Since we’ve hit the time of year when TV networks are well into deciding what will live or die, I thought I might throw out a couple of personal requests.
Can ABC please renew American Crime, despite its lousy ratings?
Can PBS renew Mercy Street, (left) even though it’s expensive and hasn’t completely caught fire?
Can NBC retain The Mysteries of Laura, if only for its dietary defiance?
Will the CW please keep iZombie alive (top), because it’s just plain fun?
And on the flipside, could all networks everywhere please, please, please kill pop-ups?
Anyone who has watched television for more than five minutes, lifetime total, has seen pop-ups. They flash onto the screen, usually on the bottom, for maybe three to five seconds, promoting another show or teasing to the program after this one.
Networks clearly consider pop-ups a good way to remind viewers what else they can watch. I suspect that in many cases, networks also see them as minimally invasive.
Instead of watching a 30-second full-screen tease to Scandal, the viewer just gets the brief reminder in the middle of Castle that this Thursday’s Scandal will be “All-New!”
It sounds harmless, a relatively quiet bit of promotion in a very noisy television universe.
It is neither. It’s annoying. Really annoying.
What viewer of last weekend’s Oscar awards show wanted to see these unexpected images flashing on the bottom of the screen? And then realize they had nothing to do with the Oscars, but were encouraging you to watch some other show later?
It’s not that watching TV shows is like performing open-heart surgery, where you need to focus on the primary task every second. Most television watching lends itself to multitasking: a bit of conversation, something to eat, check the phone for texts.
But all those distractions are the viewer’s choice. Pop-ups aren’t, and noticing them is not optional. It’s like a kid on a bicycle at the perimeter of your vision while you’re driving. You’re going to look and see what’s there.
Only with the kid, it’s a safety issue. With pop-ups, you’ve been distracted for nothing. You’re not watching The Blacklist to have someone figuratively shout from the corner of the room that Shades of Blue is on next.
Nor, by the way, are the broadcast networks the felony offenders here. That distinction goes to cable networks.
My wife used to watch movies on Oxygen, like Pride and Prejudice. She stopped, because while Elizabeth Bennett was walking across the foggy morning fields, bam, the bottom third of the screen would become an animated promotion for The Bad Girls Club.
Now there’s an audience for The Bad Girls Club. My wife knows that and doesn’t mind if other Oxygen viewers want to watch it. She doesn’t. She especially doesn’t in the middle of a show she does want to watch.
So she stopped watching movies on Oxygen, and I would be surprised if she’s the only one. When a pop-up feels like an assault, it’s time to leave the battlefield.
Maybe Oxygen has research saying that people who watch Pride and Prejudice also want to know who’s cursing out whom on The Bad Girls Club. My guess is that in most cases those are two different viewerships, and that the P&P crowd doesn’t want to see modern-day TV girlfights any more than the Bad Girls Club crowd would want to watch Mr. Bingley courting Jane Bennett.
I know this is an age when TV networks want to maximize simultaneous screen information, and it can be valuable. When ESPN runs crawls of updated scores, or CNBC runs crawls of stock data, that’s useful information to most of the audience. A judicious “Coming up on the 11 o’clock news” crawl at 10:47 is fine.
But most pop-ups, sorry, just get in the way.