"This is an industry, it's a business. We exist to make money. We exist to put commercials on the air. The programming that is put on between those commercials is simply the bait we put in the mousetrap."This is an important point. The audience is not the consumer, it's the product. The consumer is the advertiser. Once you understand this, a lot of the crap that gets put on television makes more sense.
This is why I'm so interested in the potential for technologies like Apple's iTunes to undermine traditional television. It's possible that, with direct payment for episodes of television we can move from an advertiser-driven industry to an audience-driven one.
There are big questions, of course. I think the biggest one is whether it's even possible for an audience to cover a substantial portion of the costs of production for a single episode. Fictional dramas are very expensive - $2 million an episode is pretty standard, these days. Can studios charge - and will audiences pay - the kind of money required to cover those costs?
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