Category Archives: Arts & Entertainment

Eerie Tales of the House of Mystery

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Today on Late to the Party Theater: Chuck discovers that Locke & Key is a terrific horror comic that calls back to the “classics” without feeling like a self-conscious reinterpretation.

LockeAndKeyIssue3
In my defense: I’ve been hearing about Locke & Key off and on for years. It’s one of the tentpole comics for IDW with plenty of coverage at comic conventions, it’s won several Eisner awards, it was getting buzz for being turned into a movie or TV series that resulted in an unaired pilot, and I’ve been hearing recommendations from people online and from my boyfriend.

So I had it on the to-read list, and I’d assumed I knew how it was going to play out just based on the premise: a bunch of kids living in an old, unfamiliar family house, discovering magic keys that open mysterious doors, each with its own power. I’d expected another urban fantasy comic, maybe similar to The Unwritten, inspired by The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe with some House of Mystery and House of Secrets mixed in.

That would’ve been fine. But what I found when I read the first volume was a lot more compelling and more layered than I’d imagined.

It goes for the slow burn. I’d already plotted out the first issue in my mind: get the kids to the house, one of them discovers the first key, they all get pulled into the mystery, they confront the bad guy, and they set up the rest of the series. But there’s no quick pay-off in the first issue. Writer Joe Hill gradually lets the prologue unfold over the entire first volume, devoting an issue to each of his characters instead of just having them serve as interchangeable protagonists.

It retains the style of the “classic” horror comics. I admit I was turned off by the art of Gabriel Rodriguez at first; it seemed too stylized to work well with the tone that the writing was trying to establish. But after a couple of issues, I grew to realize that it was perfect — the book frequently makes subtle and not-particularly-subtle references to William Gaines and the old EC horror comics, and the art keeps it rooted in that tradition. (In fact, Rodriguez’s art in Locke & Key reminds me of a particular comic artist from the late 70s and early 80s, but I’m drawing a complete blank on the name. Anyone have any ideas?)

It puts a modern spin on several different eras of horror stories. Locke & Key is unabashedly a horror comic, even more than I’d expected it to be — axes to the head, knives to the eyes, attacks with crowbars and bricks, all rendered in splash pages with gouts of blood. But while Hellblazer always seems firmly rooted in the 90s, DC’s horror comics rooted in the 70s, and Tales from the Crypt unmistakably from the 50s, Locke and Key‘s influences seem to span several decades — from gothic (with the creepy old house and the town name of Lovecraft) to modern.

I realize it’s probably bad form to draw comparisons to Stephen King when talking about Joe Hill‘s work, but the greatest achievement of King’s first novels was how well he took traditional horror stories and translated them into contemporary settings. Locke & Key does something similar for comics, but without feeling “millennial.” Looking back at the first few issues of The Sandman, the influences of EC Comics and Berni Wrightson are immediately apparent, and the introduction has the feel of a deliberate reinvention of classic horror. Right out of the gate, Locke & Key seems to acknowledge the influences without letting them become overwhelming. Classic horror comics provide the tone of the story, not the purpose.

Finally, It’s smart. Again, probably because the art grounds it in a heavily stylized, almost cartoonish atmosphere, the writing and plotting can be introspective and realistic without either coming across as mundane or as pretentious. Instead of lurid descriptions of horrific acts of violence, we get matter-of-fact descriptions of them. Instead of monologues or dramatic soliloquies, we get natural, realistic dialogue. Literary allusions — much of the back story revolves around a school production of The Tempest — don’t come across as forced. And while none of the characters is complex enough (so far) to be the focus of an entire story, they all work together well and are given enough depth to keep from collapsing into caricature. Somehow, Hill puts just enough spin on them that they seem to be characters who just happen to fit into a stereotypical role.

At this point, I’ve only gotten through the first issue of the second volume. (Possibly the best single issue of the series I’ve read so far). There’s still twenty-three issues for it all to completely fall apart, or worse, to turn into something as solid-but-predictable as I’d originally expected. For now, though, I’m happy that my first impressions are being proven wrong. And I’m reminded of being a freshman in college, just discovering The Sandman and Hellblazer and learning that there was a whole world outside superhero comics.

Edit: I forgot to mention that he does have a kid who lives in San Francisco call it “Frisco.” But apart from that, it’s all pretty good.

Lawful Evil Dead

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The Cabin in the Woods is the best horror movie I’ve seen in years.

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Thanks to a friend with connections in the industry, I got to see The Cabin in the Woods a couple of weeks before its release on Friday the 13th. It’s been killing me not to post something about it, because:

  • I absolutely loved it.
  • The official trailer seems like it spoils the entire premise of the movie, but I’ll assure you that it doesn’t.
  • This is the first movie I’ve seen in a long time that genuinely kept me guessing, so avoid watching or reading anything else about it before you see it.

Because Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s names are on the movie, it’s pretty much guaranteed an audience from fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Cloverfield. I hope it goes even wider than that, though, because it’s really smart and a hell of a lot of fun. It reminded me a little bit of Drag Me to Hell — a fairly slick Hollywood production that somehow retains the swagger of a low-budget indie.

So yeah, don’t watch or read anything about it, starting NOW.

For anyone who’s already seen it — or anyone who for whatever reason still needs to be convinced — my take on it is after the spoiler safety jump.

Continue reading →

When I Was a Child, I Made Fun of Childish Things

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Getting defensive over a sneering op-ed about what Adults should be reading

It’s entirely possible that Joel Stein is being sarcastic.

Maybe he got the request from The New York Times to participate in a discussion about adults reading young adult fiction, and his reaction was: “Seriously? After 15 years of Harry Potter book releases, the Twilight franchise, and The Hunger Games being on the NYT best seller list for eighty-four weeks, you’re going back to that well again?” So to protest, he responded with a completely over-the-top caricature of the Pretentious Insecure Twat that would be too implausibly asinine for anyone to possibly take seriously.

Or maybe he was just bored and wanted to see how many people he could piss off on Facebook, to promote sales for his new book. Maybe he’s trying to establish himself as the edgy guy who tells it like it is. Whatever the case: screw that. Irony and sarcasm are old news; sincerity is the big thing now.

And reading that article made me feel defensive. Not for enjoying books, comics, games, movies, and TV shows for a younger audience. I’m feeling defensive for always acting like there’s a problem with that in the first place.

I’ve realized that every time I write about an animated series, or a comic book, or a young adult book, I’m careful to qualify it in my description. So I’ll write 600-1000 words about a comic book convention, or a video game, or a cartoon, but I’ll make sure that everybody knows that I’m not taking it seriously or anything. All these years I’ve been as guilty of contributing to the perpetuation of douchebaggery as pieces like Stein’s, with the only difference being that I’ve been doing it without realizing it.

The problem isn’t one of substance, because there’s no substance in Stein’s piece. Instead of talking about the merits of any adult fiction past “I’m in the target demographic,” he talks about scoffing at people he sees reading inappropriate material in public.

The problem isn’t substance, but relevance. Stein’s opinions are so outdated that he might as well be wearing a straw hat and singing to us about the dangers of pool. Almost 25 years after the publication of Watchmen and decades of resulting discussions of comics as literature, in an environment where the video game industry is bigger than the film industry, and where Pulitzer Prize-winning authors hold panels with comic book authors about the dissolution of the idea of “genre fiction” in literature, Stein’s blanket dismissal just makes him seem like a relic. Someone so clueless as to use Donkey Kong as his go-to example of a video game.

And for that matter: for someone so concerned with being taken seriously, Stein should probably be aware that claiming not to know anything about The Hunger Games apart from “games you play when hungry” doesn’t make him look as literate as he believes. It makes him look like an idiot, completely unaware of his surroundings. I have even less interest in reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close than I do in reading Twilight or, for that matter, Freedom. But I could at least tell you what each is about.

Nature’s provided us with ways to quickly and easily identify things that will be toxic or dangerous. Brown spots on a piece of fruit indicate it’s unsafe to eat. Millions of pain receptors in our skin warn us when we’ve touched a hot surface. And whenever someone responds to a reference with the comment, “I don’t own a television,” it’s a clear signal to excuse yourself from the conversation and make as much distance as possible before they attempt to name-check Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace.

Because that is the real problem. Raging against legions of Twilight-reading moms not living up to their full intellectual potential is arguing against a straw man, all the while insisting that you’ve shared some sort of insight. It’s the pseudo-intellectual equivalent of complaining about airplane food, unaware that it’s been years since airlines regularly served food. The people reading “young adult” books to the complete exclusion of “adult” ones are reading them because they get something out of them, something they’re unlikely to get from material that someone else tells them is more appropriate.

Besides, they’re mostly imaginary in the first place. Just the most cursory survey of reviews on Goodreads shows that most readers are better off than Stein (and for that matter, me), because they’ll read whatever they can get their hands on. I’ve seen plenty of readers who’ll happily jump from The Hunger Games to a Sookie Stackhouse novel to a Kazuo Ishiguro novel. Suggesting that they’re wasting their time on junk food does nothing to expand their intellectual horizons, but only reveals yourself to be an ass showing impotent disdain.

And I’ve never actually encountered one of these Twilight moms, who’ll read nothing but Harry Potter and the occasional Harlequin romance. But I’ve encountered plenty of people who make gut responses to a book, or a movie, or any piece of media, based solely on its genre or its target demographic. It’s easier (and lazier) to claim that that’s a case of being discriminating. Or to claim that it’s encouraging people to challenge themselves, instead of just reassuring themselves that it’s okay to enjoy stuff that has no intellectual content. It’s bullshit.

And that’s where I’m complicit in it. I read The Hunger Games, but instead of just appreciating its masterful pacing and pointing out its clever spin on the traditional love triangle in an age of constant media exposure and awareness, I felt the need to explain that I knew it was just a kids’ book. I loved the technical artistry and economy of silent, expressive storytelling in Wall-E and Up, but still felt weird for being a 40-year-old man watching a kids’ movie. I’ve enjoyed the pulp-adventure storytelling and amazing concept design in The Clone Wars series, but I try to keep it on the down-low since it’s on Cartoon Network.

This could potentially be an amazing time to be an artist. The walls between genres and even media are dissolving, and we’re seeing cross-cultural mash-ups, literary re-interpretations of pulp material, and young adult mash-ups of mythology and social satire. One of the best books I’ve read recently was about comic books, and another was a post-apocalyptic novel. With this kind of media saturation, the whole notion of limiting yourself — I only have so much time to read all the world’s great literature! — is an overly sentimental and ultimately silly anachronism. If you haven’t read Moby Dick by now, then you probably won’t. And really, that’s fine, since it’s made its way through culture enough that its themes have been re-interpreted and reincorporated dozens of times over.

When I was growing up, I developed a real sense of the stuff I read and watched for fun as opposed to the stuff that was supposed to be “good for me.” And it’s hard to let that go. But it’s completely irrelevant nowadays. Thousands and thousands of people have something to share, and they finally have the means to share it. You can choose to take part in it, or you can get left behind.

Being Katniss Everdeen

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If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention! The internet’s preeminent Hunger Games fan and the bold battle against real racism.

Being john malkovich
Man, I just can’t get a break. I was just recovering from the discovery that I’m a horrible misogynist-slash-”white knight” pseudo-feminist, and now I find out I’m a racist? If I’m this much of a jackass without even realizing it, I shudder to think what kind of damage I could be doing intentionally.

As it turns out, I got started on my path to white supremacy simply enough: I read The Hunger Games quickly, and I didn’t remember that one of the characters was described as being dark skinned.

I know now just how awful that is, thanks to the tireless work of the author of the Hunger Games Tweets tumblr and corresponding Twitter account. The account’s been keeping up the good fight by “expos[ing] the Hunger Games fans on Twitter who dare to call themselves fans yet don’t know a damn thing about the books.”

The reason I’ve seen dozens of people linking to and commenting on that tumblr is because of a post about it on Jezebel.com. Jezebel fulfills the “Give Me Something to Be Angry About” requirement of Gawker’s media empire, and they hit pay dirt on this one. In the two days since the post was published, I’ve seen at least two dozen links to it and comments on it, just from people I know. And they’ve found it “jaw-dropping,” “nauseating,” “depressing,” “abysmal,” “heart-stopping,” and it made them hate humanity.

To them, I’ve got a couple of questions:

1) How much of that Tumblr did you read?

I got about eighteen pages into it. And when you start reading, yes, it does look like page after page filled with disgustingly racist messages from people both hostile and clueless. And there are several of those. I counted about 15 before I stopped digging.

But there’s a lot more of this. And also this. And this. This too. Also this. Plus this. And of course this too, which I guess isn’t racist because it’s making fun of an Asian name.

In other words, a lot of people saying “she doesn’t look like I pictured” followed by trollfaces, “deal with it” animated GIFs, and treatises about exposing a significant social ill. In other words, a tumblr.

2) What internet have you guys been using?

Because I want to start using that one. I like the idea of being so stunned at the sight of someone saying something stupid and racist that it makes me want to vomit. The internet I’ve been reading has me seeing at least one disgustingly racist comment every morning before lunch. The internet I’ve been using lets actual white supremacist groups have websites.

Yes, any one of those genuinely racist tweets and facebook messages would be gross enough to be worth calling out. It’d be good to see any one of those tools held responsible for what he or she writes. And like I said, I counted 15 of them.

But at the same time, I kind of already knew that there are at least 15 racist people on the internet.

Why is this getting such a disproportionate level of outrage?

May the Click-throughs Be Ever In Your Favor

A huge part of it, of course, is the perfect combination of opening weekend for a hugely popular movie franchise based on a hugely popular book franchise, and the internet’s favorite hobby: complaining about stuff.

Casting for The Hunger Games was announced a pretty good while ago, and that twitter & tumblr account have been around for at least a month, as far as I can tell. It’s an amazingly fortuitous coincidence that Jezebel ran the story this week.

I can only imagine the fight that went on at Jezebel headquarters: a crass young copy editor and webmaster a few weeks ago, saying “We’ve got a story here! Let’s run it now!” Then the writer of the post turns, measured in tenor but still barely able to contain the swelling rage — I am of course picturing a stately, distinguished white man playing the part in the movie, maybe Alec Baldwin or Sam Waterston overdubbed with Morgan Freeman’s voice. And then that writer says, “I don’t know how long you’ve been here, young man, but I’ve been here long enough to know that the name Gawker Media means something. It means honor. It means integrity. It means responsibility. And it means holding onto this goddamn story until we’re sure we have all the facts!”

And finally, after the story was given time to grow and season, and coincidentally The Hunger Games had a successful opening weekend, it was ready. That writer took a moment to gaze out the window at a city in turmoil, a city whose demons had to be set free so that healing could begin. And the writer picked up a phone and said simply, “It’s time.” And then hung up without saying goodbye.

The internet needs sites that give people something to be angry about. It’s what drives social media sites in the first place. Gawker Media happens to have achieved perfect vertical integration — you can read Gawker.com to make fun of women, and then Jezebel.com to be outraged at people making fun of women. Personally, I get my daily outrage quota from ThinkProgress.org, and there Alyssa Rosenberg delivered a convenient two-fer of things to piss us off: the racist and sexist things that have been written about the movie.

(The misogynistic comments in reviews are legitimately awful, since a) they’re written by people who should know better, not clueless twitterers; and b) there’s no way they’re meant to be deliberately provocative, so it’s possible the writers aren’t even aware how gross it is to be complaining that a thin actress is too fat).

I’m all for a good open shaming of people being assholes. I just feel better about it when I know it’s sincere. Not just an attempt to ride the coattails of a young adult franchise from people still pissed off that Twilight was too Mormon to have significant non-white characters.

Thoughtcrimes

Those tweets and facebook messages are plenty gross, but the tone of much of that “Hunger Games Tweets” tumblr is just as toxic. They’re both fueled by ignorance, but now one’s running on a sense of righteousness and an awful lot of media exposure.

Mean-spirited but harmless “his name is Gale not Gail lol” stuff is what fuels significant portions of the nerd internet. Give it a cause and an audience, though, and it turns nasty. And a dozen genuinely repulsive messages get turned into a Significant Social Problem That Affects Us All. (That we will write a post about and then completely forget as soon as we stop getting internet traffic from it).

As I said, I’m one of the people who didn’t remember the description of Rue & Thresh as being black. Or of Katniss and Gale as being “olive-skinned,” for that matter. I also can’t remember the hair color of any of the non-Katniss characters, or whether they might’ve been left handed or homosexual. I didn’t remember because I didn’t care. It was never relevant to the story.

When I’m reading a book, I’ve got a default picture of everybody in my head. And it’s white and male until I read something that suggests otherwise. That’s not because I’m racist and misogynist, it’s because I’m white and male. Most books look pretty much like the parts of Being John Malkovich inside Malkovich’s mind, except instead of John Malkovich it’s a 50/50 mix of myself and, for some reason, Scott Adsit. It’s weird.

When a description becomes significant, I remember it. The relevant parts of the description of Rue — the character people are making the most fuss about — are that she’s young, small, stealthy, clever, and she reminds Katniss of her sister Prim. None of that has anything to do with her being black.

But now there are legions of outraged bloggers tripping over themselves trying to assign more significance to “I didn’t picture her as black” than is there. I pictured both her and Prim as looking like a younger Dakota Fanning, myself. So what? Why so eager to put a value judgment on that? They’re going to have their work cut out for them if they want to put a stop to people making assumptions. At best, it’s impotent internet rage — I’m using animated GIFs to make a difference! At worst, it’s accusing people of crypto-racism.

To be fair, there are a few glimmers of awareness, like saying that if the mentions of race aren’t relevant to the story “It really doesn’t matter.” But there’s really only one thing on that tumblr that I do agree with completely: “The outrage makes no sense.”

Winter is Coming! Direct to your home! For a new low, low price!

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Even making generous guesses at the amount of revenue available from switching from a subscription model to an a la carte one, the numbers still don’t add up.

This began as a response to an interesting comment on my post about threats to pirate the Game of Thrones series. I got carried away, as I tend to do, and the comment became too unwieldy for the comment form.

I hope it’s clear that I’m not trying to call anybody out or dominate the conversation, but that I think this is a genuinely interesting way to talk about the topic. It’s at least more interesting than watching people contorting themselves into knots trying to come up with a rational-sounding counter-argument to “People shouldn’t steal stuff.”

All the quoted sections are from comments by Tom Coates.

Why are you paying HBO $240 a year to get to see True Blood and a couple of episodes of Game of Thrones. If you think that’s genuinely what it’s ‘worth’ to see those shows, I think that you are—bluntly—wrong.
[...]
Is your argument REALLY that people should be paying $240 a year for True Blood? Because that just doesn’t sound in any way plausible. Not one bit.

No, that’s not what I’m saying. That’s why I no longer subscribe to HBO.

My argument was that for at least a year, HBO was getting (at least) around $240 from me for watching True Blood. So I was a more valuable customer to them than the guy who says “I don’t want all that; I’ll give you $40 for it. Deal? No? Okay, then I’ll steal it.”

My argument was also that there are millions of people like me who do subscribe to HBO and pay for their service. So when MG Siegler says that if he doesn’t like the terms, he’ll just take it for free, he’s not just hurting some faceless corporation. He’s taking advantage of stuff that millions of other people are paying for. It takes some mighty big stones to expect any sympathy from the people who are paying companies for stuff that he gets for free.

Ratings

I’m guessing a lot of other people out there are NOT prepared to pay $240 a year to get to see True Blood, and that—frankly—many of those *would* be prepared to pay $40-60 to get to see the Season via iTunes when it’s broadcast. So you need (say) eight of those people to download for every one who buys HBO. That seems *entirely* plausible to me, frankly.

I’d be in that group of people who’d be prepared to pay $40-$60 to get the Season Pass on iTunes. The point of that blog post is that it’s unlikely that’d be enough.

I do think it’s being needlessly combative to dismiss all the actual numbers as being completely unknowable. It’s not that I agree with the claim that piracy numbers significantly equate to potential sales. I think it’s “needless” because even by doing the simplest, back-of-the-envelope calculations, the economics still don’t make sense.

Ignore the 8:1 ratio, and make it even simpler. Let’s say that Game of Thrones (instead of True Blood, just for the sake of keeping the conversation consistent) goes on iTunes the day after broadcast, for Siegler’s suggested figure of under $40 for an HD season pass. And HBO is actually $16/month on DirecTV, not $20. So one year’s HBO subscription is $192. $192 / $40 = 4.8, which means that you’d need a 5:1 ratio of iTunes season pass sales to HBO subscribers.

(Obviously, that ignores Apple’s cut, along with whatever deals it gets from DirecTV or Comcast. But it also ignores the fact that HBO doesn’t make all its money from selling one TV series through one source. So for simplicity’s sake, let’s call it even).

If a ratio of 8:1 is plausible, I’m assuming that you think 5:1 is plausible as well. But can you name any other TV series — or for that matter, any other product — that has seen a five-fold increase in ratings simply by lowering its price? I think that’s the part that’s completely implausible.

According to Entertainment Weekly, the finale of Game of Thrones (the highest-rated episode of the season) had 3.9 million viewers in the first night of broadcast. (The article goes on to say that the show averages 8.3 million viewers when you account for repeats, DVR, and on demand). This report puts it at 3.04 million viewers.

Are we supposed to believe that making the show available on iTunes would suddenly turn Game of Thrones ratings from 3 million to 15 million? Or even more unlikely, that you could convert 8.3 million viewers to 40 million? That assumes 15 million viewers would be interested in an epic fantasy series at all, much less that they’d be willing to pay $40 a head (no pun intended) for it.

A couple of obvious counter-arguments: this assumes that it’s either all subscriptions, or all iTunes season pass sales, and not a combination of both. It assumes that if HBO made its programming available same-day (or day after) on iTunes for $40 a season pass, that they’d lose all their subscribers. Obviously they wouldn’t lose all of them, but it’s clear to me that they’d lose a huge portion. There’d be very little incentive left to subscribe, unless you were one of the rare viewers who watched every series on the channel and you just couldn’t get enough of Kung Fu Panda 2.

Profits

And the even more obvious counter-argument: even by the generous, over-simplified example, they’d need 15 million viewers on iTunes + season passes to make the same revenue they get from 3 million viewers on subscriptions alone. But would they need all of those 15 million just to be profitable?

Obviously not, but it’s not as clear-cut even in the simplest calculation. Take that one estimate from The Hollywood Reporter that it cost $60 million to produce the series. Every discussion of Hollywood that I’ve ever seen says that a feature film has to make double its production cost in order to become profitable, because of marketing and distribution. For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that it’s significantly less for TV series than it is for movies, and assume it’s 1.5 times the production cost. That would mean that GoT has a “break-even” point of $90 million.

I don’t know what Apple’s cut for TV shows over iTunes is, either, but just assume that it’s the same as for apps: 30%. That would mean that for every $40 season pass to GoT, HBO gets $28. By those numbers, a season pass of GoT would need 3.22 million season pass sales to break even.

That seems reasonable, right? They got 3 million viewers just in one night via subscriptions. But that’s the problem with directly equating ratings to sales: again according to Entertainment Weekly, the sales of GoT DVD sets are “through the roof” and broke all kinds of records. That record-breaking value: 350,000 units over 10 days.

That’s a much better indication of how many people are actually willing to pay for the whole season. I don’t know how to get the number of iTunes season pass sales for the same season 1 set of GoT, or if that information is even available to the public. No matter how much more convenient it is to buy stuff over iTunes than to pick up a physical DVD set, I’m pretty sure that that convenience doesn’t translate into ten times more sales. I would be stunned to learn if it’s even twice as many (700,000 units, still a good bit short of 3.2 million).

But that’s for a TV series that’s already a year old, and has had its big events long since spoiled all across the internet. Of course there’s going to be a drop in sales. How much do the sales increase if you reduce the time between broadcast and season pass/DVD set availability? I don’t know how to estimate that, other than to say “less than 2.5 million people.”

On the one hand, you’ve got a known market of 29 million subscribers, paying you $192 a year. On the other, you’ve got a demonstrated market of 350,000 customers, paying you around $30 a year. Somewhere in the middle, you’ve got the iTunes market.

We do know at least that MG Siegler and the guy from The Oatmeal have pledged to chip in $80 towards our $90 million estimate. Counting the actual bankable value of that, that leaves: $90 million.

If it’s silly for the RIAA and MPAA to directly equate piracy numbers to lost sales — and it is silly — then it’s every bit as silly to claim that those numbers significantly equate to potential sales. A company simply can’t make projections by treating torrent download figures as actual sales. A company can only make projections based on what people actually buy. I can’t imagine a TV exec would last very long if he could promise ratings would double or more, simply by opening the show up for download.

What I can imagine is that execs would be eager to do it if they had ample evidence it would actually work. When even a rough estimate fails to hold up — even though it’s based on numbers completely pulled out of my ass and still altered to make them more generous — I don’t see how the actual numbers could work.

A Word from Our Sponsor

Moreover, frankly, the world changes, and people’s business models have to change too. If all the other broadcasters think that they can make money by selling on iTunes the day after broadcast for a certain amount of money, then of COURSE expectations will be set for shows on HBO to be similar. And people will justifiably start asking ‘why am I paying so much for this’ or ‘why can’t I get it at the same time as I get all my other shows’.

And to those people, you point out: “all your other shows are subsidized by advertising.”

If anyone is paying $40 per season to watch Mad Men, which is broadcast with commercials on AMC, and is still confused as to why he can’t pay $40 per season to watch HBO shows immediately after they’re broadcast, then I’d suggest he’s not paying enough attention to Mad Men.

And anyone who underestimates the impact of advertising should consider this: an episode of True Blood a while back had two male vampires having sex with each other followed by one ripping the other’s heart out. The series regularly combines the “nudity,” “graphic violence,” and “adult language” warnings not just in a single episode, but in a single scene. HBO does have a standards and practices department, I’m assuming, but a significant part of the reason producers go to HBO is to be able to make content that’s not beholden to advertisers.

There’s Right, and then There’s What’s Right

And one way or another, whether it’s moral or reasonable or not, people are going to start moving to either other shows or they’re going to torrent it. Because it’s easy and it works.

Is that right? No. Is it basically inevitable? Yes. Does that mean that their existing business model might be under threat? Yes. Is that fair? Bluntly, that’s an irrelevant question.

If the question is irrelevant as to whether it’s unfair to HBO, then why is it relevant whether it’s unfair to customers? Why should HBO — or any of us — care whether or not Siegler is stamping his feet and complaining that he doesn’t get to watch Game of Thrones exactly when and how and for how much he wants to? He’s already demonstrated that he’s not a guaranteed source of income to HBO, and he’s already demonstrated that he’s willing to take advantage of those of us who do pay for what we get. If fair is irrelevant, then why should I care what he says?

Saying “fair is irrelevant, this is business” is always the position that’s presented as if it were the most pragmatic one. But in fact, it’s so short-sighted as to be completely unrealistic. An economy where one party in every business transaction is treated unfairly is unsustainable. If someone can’t even speculate on a business model that doesn’t end up with HBO losing money, then that’s not saying “I want HBO to make its content more widely available.” That’s saying “I want HBO to go out of business.”

I don’t want HBO to go out of business. Not for HBO’s sake, but my own, so that I can continue to watch vampires having gay sex and ripping each other’s hearts out.

Sermons vs. Stupidity

And meanwhile, a whole bunch of people actually are moving away from cable completely, because it’s an expensive standing cost each month that they don’t need to pay and they don’t want to pay. They want to own the shows and be able to watch them when they want to. Again, if HBO’s business model doesn’t stand up under those circumstances, and other people’s models do, and if HBO isn’t prepared to find some way to change, then — and surely this is obvious — HBO will fail.

Again, there’s a difference between what is fair and reasonable and what is going to happen. We’re in a transitional period here. Obviously the possible viewers buying things from iTunes is likely to grow massively over the next ten years. And the desire to be able to buy bespoke, just the things you want, to watch when and how you want, is not going to evaporate. So, I’m afraid, one way or another, HBO are going to have to find some way to adjust to it.

HBO has been adjusting to “transitional periods” quite profitably for most of my lifetime. Before the rise of VHS and DVD, they distinguished themselves by being the most convenient way to watch movies at home. Then they distinguished themselves by being the only way to get sex & violence on TV. Then they distinguished themselves by being the channel that produces highly desirable series and shows them without commercial interruption. It’d be an enormous mistake to talk as if HBO is run by idiots who can’t tell which way the wind is blowing.

And the “whole bunch of people” who are moving away from cable aren’t yet enough to replace a subscription model. If the market were there, they’d be milking it for all it’s worth. But the market just isn’t there.

People keep acting as if my posts and comments are “moralizing” about piracy. But piracy doesn’t offend me nearly as much as stupidity does. When Siegler and others say that HBO can provide the same thing that ad-supported channels do, and that HBO’s resistance to do so is purely out of greed or artificial scarcity, that is a gross display of willful ignorance. The facts simply don’t support it.

When Siegler and others say that piracy is their only option, and that it effectively sends a message to the production companies, that’s just insultingly disingenuous.

It’s entirely plausible that yes, “over the next ten years,” the market will be such so that people will be able to buy their programming a la carte. Assuming it happens, that’ll be great! But that doesn’t change the fact that Siegler is saying willfully stupid and disingenuous things right now.