CATHODE CORNER #1: Most everybody agrees CBS’s Winter Olympics coverage sucked. Here’s why: The network thought it could return to the alleged good old days of the now-nonexistent mass audience, by running hour after hour of “personality” features and flag-waving hype while snubbing anybody who might actually care to watch a sporting event. That just doesn’t cut it in today’s age of subcultures, where you must show more than superficial interest in a topic if you want more than a superficial response.
CATHODE CORNER #2: For those who think six commercial broadcast TV networks just ain’t enough, here come two more. One’s PaxNet, being assembled by one Lowell W. Paxson. Launching in August (locally on the UHF channel now running the ValueVision shopping network), it’ll skew to the AARP crowd (program acquisitions include reruns of Dr. Quinn, Touched by an Angel, and the Seattle-filmed Under One Roof). More ominously, Paxson’s a close pal to James Dobson, head of the rabid right-wing lobby group Focus on the Family.
The other new weblet, provisionally named Silver King and without a startup date, might be more interesting. It’s run by former Fox and Paramount exec Barry Diller. He’s acquired the Home Shopping Network with its 12 major-market stations (none here), the USA and Sci-Fi cable channels, and a piece of Universal’s syndicated shows (Xena, Hercules, Jerry Springer) as assets in assembling his network foray. (Diller also bought TicketMaster from Paul Allen, who in turn now owns a stake in Diller’s TV ventures.)
The most intriguing part is Diller’s promise to emphasize local programming on the Silver King-owned stations, and to encourage it on the network’s affiliate stations. Despite recent advances in cheap, efficient video-production equipment, many U.S. cities now have little or no local shows other than news, sports, and sponsored preachers. (Seattle, with Almost Live and Evening Magazine and Northwest Afternoon, is an exception. And even here, indigenous fare’s decreased since the early-’90s days of Spud Goodman and 7 Live.) It’d be immeasurably cool if we and other areas had more local talk, local entertainment, maybe even a local documentary or two.
ODDS & ENDS: Spy magazine’s apparently folded, again. Did anyone notice? Didn’t think so…. No matter what ya think of The Real World, ya gotta love MTV’s new slogan: “Giving the squares something to bitch about”…. Speaking of bitching: While cleaning closets, I ran across my ’80s button collection and wistfully decided to seek new cute slogans-on-tin. But none were to be had–only hateful, assholier-than-thou badges that’d make anyone who wore ’em look as sad as the jerks they were meant to insult. Where’d all the fun go?
A WORD TO THE WISEGUYS: A kindly reader suggested I stop using the term “yuppie,” describing it as an ’80s relic with no modern relevancy. To be exact about it, the small, monocultural caste for whom almost everything in today’s Seattle is designed and marketed can no longer be called young urban professionals, no matter how many day-spa facial treatments and hair transplantations they endure. And many current young adults with careers don’t necessarily share their elders’ market-decreed preference for all things fetishistically bland. (Note the absence of James Taylor or Bonnie Raitt in that ’70s revival youth fad.)
Still, the city’s real-estate developers, politicians, fashion retailers, mainstream media outlets, big restaurateurs, et al. continue to direct their efforts at one and only one target market–the ever-venerated upscale baby boomer, with a liberal-arts degree, a lucrative career, and claims of former “’60s rebellion” participation contradicted by a relentlessly middlebrow aesthetic. Only a sliver of the region’s population fit even close to this image, now or in the ’80s. This fact doesn’t stop the political and business leaders from proclaiming ’em the only people who deserve to live here.
So there is an urban-professional caste, powerful beyond its numbers, whether you call it by the Y word or not. If not, what would you? I’ve used such alternate terms as “the Demographically Correct” and “people who think giant glass bowls are art.” Record suggestions at >clark@speakeasy.org. Remember: We’re not talking about real individuals, just mythic archetypes.
