing look at the breast of the woman in the foreground, and once more using the text to shock, it labels her (or all three of them) a “bitch.” And finally there’s the play on the ménage a trois in the poster on the right, with another guy in the poster who is being encouraged to stare, and with the viewer invited to do likewise. To add to the classiness, we can clearly see the blonde’s underwear and she’s perched on him as if ready for or engaged in the act.

Taking all three sets, personally I think the GG ones are quite fun. They’re not all that revealing, and I read them as engaging more in a playful attack on their critics (and a jujitsu one at that, using that criticism to sell) than truly reveling in the voyeurism. That said, knowing that GG is largely pitched at women and largely has a female audience helps take the edge off what otherwise might be a worrying level of voyeurism. By contrast, the MP posters are really going for a porn aesthetic. On one hand, as I said above, they do need to up the ante if they’re going to suggest that this version is even more risqué than the nineties one. But on the other hand, they seem to go well beyond guilty pleasure selling. Calling a woman a bitch is already not exactly a lovely thing, but when it’s one who is very nearly showing us her breast, the poster evokes images of the degradation of women in pornography that posits the woman actually likes being treated like dirt. And the other two just make me thoroughly uncomfortable too. Unlike GG here, I don’t have the assurance that this show is after women alone, and the pictures are significantly more revealing, enjoying their voyeurism without much of a sense of that being strategic or playful. So call me a prude, but I think MP’s posters are, like the show itself, pretty awful, illustrating the fine line between selling a guilty pleasure by playing at trashiness, and actual trashiness. GG, I’d pose, is ironically trashy; MP is trashy.

I’m variously annoyed, depressed, and amused by spam. Annoyed because, well, it’s annoying. Depressed because it can only exist because some doofuses actually click through (“Do I wish I had a ‘trouser beast’? Why, damn it, I do! I’d better click through and buy me some of those pills, so that tomorrow I wake up with one that will, as this ad promises, ‘scare the neighbors’”) and thus it reminds me both of how stupid some people are and of how stupid many people think we all are. Amused when its inappropriateness can only be met with laughter.

Part of running a blog involves dealing with spam. There’s the whacked out spam that reads like clothing I’d often see when I lived in Hong Kong, peppered with English phrases yet designed by non-English speakers (“crazy pilot home run go anaphylactic shock heroes live for the best why Friends dig it barroom brawl cheese town tank boy”), and then there’s the stuff posing as real messages (a recent one is “I have been searching everywhere on the internet for this specific information. Finally I find it here! Thanks.” Maybe I’d believe it more if there was information in the post on which it commented, not just opinion/rambling). Both just want you to click through.

But around this time of year, I always get some new show / returning show spam that doesn’t want you to click through, but that wants to sell a show. It rarely goes into the filter, and seems not to have been delivered by a ‘bot. Rather, some poor intern somewhere seems to have the job of trawling through Google, and replying to all blogs that mention a specific show with enthusiastic plans to watch the new season. More after the fold:

Example: I recently received a comment on a two year-old post about CW’s ill-fated Life is Wild. In that post, I made some comments about various other shows, including Gossip Girl, about which I wrote:

To The CW, if you must keep the Kristen Bell voiceover for Gossip Girl, try to limit her reference to herself (“Who loves you? Gossip Girl,” “Gossip Girl here,” “Where will you find out? Gossip Girl”) to once per episode. Mimicking Elmo isn’t a strategy for being cool

That inspired this comment:

Wow! You are right! Gossip girl really rocks! The new episode season 3 is going to air in less than 30 days. Let’s watch it man

Note that I didn’t say it rocks. And, as an aside, I find the “Let’s watch it man” (emphasis added) hilarious, since it poses the writer as a dude speaking to another dude, which doesn’t seem to match the gendering of the show (“bro, let’s get some Buds, kick back and watch the GG”). But observe its sly attempt to use my blog to let you, the reading public (yes, you, Mum!), know when the show starts up again, and to encourage you to watch it.

And herein lies my ultimate beef with spam. It’s lazy. I’m not naïve enough to think that we could just wave a magic wand and make advertising go away. I’m also not silly enough to think that all advertising is Hell incarnate – some advertising serves an informational role. But would they at least put some effort and some thought into it? I think that this is the hard line for many people when it comes to advertising, product placement, spinoff merchandising, etc. The Simpsons, for instance, has videogames that capture the show’s feel and attitude, it has talking bottle openers that someone put some thought into, and it has Krusty Seal of Approval stickers. They’re all intelligent, and I can appreciate the effort both to extend the text meaningfully and to actually think about the audience member. But it also has cups with a generic image of Homer on. Boring. Similarly, I’ve seen advertising campaigns that are intelligent and thoughtful, and I’ve seen others that are lazy and stupid.

As I noted above, I’m sure the stupid stuff works with some people. Lazy paratexts sell and lazy ads can work. And yes, this Gossip Girl ad made me laugh, but otherwise it annoyed me. Which means the show’s playing a risky game, since I now see Gossip Girl as undifferentiated from the “grow yourself a trouser beast” ads that litter my Hotmail account. So too might my reader(s) (that’s two shoutouts for you in one post, Mom! Sorry that last one came in a rude sentence) if I let the comment be published. And as I type this, I’m aware of the irony that some GG intern will likely reply to this post with a similar peppy encouragement to watch the show. But, “man,” all I’m asking for is a little effort.

While unpacking and getting the new life sorted out, one of the things I’ve found some spare time for this summer has been catching up on (ie: watching from the beginning) Mad Men. I’m now intrigued by their advertising for the new season.

Before getting to the ads for the show, though, let me say how wonderful I think Mad Men is. I’m so impressed by the storytelling, and by how the show can shift focus to various supporting characters with skill, fleshing them out wonderfully over time. It’s also a treat to see a show that can critically examine a whole bunch of “issues” without feeling didactic, obvious, or hackneyed.

I’m also somewhat surprised by its relatively low ratings to date, which places its ad campaigns under the microscope for me. Yeah, it’s slow, it’s hard to crack if you missed earlier episodes, and it’s on a cable channel. But Lost is hard to crack, and has managed much higher ratings. And, like Lost, I would have imagined that its eye candy factor, both in terms of beautiful people, but also in terms of high quality filming, would have helped smooth over other perceived problems. Even more than Lost, too, it’s been a critical darling. Like 30 Rock, it’s managed the amazing trick of being full of product placement yet still loved and revered by TV critics and academics alike. It’s gotten a bunch of Emmy nominations.

So, if it’s so good, and if it has such good buzz, why aren’t more people watching it?

AMC is clearly asking the same thing, since they’ve put a major push into marketing it this last month. Two strategies in particular are interesting.

First, as many of you will have seen on Facebook, they came up with a Mad Men Yourself avatar creator. The Simpsons made such a splash with its avatar creator for The Simpsons Movie, as Facebook went all Springfieldian for a month or more. It’s a smart tool for getting your show out there, and I’d imagine that if the Yearbook Yourself site wasn’t competing with it right now, I’d be seeing even more Duck Phillips, Pete Campbell, or Rachel Mencken clones on Facebook every time I log in. Below is my own arrival at Sterling Cooper.

What I find somewhat amusing with these is that neither Springfield nor Sterling Cooper seem like particularly wonderful worlds to step into. I think of a friend who recently expressed concern that a Facebook quiz said that she was Betty Draper in Mad Men, and a friend of hers noted that there’s no particularly wonderful woman to be in the show. I’d echo that with men – sure, everyone wanted to be Lester or Omar for the Facebook Wire quizzes, but do you really want to be Don, Sterling, or Pete? If so, you kind of missed the criticism. I think the way to read these avatar creators, though, is not that they’re saying that you might want to step into these worlds, as much as they’re sending a message that one could, since they are immersive, expansive, tangible environments.

The other part of the Mad Men campaign that somewhat perplexes me is its joining forces with Banana Republic (hereafter BR). BR has designed a bunch of its summer items around the show, and its windows are full of ads (including a competition that would allow one a walk-on role in the show). Mad Men is full of product placement, but since it’s set in the early sixties, they’re all for brands that were around then. BR wasn’t, so already there’s a somewhat odd temporal disjuncture. It’s a smart relationship for BR, since Mad Men is heavily stylized, full of well-dressed and crisp looking people, and it’s a critical darling, so they can brand themselves as classy, chic, and sophisticated. But Mad Men seems to get very little textually out of the deal – how does that communicate to anyone a sense of what Mad Men is, other than saying it’s the classy sibling of the Gap and Old Navy (but which shows are the Gap and Old Navy in this metaphor?). Admittedly, what it does get is visibility – it gets into malls around the continent.

So what I’m left wondering is whether that’s ultimately all Mad Men really needs to get more viewers – visibility. Is a BR shopper a would-be Mad Men viewer? I’d love to see the demographics and research behind this campaign. Indeed, I’m left, ironically, wanting to know how this show about advertising handles its advertising.

Remember when The WB network began and it had a fair amount of African American programming, but then it went for wealthy young white women? Then UPN also programmed a lot of African American content. Then the two merged, and African American shows were ghettoized into one night so that the wealthy young white women could hold court for the other nights. Well, with the cancellation of The Game and Everybody Hates Chris, the CW can now boldly announce that CW stands for Completely White. (Okay, there’s Tyra and there’s the kid on 90210, but not much else.)

Gone, too, are 13: Fear is Real, 4Real, Easy Money, In Harm’s Way, Privileged, Reaper, and Valentine.

What’s new? After the fold …
Inspired by the relative success of 90210, the CW is now bringing us a reboot of Melrose Place. I encourage you to watch the clips below, so that you too can revel in how completely bad this show looks.

Indeed, I must interject here and note that either the CW is just really crap and/or I am finally an old person, because there’s very little on this network that I find stomachable.

Exhibit B here is The Beautiful Life, a show all about the glamorous life of scheming, conniving, catty models. How empowering! The preview clips suggest that the CW has found an innovative way to cut their production budget – by filming a half-hour show, yet filling in the extra hour with close ups of runway models walking. I feel I know the actresses’ calf muscles and cheekbones better than their characters after watching this, though maybe that’s as deep as the characters get?

The third new show for Fall, The Vampire Diaries, clearly aims to capitalize on the Twilight buzz by adapting the Vampire Diaries books. But who knew vampires could be so utterly boring? The clips are entirely yawn-worthy, proving why the nets should spring for real trailers, not just crappy scenes seemingly picked at random.

Midseason, we’ll have Parental Discretion Advised added, a drama centered on a young woman who has bounced around between foster parents but now finds her biological parents. It’s from a Brothers and Sisters producer, and though the clip drips sap at points, I actually found it rather intriguing, and narratively engaging.

The schedule is paired down, partly because CW only have two hours a night, partly because they’ve ceased broadcasting networked content on Sundays, leaving the affiliates to their own devices. Anyways, it looks like this:

• Monday wisely keeps the winning pair of Gossip Girl at 8 and One Tree Hill at 9.
• Tuesday is 90s flashback night, with 90210 then Melrose Place.
• Wednesday starts with America’s Next Top Model, then stays model-centered with The Beautiful Life.
• Thursday goes gothic, with Vampire Diaries replacing Smallville at 8, then Supernatural staying put.
• Smallville begins its new life on Friday at 8, followed by an encore of America’s Next Top Model.

CBS’s turn to unveil their schedule came yesterday. But first, fellow Extratextual Ivan Askwith just posted some neat thoughts about serial television, and I’d hate for them to be swallowed amidst my upfront posts, so please scroll down to read those too.

As for CBS, there’s no eleventh hour reprieve for The Eleventh Hour, Without a Trace vanished, The Ex List is now on the ex-show list, Worst Week certainly had its worst week, The Unit got a bullet between the eyes, Harper’s Island experienced a horrific end too, and Game Show in My Head will remain in the head.

However, Patricia Arquette went from speaking to the dead to reincarnating the dead, as her Medium, just a day after getting tossed by NBC, is now on CBS. It will be on a new Women Who Talk to Dead People Friday, along with Ghost Whisperer.

Below the fold are CBS’ new shows, and that whole “rescued from death” theme is prevalent:

First, Accidentally on Purpose brings Jenna Elfman back to TV, as a newly pregnant and single movie critic. Hearing about it made me wonder why she was away for that long, given that she totally drove Dharma and Greg, and then I watched the clip and found it about as funny as someone lancing my eye with a hot poker, so there’s your answer.

Next, with ER dead and therefore her chances of holding out for yet more guest appearances, Julianna Marguiles stars in The Good Wife, a drama about a woman whose politician husband gets chucked in jail, leading to her returning to her career as a defense attorney. The trailer is very savvy in drawing upon our fascination with how Mrs. Spitzer or Elizabeth Edwards feel when their husbands are disgraced to create interest in her character. The clip’s somewhat interesting, and Marguiles does a reasonably good job, so who knows?

Three Rivers joins the medical drama fervor (Mercy, Trauma, Nurse Jackie, Grey’s, Private Practice, House, and probably some others I’m forgetting), with a bunch of transplant doctors bringing new life to those needing a spare liver, kidney, or other such organ. The trailer’s on the cheesy side, waxing long and sappy about the value of second chances and the importance of hero-doctors, but aren’t all medical shows sold with such junk around them? It seemed relatively well done aside from that, so if that “aside from that” component is more prevalent than the sap, it might be interesting.

And if you can’t ever get enough of those medical dramas, good news, since you’ll be getting another one from CBS midseason, Miami Trauma.

Meanwhile, CBS’s other key addition to its Fall line-up is NCIS: Los Angeles. It stars LL Cool J and Chris O’Donnell, which has to be one of the funnier pairings I’ve heard of in a long while. When LL rapped about coming back to rule the rap world in “It’s Time for War,” who knew he intended to do so with an NCIS spinoff as his beachhead? The clip tries to make itself look as much 24 as NCIS, but when both O’Donnell and LL tell us the show is “hot,” I’m not convinced.

And midseason will also bring another Canadian-American coproduction (“another” since Flashpoint is returning in Summer 2010), The Bridge, starring BSG’s Aaron Douglas as a cop who becomes head of the police union. I love this Canadianization of American TV: first a sniper show in which you root for nobody to get shot, and then a show where the protagonist is a union head. When the US finally gets universal health care, you can thank CBS for allowing our Canadian thoughts access to the American mind.

Midseason also brings Arranged Marriage, a reality show, in which unlucky, perhaps undesirable, individuals let their friends arrange marriages for them. The show will follow their lives post-marriage (yes, the marriage will be real). Oh dear. Has it come to this?

Undercover Boss is another midseason reality show, placing bosses in low-level jobs at their businesses, yet in disguise so they can hear what people really think of them and maybe learn a bit about life at the bottom. It’s based on a UK version, which puts the boss in the job for at least 10 days, and occasionally ends up with people getting due change or recognition, but also results in people getting in trouble. Charming. I think I’m washing my hair that night (and, yes, for the record, I am mostly bald).

I can’t find embeddable clips at the moment, so just go here instead to see NCIS: LA, Three Rivers, The Good Wife, and Accidentally on Purpose.

Meanwhile, the Fall schedule for CBS looks like this:

• Monday is comedy night with How I Met Your Mother at 8, Accidentally on Purpose at 8.30, Two and a Half Men at 9, then Big Bang Theory at 9.30. And, because Horatio Caine’s always a barrel of laughs, CSI: Miami follows them at 10
• Tuesday is NCIS night, with NCIS at 8, NCIS: LA at 9, then The Good Wife coming in at 10 as a very odd thematic pairing
• Wednesday gives us The New Adventures of Old Christine at 8, Gary Unmarried at 8.30, Criminal Minds at 9, and CSI: New York at 10
• Thursday offers Survivor at 8, CSI at 9, and The Mentalist at 10
• Friday is, as said, Women Who Speak to Dead People Night, with Ghost Whisperer then Medium, followed by Numb3rs, which promises to use more ouija boards this season
• Saturday offers crime dramas, then 48 Hours at 10
• Sunday has stalwart 60 Minutes (can they cancel Andy Rooney, though, or at least spin him off to his own angry old man show called Another Thing I Don’t Like About Life After the Great War) at 7, then Amazing Race at 8, Three Rivers at 9, and Cold Case at 10

I’ll try and get to The CW soon, then will be back to discuss the dead pool, and also the head to head battles in the schedule (because, lest you and your TiVo/DVR be so wrapped up in each other’s company, a huge number of people still watch when the shows are actually played).

ABC’s upfronts were on Tuesday, but here’s what happened:

Many of the cancelled shows were announced earlier, and I’ll discuss the dead pool in a later post, but let me say with joy that both According to Jim and Samantha Who? are no more. ABC killed Pushing Daisies this year and also yanked Boston Legal, so they have a lot to make up for; this is a start. Kill Grey’s Anatomy, ABC, and we’ll call it even. Alas, Grey’s and its negative effect on undergrads’ ability to spell my name carries on. Also gone though are Cupid, Dirty Sexy Money, Eli Stone, Homeland Security USA, In the Motherhood, Life on Mars, Opportunity Knocks, and The Unusuals (wow, that last one was quick! I guess Joan and God ain’t talkin’ no more).

There are also a whole bunch of new shows, especially on Wednesdays. Comments, embedded clips, and schedule below the fold.

ABC has been advertising Flash Forward for a while now, as anyone watching Lost ads who saw oblique “What Did You See?” ads knows. The set-up is that the entire world blacks out for a couple of minutes, then realize that they all “flashed forward” to an image of their lives six months in the future. Starring Joseph Fiennes, about time travel, and on ABC, I’m surprised it’s not called Damon Lindelof in Love. Lost’s Penny (Sonya Walger) and Mr. Sulu, John Cho, also star. I’m suitably intrigued and impressed with the clip, so I’ll be watching.

I also found the clip for The Middle promising. I’m not mad about Patricia Heaton, but love the janitor from Scrubs and am happy to see him with meaningful work, especially if the script is this good.

I’m somewhat confused by the ad for Happy Town. It starts by boasting that this is from the network that brought us Twin Peaks, but I wonder if the trailer editor ever watched that show. Yes, there’s a murder, but I don’t see the rich characters, quirkiness, and/or thematic play of Twin Peaks. It seems more Harper’s Island, and not suitably interesting to grab me.

Shark Tank is ABC’s new reality show, and seems to be aiming to mix The Apprentice and American Inventor. I don’t see it working, though: it seems too mean (and hence hardly a good fit for ABC’s warm fuzzy brand). And I’m not sure people want to watch shows about failing in the business world in this environment.

Modern Family seems to be the network’s attempt to give the Office treatment to family life, with a domesticom mockumentary. Ed O’Neill returns to TV, though without a clip to watch, I have little else to comment upon.

Ditto with The Forgotten, which is yet another procedural, Cold Case meets Without a Trace. I’m at capacity with my procedural viewing, so I’ll pass.

Eastwick is also lacking a clip at present, though ABC’s marketing team suggest that it is “a devilish blend of Desperate Housewives and Charmed that explores the hidden depths of women,” “brimming with romance, mystery and wicked charm.” Hmmmm. Insert disinterested look here.

Keeping with the girl power theme, ABC is also bringing together Courtney Cox, Busy Phillips, and Jordan from Scrubs in Cougar Town. The title alone hardly promises respect for the women, and the clip is full of angry neurotic women clichés. The young man seems so much more composed and comfortably in his skin, giving us yet another pathetic female lead. This show seems to be exactly what I found disempowering about a certain brand of postfeminism.

Kelsey Grammar takes another swing at primetime comedy with Hank, and if the clip’s anything to go by, this one’s another strike out. Not funny.

The Deep End steps into risky territory. Buoyed by the strength of the Law and Order franchise, and with a spunoff character, NBC’s Conviction didn’t last long with the young hotshot lawyer premise, so The Deep End is, well, jumping in at the deep end. Populated with actors from failed WB/CW shows, it looks okay, but only okay.

Finally, Lost’s Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell) headlines the rebirth of V. I haven’t seen a clip, so I’ll withhold comment, but it better be more than a camp 80s product with lizard people.

Anyways, ABC gave us an incomplete Fall schedule, without telling us where Happy Town, The Deep End, and V fit, no less (or where Lost will go when it returns in 2010). Nevertheless:

• Monday kicks off with Dancing with the Stars at 8 (to be replaced by The Bachelor when it’s over). Nathan Fillian fans keep their beloved Castle at 10
• Tuesday offers a mixed bag, with Shark Tank at 8, then the Dancing with the Stars results show at 9 (or Scrubs at 9 and Better Off Ted at 9.30, when the show’s done). From entrepreneurial competition to either dancing or offbeat comedy, we then segue to procedural at 10, with The Forgotten
• Wednesday is all new, with Hank at 8, The Middle at 8.30, Modern Family at 9, Cougar Town at 9.30, and Eastwick at 10.
• Thursday brings us Flash Forward at 8. Then Grey’s Anatomy comes on at 9 (though since Lost seems like it’d be a good fit with Flash Forward, and FF’s ads played during Lost, let’s hope this means Grey’s will be gone by the new year), and Private Practice at 10
• Friday starts with Supernanny at 8, then Ugly Betty has apparently been banished to Fridays at 9, followed by 20/20 at 10
• Saturday is College Football
• Sunday is wholly familiar: America’s Funniest Home Videos at 7, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition at 8, Desperate Housewives at 9, and Brothers & Sisters at 10

I’ve already discussed NBC’s new shows, since they already announced them. But the big news of the day, for me, is that Chuck was renewed. And in talks with journalists, Ben Silverman drew the line directly back to the fans’ and Subway’s campaign to keep the show around (see my post on the campaign here).

Law and Order was the other lucky survivor of the day, though Medium, Life, and My Name is Earl weren’t so lucky. Apparently, CBS might pick up Medium, and My Name is Earl’s Greg Garcia is also hoping to shop his show around. Garcia wasn’t a happy man, firing back at NBC that “It’s hard to be too upset about being thrown off the Titanic.” Ouch. I hope the show finds a new home, since I really like it (what’s not to like about Randy and/or Crab Man?), and it seems like it might be a good fit with FOX.

As for the schedule, more after the fold:

We already know that Jay Leno owns a huge chunk of it. Ben Silverman talked a big game of not showing repeats, though if Leno tanks, it’s hard to see how NBC won’t just play everything multiple times over. Indeed, I couldn’t read the schedule without thinking about what will happen when Leno tanks. Any thoughts?

Anyways, the schedule looks like this in Fall:

• Monday, Heroes at 8, and Trauma at 9
• Tuesday is still Biggest Loser night
• Wednesday begins with Parenthood at 8, then Law and Order: SVU takes over
• Thursday night comedy kicks off with SNL Weekend Update on Thursday (memo to NBC: you are not The Daily Show; please stop trying), then The Office, Parks and Recreation, and Community
• Law and Order ends up in the Friday slot, which could be its death, but it has a good thematic pairing in Southland at 9, so though I’m sure neither show’s staffs are too happy about their timeslot, it might actually work for them
• Saturday brings Dateline at 8, then encore performances of Trauma at 9, and SVU at 10
• Sunday is football

The Olympics will interrupt proceedings, and it seems as though some changes will happen before The Olympics, some after, but the above schedule undergoes the following changes at some point:

• On Monday, Chuck will replace Heroes, and Day One follows Trauma
• On Tuesday, 100 Questions cuts into a slimmed down Biggest Loser at 9.30
• Mercy replaces Parenthood on Wednesday
• On Thursday, Community will replace SNL, and 30 Rock will take its regular spot at 9.30
• Friday stays the same
• Saturday sees Southland encores replace Trauma’s
• Sunday starts with Dateline at 7, then Seinfeld’s Marriage Ref moves in at 8, while Celebrity Apprentice takes the 9 slot

Is it just me, or does Spring look like it’s shaping up to be the much better season? Chuck, Lost, Day One, 30 Rock