Why On The Lot Flops, Flounders, and Fails
Posted by Jeremiah on 2007/05/29 • Comments?
The Hollywood studio system is desperate. If you don’t believe me, and you’d have to be living by a river in Egypt to not, look no further than the latest burp in the reality television genre.
On The Lot, created by DreamWorks Television, FOX, Amblin Entertainment and Mark Burnett Productions, features wanna-be film directors competing in an American Idol-style competition for a million-dollar movie deal with DreamWorks/Paramount/Viacom.
The first three episodes revealed that the mostly pretentious contestants are stuck in some enchanted daydream about what it means to be a director. The most recent screening episode confirmed that the few contestants whose talent is not superceded by ego (and I can count them on one hand) don’t need this show to succeed.
Herein lies the false premise of the show: undiscovered talent need Hollywood.
In case you missed it, a media revolution is happening. The story goes like this: A generation of people grew up saturated in the media and technology. Technological advancements allowed this generation to have every means of professional media production at a fraction of the cost to previous generations. Then along came fast access to the most democratic broadcast medium in human history: the internet. Overnight, an entire generation of “undiscovered” storytellers began creating more media than Hollywood had ever produced and began entertaining more people more often than Hollywood could ever gouge money from.
Just as musicians who were screwed by the RIAA for years are discovering the financial freedom of going label-less, so too will the next generation of storytellers break free from Hollywood.
Hollywood is desperate for undiscovered talent because it knows that its historic system is unsustainable in the new media landscape. The prize is as masturbatory as the oligopoly could get: reward the most popular kid with indentured servitude to the show’s creators.
The media is the most powerful cultural force in our society. For too long a minority living in a bubble have controlled this force. On The Lot reinforces this bubble under the guise of letting in undiscovered talent.
On The Lot isn’t just bad reality television. It’s a bad reality that society is ready to leave behind.