Jon Stewart IS Chickenman
He's everywhere, he's everywhere!
Not sure what the hook of this Wired magazine interview with Stewart and his right arm, Ben Karlin, is. Wired already established, in an earlier issue, the fact that the clip of Stewart eviscerating the two "Crossfire" hosts was probably seen by more people on the Internet than on CNN.
But hey, it's the annual TV issue and you need a hook, and who's more beloved in media circles right now than this guy? Besides, Stewart meshes perfectly with Wired's predictable take on television: The old order is dying. The new order will be dictated by technology. It will look nothing like bad old TV. It will consist entirely of the things we want to watch. Which, in Wired's view, means "The Daily Show" 24/7.
It is nice that Stewart was willing to talk on the record with Thomas Goetz about the 13 minutes that killed "Crossfire," something he wasn't willing to do earlier this year (I tried). And it was fun to see him break down the whole Wired conceit that high tech will be the next big thing in TV....
GOETZ: Yet there's a lot of venture capital going into video-delivery technologies ... Isn't there something promising about new ways to watch television?
STEWART: Sure. But how much do you need TV to be available in convenient form? It already is convenient -- we have the DVR. Do you need TV on your wach as you walk from your cell phone to your BlackBerry? At what point do we get saturated enough to say, "OK, I get it! We can watch anything we want at anytime! Let's go sit around a large table and eat a meal in silence!"
What Wired doesn't seem to get is that the ability for people to produce high-quality video at home for little money will mean they won't have to live in New York, L.A., San Fran or Vancouver, where their outlooks would be shaped, inevitably, by the cultures of those media- and creative-saturated communities. And by creative I mean "creative." Wired is looking to Yahoo or Google, but is blind to its own geographical biases. Already we are seeing high quality documentaries coming from all over, and it's not a stretch to imagine high-quality drama and comedy shows someday originating from St. Paul or Cleveland or Dallas or ... or ... Kansas City.
Then who will Conde Nast writers fall in love with?
Update: On the jump page, Goetz replies!
Hey Aaron -
You may not recall, but we both wrote for Jeff Salamon at the Voice (back when his TV section was called "Wired"). I've been a fan of your smart riffs on TV ever since, so I was eager to see your take on my interview with Jon Stewart and our TV package.
So yeah, I was bummed to see you waved it off as predictable. To my mind, the idea that the TV business - or more accurately, how we receive video entertainment in our homes - is on the verge of major change is actually fairly unperceived, no place less than in the office buildings of the TV biz itself. Fact is, mass-market TV is in a major rut of tired formulas and head-in-the-sand thinking, yet if you look closely there are all sorts of places where its breaking out from those formulas - the Daily Show among them.
That may be obvious to you - you regularly and astutely criticize TV on just these grounds but it's actually not all that apparent if you look at the majority of what's on the air (that's one of my favorite insights from the interview with Stewart: that there is and always will be a 80%-crap/20% goodness ratio no matter how we get our TV fix). Rather it's something that finally, thanks to broadband adoption and digital cable and the demise of the old advertising business model is happening on the fringes. Which meant, we figured, that it's a good time to note the moment and put our finger to the wind.
And yeah, I agree that digital tech will let the some people create their own video entertainment - we mention this in sidebars on Internet TV and P2P tv and streaming video. But the fact remains that, at least for now, the masses won't find that stuff until it hits MTV2 or Comedy Central or - more likely - Yahoo. That's what we like about Yahoo, actually: it recognizes that it's not just a content channel in the old top-down model so much as it's a conduit for all that cool stuff from Cleveland or Kansas City. Because it's no good if somebody in St. Paul is doing something cool if somebody in Minneapolis (where I'm from, by the way), can't find it.
So at least in my mind, even if you wave us off, we're actually celebrating the same stuff.
