BSG is the future of TV

Perhaps as a continuation of my thoughts about HD DVD, I thought I'd share some more thoughts about how Battlestar Galactica, the best SF show on TV today, is the future of successful TV production.

Not just because of great acting and writing - those are eternally valuable. No, the difference between BSG and the way TV has been made in the past is more fundamental. Essentially, from the early 1960s or so until effectively now, TV was relatively easy money. TV producers will tell you this is bullshit - that TV is a high-risk industry, where a flop series can be a disaster for a network. And this is true, up to a point.

However, for decades now networks (who, except for a small window in the 1970s, have always owned the content they air) have found risk-mitigation strategies. For the most part, this has meant two strategies: Block buying, and foreign markets. Block buying is when a network forces an affiliate or other broadcaster to buy less successful content instead of just the one popular show. It is impossible for Global TV here in Canada to buy (say) 24 alone. In order to get 24, Global will have to buy at least one other series from Fox as well - and often several other projects. Movie studios do the same thing to theatres.

The other strategy complements the first. The US TV market has an advantage over all other TV markets in the world, in that it is possible for an American television show to pay for itself in the domestic market alone. This is impossible in Canada, and nearly so in most smaller countries. This, more than any other reason, is why American television dominates Canadian airwaves (and is at least a strong presence in other anglosphere countries.) The ability to collect all the necessary costs of production from the domestic market has allowed American networks to dump their content on foreign markets at well below the cost of production - it costs Canadian producers literally an order of magnitude more to produce Canadian content than to buy American shows. This is why they only do the bare legal minimum.

The point of this discussion is to realize that once a TV series has been produced, it's almost guaranteed to make some profits, through the two strategies above. More importantly, there's no real changes made between the content as it's produced in the US, and how it's aired in foreign markets. (With the exception, of course, of translations in to foreign languages.) So for zero to marginal costs, there's a lot of easy money to be made once a show's made it to air, regardless of how long it lasts.

Battlestar Galactica is starting to change that, slowly. One example is the weekly podcasts that the Executive Producer, Ron Moore, makes available for free on the Internet. For fans who want to, here's a way to get the audio commentary of a DVD without waiting. Meanwhile, when the DVD's are released, the commentary is already made, and ready to be slapped on to the disc. However, it was something Moore mentioned in one of the podcasts that sparked this post - that the DVD of Season 2 would contain an expanded version of the episode Pegasus. There's no new content being produced - just stuff that had to be cut from the epsiode as it aired.

This is a natural addition to the now-ubiquitous feature of "deleted scenes" on DVDs, but it also points out what I think will be the next strategy for TV producers - deliberately shooting more film than will necessarily make it to air in a 42.5 minute episode, and packaging "directors cuts" on the DVD box sets. This serves two purposes: 1) For only a little extra cost, it adds a significant extra value to the DVD box sets relative to making a home library of episodes as they aired. 2) Related to that, it helps fight piracy - most episodes that are downloaded are recorded from the original broadcast. If the DVD has a guaranteed advantage to the pirated versions, people are more likely to buy them.

I think this is great, frankly. But it probably is going to be adopted by the TV producers in baby steps, because they're still used to the era of "easy money." That era, however, is dying. What BSG shows is that the new way TV is going to succeed is still going to be profitable, but TV producers are going to have to work for it. Commentaries on every episode, expanded directors cuts, plenty of blooper reels, whatever it takes to make consumers stay with the product, even watch it several times. "Easy money" is dead, long live "hard money."

This won't be true for all forms of TV, certainly. But hour-long dramas are already very expensive. $2 million an episode isn't out of the question anymore. For dramas at least, it's going to be necessary to secure additional revenue, and this is almost certainly the way they'll do it.