Why Is Your Network At The TCAs?

The Television Critics Association's summer press tour kicks off Wednesday and depending on who you speak to, it's either an expensive exercise in futility or a still-useful anachronism of another time. Think of it as the television industry equivalent of the car cigarette lighter. It's sometimes helpful to have it working in an emergency, but your car won't stop chugging away if it's not there.

I've written a bit about the TCA in the past and the general reaction from critics is that I'm either jealous or clueless. Sure, there's a grudging recognition that maybe gathering together critics twice a year in an industry that is increasingly a 24/7, 12-months-a-year slog might not be the best use of a network's resources. But like any long-running institution, giving up the status quo is scary. There's no upside in being the one who ruined a good thing, even if it's not good for the bottom line. More than most businesses, television is a socially-driven industry and the TCA tours are the White House Correspondent's Dinner of Hollywood. Sure, most people think it's only of marginal real-world use, but everyone love hanging out in that hope that some news will come out of the scrum.

Despite all of its flaws and the changes in the industry, publicity in the TV business is still measured in some very familiar ways. And when the network president asks why that new show failed, you don't want someone bringing up the fact that you had a chance to speak to a couple of hundred critics and decided against it. So like British troops in WWI that marched out of the trenches into near-certain death, publicists work weeks on their TCA presentations. Because they realize that while they're likely to die at some point, they don't want to get killed by friendly fire from their colleagues.

The irony of that logic, which is the TV industry equivalent of the 1980s argument "No One Ever Got Fired For Buying IBM," is that a TCA tour appearance is only helpful to a very small subset of TV shows each year. Those rare birds that are well-written, surprising works of quiet art that might not break through the clutter. For the other 95% of the shows making a TCA appearance, the network would be just as effective spending their money on digital initiatives or Snapchat filters. But while those approaches are difficult to measure for effectiveness, the publicity metrics of the TCA are easier to quantify. It's safer for a network to show up, be ignored and then just blame it on the critics natural indifference. Rather than recognizing the problem isn't with the critics. It's simply the wrong venue for the message.

This isn't a question of convincing critics to like or even love a show. In most cases, the networks and studios just want some attention. They want a chance to be heard and as Tim Goodman writes in The Hollywood Reporter, getting heard at the TCAs is an increasingly difficult task:

It is a great time to be alive and a lover of television. Except the vast majority of viewers do not have time for your weak-ass offerings. They don't even want to know the names of those shows. The spinning wheel of death that's trying to load information into their available mental bandwidth only wants the best of the buzziest, the median six must-see show critics are going to see over the nearly three weeks of the Death March. Don't mention anything that isn't absolutely relevant and necessary.

And that's really the crux of the matter. How do you get the most attention for your show? And even more importantly, what is the most effective way to get potential viewers to tune in? In a crowded media environment, "buzz" for a show depends less on industry high-fives that make everyone at the studio feel good. It's increasingly about developing a social buzz from trusted sources. And that involves a more targeted approach than locking a couple of hundred over-worked critics in a room and offering them cookies and swag in hopes they'll remember your show when it premieres in a couple of months.

I understand the reasons why some people find the TCA circus useful. It gives the network folks and critics face time, there's lots of bacon for all and the chance to party with some of everyone's favorite TV stars. But putting aside the social and marginal professional reasons, my quibble with the TCA gatherings has always centered around one question: are they the best use of network and studio resources? And for that matter, is this really the most effective use of a critic's time? Note that I'm asking about effectiveness, not how they'd prefer to spend their time.

I don't harbor any hopes that things will change anytime soon. TV critics love the TCA gatherings in much the same way that political reporters love hanging out with stars while they listen to the President deliver some jokes. The twice-a-year TCA gatherings are an institution.

But not all institutions deserve to live forever.