I haven't really talked about this online yet, but over the last year or two of running CCLaP, I've started coming up with the hazy first general shape of something I've been calling in my head the "Grand Unified Theory of the Arts" -- namely, the idea that every new medium for artistic expression that ever gets invented actually goes through a remarkably similar series of steps in its history, as far as how it's perceived and used by the general public, something you can clearly see if you line up these media's histories in specific ways, but easy to miss if you don't. I don't nearly have enough of the details worked out yet to start writing about it extensively; but since I was thinking about the following recently, and since it's so relevant to what's going on in the general culture these days too, I thought today I'd take a look at the history of the television industry as a good example of what I'm talking about.

But as always, first a few caveats are in order; for example, every time I refer today to the "arts" or "artistic projects," I also mean projects designed primarily just to entertain, since the arts and entertainment are so intricately linked in human culture. And of course, when I refer to the history of television, I actually mean the entire history of broadcasting in general, in that many aspects of how television stations work even to this day are still based on rules first established at the dawn of commercial radio, a hundred years ago now back at the beginning of the 20th century. In fact, I'm convinced that this is part of why all these media's histories are so relatively similar when it comes to their ups and downs -- because of most humans' bad habit of establishing quick rules for any given medium right after its invention, then blindly and irrationally sticking to these hastily established rules for the entire rest of that medium's history, no matter how problematic they're eventually proven to be, no matter how inefficient they become in a changing future society. For example, why do novelists get paid a percentage of every book sold, while screenwriters are simply paid a flat fee no matter how many people see the movie? Because those were the norms first established in these two media when they originally coalesced into industries; and once such industry norms are established, most people find it a herculean effort to break with such norms.

See, at the beginning of their histories, both TV and radio were experimental media, with just a few adventurous early adopters willing to invest the money and patience needed to be regular listeners and watchers, almost exactly for example what you saw with the videogame industry in the '70s and '80s. (And in fact radio barely even got out of its experimental stage before TV was invented in the first place.) Back when they were first established, these "broadcasting networks" were happy for any kind of revenue at all they could manage to sweet-talk their way into, and considered themselves lucky to have just a handful of hours a day of original programming, while the majority of the public's attention and money was still devoted to such things as paper books, live theatre, vinyl records and more; and again, you can see this exactly in the same kinds of terms as videogame companies in the '80s, happy for any sales at all in a world where people still mostly spent their entertainment budget on other things. But this all changed for television after World War Two, when a whole combination of factors contributed to TV becoming the most dominant medium in the country for distributing artistic content: the quick rise of high-technology in those years; the decentralizing of what was then mostly a packed urban population into millions of isolated suburban homes; the need to convert a heavily-producing military-based manufacturing industry into a peacetime domestic-goods one; rising household incomes combined with rising consumerist peer pressure (i.e. "Keeping Up With The Joneses"); and let's not forget the pure science-fictiony gee-whiz allure of the medium itself, always a huge driving factor behind any new artistic medium.

And so that led to the national cultural focus shifting so much to TV in the '50s, '60s and '70s, and therefore so much money shifting to that medium too; and that's what pushed these broadcast networks to start providing eight hours a day, twelve hours a day, sixteen hours and more a day of original programming, so that they'd have an excuse to sell more and more ads to what at the time was an unending line of cash-flush clients queued up out the door and around the block. And then this is also when the television industry established so many of its rules for itself, ones that sometimes seem so ridiculous now but made more sense then -- for example, paying all that money for all those pilots each year, just to reject most of them and then eventually cancel even most of the ones they green-lit, which made a lot more sense when TV shows were so profoundly less expensive to produce; or the industry standard of 22 to 28 episodes per year for the average weekly series, which was much more easily accomplished back when television-writing was much less sophisticated and there was much less expected of it, and therefore such scripts could be shat out by the dozens each year without breaking a sweat. (In fact, let's not forget that many early TV series would actually do a full 30 to 35 episodes a year, one almost every single week except for summers.)

But then just like every other artistic medium in history, by the '80s most people within the television industry had come to mistake its thirty years of cultural dominance for a belief that it had always been this way, and will always continue to be so. And so it's this period, extending throughout the '90s as well, that you suddenly saw everyone in this industry get greedy -- network owners selling out to huge corporate conglomerates for obscene amounts of money, the invention of cable, the gradual expansion of the number of stations at one's disposal from a handful to then 30 or 40, then quickly into the hundreds, every single one of them relying on the traditional industry model of 24-hour programming and ad-based revenue. And even worse, this attitude from the TV execs that such a system would be able to support limitless expansion, that the ad dollars would simply never dry up no matter how many channels one opened. And even worse than all this, now that all these places were being run by corporate conglomerates, and with billions of dollars now exchanging hands, suddenly it was the people with business degrees not only making all the business decisions like they should, but all the creative ones too; and see, there's a reason why serious problems always develop at creative companies when you put business people in charge of creative decisions, because the first thing that's tossed is any sense of sanctity for the creative process itself. See, I don't mean this as an insult (such people are an important part of any creative-based company), but business people are trained from the start to see creative projects merely as sellable and purchasable commodities, interchangeable products where the actual quality from unit to unit doesn't really matter, which is the whole reason that creative businesses have two different kinds of employees to begin with -- it's the creative people who decide what the company is going to produce, then the business people who figure out how to sell the thing the creative people chose.

But here's the funny thing, that this paradigm actually worked deceptively well throughout the Postmodern Age; and I say "deceptively," of course, because now in the 2000s we've suddenly seen a series of developments that have quickly shattered this whole shell-game illusion the industry had set up, more quickly in fact than anyone thought possible:

--The production quality of TV shows going up and up, for example, with more and more movie stars being hired for them too, driving budgets up to astronomical levels;

--The growing sophistication in TV storytelling too, leading to these dense and complex serial shows, whose writing staffs simply can't churn out 20 or 25 episodes every year, or at least not do so while maintaining the extra-high level of quality that make those shows hits to begin with;

--The death of traditional advertising as a cost-effective way to sell products to the general public anymore, and the growing weariness among most traditional clients to spend so much on television advertising anymore;

--The pure contempt these corporate television executives have shown the creative members of their industry over the last decade -- the endless production notes, the endless show-tweaking, the endless forced compromises -- driving more and more of the legitimately talented creatives in their industry straight into the loving embrace of other creative media (see for example the spike in new online multimedia production companies, during last year's strike of the Writers Guild of America);

--And related to that, the growing simple realization that most audience members won't in fact just sit through any crap you put in front of them -- that the only reason they did so in the first place was simply because no viable alternative was available;

--Which of course leads to the biggest complication for the TV industry of all, the astronomically fast rise of the internet, and the collective serious challenge to audiences' attentions that these most recent streaming-video, home-broadband years have suddenly started providing -- from Facebook to YouTube, podcasting to blogging, and 40 million other diversions in between.

What we're actually seeing these days, then, is not nearly the full-blown cultural crisis some people are making the meltdown of Hollywood out to be, but merely the inevitable passing of television as this nation's primary means for distributing artistic expression and light entertainment, and all the fiscal ramifications that come with that -- less audience members, hence less advertisers, hence less need for 24-hour programming, just less less less less less, exactly like what happened to live theatre in this country during the 1950s, '60s and '70s. And just like any other medium's moment of losing national dominance, the execs within the TV industry have mostly tried to respond to all this by clinging to all these established rules of their medium, no matter how ridiculously inefficient or outdated they've become: just to cite one good example, how they just keep going on producing a dozen new series every year, just to eventually reject or cancel eleven of them, despite each of them now costing several million dollars for every single episode. And the only reason it seems to be such a bigger deal this time, versus for example the demise of live theatre last century, is that the now-corporate-dominated television industry had pushed expectations to such a ridiculous level to begin with, trying to squeeze an amount of money out of an artistic medium that no artistic medium could ever possibly be expected to maintain for long. And so of course when one particular artistic medium starts losing billions of dollars a year, of course it's going to seem like some kind of cultural cataclysm, instead of the simple changing of the guard it is, a simple readjustment of an overinflated market.

It's no coincidence, no coincidence at all, that in a mere ten years we have seen the accidental and almost complete 180-degree shift in the television industry to the paradigm that now exists -- how roughly 90 percent of all original programming anymore is ultra-cheap disposable crap, game shows and reality shows and clip shows and the like, while the dozen decent traditional scripted shows collectively still on the air are not just good anymore but all them very, very good; think Mad Men, The Sopranos, The Wire, Lost, etc etc etc. After all, this is exactly what happened to live theatre during the second half of the 20th century, exactly what happened to paper publishing during the first half, exactly what happened to representational painting after the rise of photography in the mid-1800s; all of them became profoundly smaller in their general scope after their day in the cultural-dominance sun, but with the average project now produced being much higher in quality than the average project from before. And again, this is simply how the arts works -- that as the audience shrinks for a particular medium, simply less of it is needed in order to sate this smaller audience, and with only the smarter stuff of that medium now being produced, in that of course the hacks responsible for most of the crap have already moved on to the next new hot thing. (For a relative example, think of just how many more places have opened online in the last year that are devoted to making money from so-called "viral videos," those endless 30-second clips of some fat kid dancing shirtless to Britney Spears or whatever, that manage to get a million hits anyway from a million bored middle-class office workers.)

The dozens of hours of reality and game-show programming we're currently seeing on television these days is ultimately an aberration, the last gasp of a medium that is just about to lose its cultural dominance, the last desperate attempt by a bunch of spoiled, overpaid industry executives to keep the 24-hour ad revenue flowing, hence the party going just a little longer. And just like every other artistic medium in history, this endgame stage won't last much longer, and in fact by just ten or fifteen years from now I'm willing to bet we'll see a profoundly smaller industry altogether -- the abandonment of 24-hour programming, many less cable channels, the permanent closure of at least one broadcast network (which let's face it, will probably be FOX, and probably because of the bottomless Bush-supporting hole they dug themselves into during the 2000s). Or in other words, not even an attempt anymore to produce so much original crap, but rather more of the attitude that you're already seeing the smartest cable channels adopt, to simply get a handful of extra-high-quality shows on the air and then surround them with repeats of the best stuff from the industry's past, for a grand total of maybe 12 hours a day of on-air programming.

As mentioned before, for example, this is exactly what happened to paper publishing in the years between the Victorian Age and the Modern one (i.e. 1900 to 1940) -- a profound shrinking of the number of penny-dreadful publications and other cheap serialized crap, the stuff that at one time made up the vast majority of that industry's revenue, as the people responsible for that stuff moved on to the more lucrative world of radio serials and soap operas. And so that then brought a much bigger concentration to the publishing of extra-high-quality full-length novels, the exact period that brought us the rise of such artists as Hemingway and Faulkner and Steinbeck and Woolf and Miller and Fitzgerald and Joyce and on and on and on and on; and that's why we ironically now think of this period as a so-called "golden age" for publishing, even though the industry itself was under an immense amount of financial turmoil at the time. (And in fact, this is yet something else I'm willing to bet; that a hundred years from now, society will ironically look at these years as actually a golden age for television, and that grad students will do endless papers about the rise during these years of such "historically important pioneers in long-form moving-image storytelling" as Bochco, Milch, Kelley, Sorkin, Chase, Winer, Abrams, Whedon, etc etc etc.)

Like I said, I'm not nearly ready yet to sit down and start writing out the details of this growing "Grand Unified Theory" of mine; but hopefully this today at least shows you what I'm talking about, of how the more I learn about the histories of other artistic media, because of all the reading and writing I now do for my own arts center, the more I'm coming to realize just how cyclical this entire process is, and how what can sometimes seem like the utterly chaotic developments of modern Hollywood can in fact be easily tracked and predicted, precisely by looking at the rise and fall of other media in the past. As always, I'm sure I'll have a whole lot more about this subject to say in the coming months and years.