Internet becomes a 'TV star'
2007-12-12 07:30
Paris - After TV's reality-show revolution several years back and the subsequent surge of revamped US dramas and sitcoms, internet is the new inspiration behind trends in television programmes worldwide, media experts said on Tuesday.
Keen to keep young viewers captive, who are less and less interested in the box, makers of new 2007-2008 programmes in Europe, Australia and the United States are increasingly resorting to web practices, such as inter-activity, for new shows, said Amandine Cassi, analyst for media ratings agency Mediametrie.
"There is a growing internet presence for all each day on television," Cassi said of the 466 new TV programmes due to be aired this season in nine countries.
Some networks are harping on the fact that TV is adapting to the new web-world and that old-style programmes have been banished, with one of the new season's documentaries, from Britain's Channel 4, even titled TV is dead.
Meanwhile two new sitcoms, Fox's Back to you and BBC2's The life and times of Vivienne Vyle poke fun at old-fashioned family TV, helping tear down the mystique of the box.
The BBC2 show features a talk show hostess while Back to you is centred on a comeback bid by two former stars of a local TV network.
Increased internet-style interactivity is the other trend, with Sweden's Sanningen om Marika, from SVT2, enabling viewers to really participate in a police inquiry over a missing person, rather than just watch an episode or send in a vote.
And in US series Gossip girl (CW), the narrator is a mystery blogger recounting the lives of a bunch of wealthy college students, while new technology freaks, or "nurds", are the heroes of two upcoming series, Chuck (NBC) and The Big Bang theory (NBC).
For the first time also, a series produced for the web and shown on MySpace, Quarterlife, will be programmed next year on NBC, which has just purchased the rights.
Mediametrie said that networks, influenced by internet's real-life real-time vision, also were turning increasingly to "hyper-reaction" and "hyper-reality". One example was a new Fox show titled K-ville, a thriller set in New Orleans two years after the destruction wrought by Katrina.
As was the case last year, locally-produced drama continued to draw viewers worldwide, with ratings still high in the United States for shows such as The Experts, Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy.
The most popular of the new sitcoms are ABC's Samantha who?, about a young woman suffering from amnesia after eight days in a coma, and ABC's Private practice (ABC), which is inspired by Grey's Anatomy and is about a young doctor working in a private clinic.