Whatever Happened to Local TV?

[FredLeonard]

Another topic got into the absence today of local kids' shows. Once upon a time, every market had them - lots of them most places, and fondly remembered.

TV stations used to be creative and inventive in offering local programming. Now the only local programming is news. No local kids's shows, talk shows, game shows, travel shows, court shows, talent shows, dance shows, bowling shows.....

Could local TV make a come back, especially on the former independent stations which now exist of syndicated shows plus CW, Ion or My? Which formats would be most likely to succeed now?

 

[Mark Giardina]

Another topic got into the absence today of local kids' shows. Once upon a time, every market had them - lots of them most places, and fondly remembered.

TV stations used to be creative and inventive in offering local programming. Now the only local programming is news. No local kids's shows, talk shows, game shows, travel shows, court shows, talent shows, dance shows, bowling shows.....

Could local TV make a come back, especially on the former independent stations which now exist of syndicated shows plus CW, Ion or My? Which formats would be most likely to succeed now?

To answer your question there are a number of reasons.

1. Cost factor. Most of the mega-media companies that own local TV stations just don't want to add additional personnel to host local game shows, TV programs for children and so-on and so-forth.

2. Most local affiliates just switch over to network programming once their early morning local TV newscasts are finished.

3. Kids have numerous options for entertainment. so why should a local channel feature a kid's show? Besides most children today are entertaining themselves with some electronic devices.

Local TV has changed a great deal since I was a kid and I'm sure the same goes for a lot of posters on here.

 

[KeithE4]

Another topic got into the absence today of local kids' shows. Once upon a time, every market had them - lots of them most places, and fondly remembered.

I can think of 4 reasons why kids shows are gone, aside from the fact that kids have a lot more choices than we had 50-60 years ago:

1. Cost. Bozo and the others didn't work cheap.

2. Advertiser support, or the lack thereof. Kids are not in the Sacred Sales Demos, and the days of Ladmo Bags & winning a bike for putting the ball in Bucket #6 are over.

3. E/I rules. I think entertainment for kids that doesn't have an educational angle runs afoul of the FCC nowadays.

4. Cartoons are not available to the stations anymore. Time-Warner owns the majority of what used to be run on locals (Warner Brothers, Hanna-Barbera, MGM, etc.). Comcast, via Universal, owns the Walter Lantz cartoons (Woody Woodpecker, et al), and Disney owns their own stuff. And they want their content on their own networks.

Also, the 1960s-and-earlier stuff we watched is irrelevant to kids today, what with the World War II, old-time-radio, & big-band references that were out of date when I watched them as a kid 50 years ago. The racial stereotypes that were acceptable in those days cannot be shown today, either.

The black-and-white stuff is even deader. Outside of Popeye, those disappeared in the mid '60s when stations went color.

Those who want to watch the old stuff can find many of them on YouTube. But does anybody really want to watch Clutch Cargo move nothing but his lips? ;D

 

[nomadcowatbk]

Another topic got into the absence today of local kids' shows. Once upon a time, every market had them - lots of them most places, and fondly remembered.

TV stations used to be creative and inventive in offering local programming. Now the only local programming is news. No local kids's shows, talk shows, game shows, travel shows, court shows, talent shows, dance shows, bowling shows.....

Could local TV make a come back, especially on the former independent stations which now exist of syndicated shows plus CW, Ion or My? Which formats would be most likely to succeed now?

KCTV and KMOV has local zoo shows for E/I programming, but that's it for local kids shows in the state of MO

 

[cd637299]

One of the "kiddie show filler" cartoons survives today, in addition to some episodes on YouTube:

TBN's Smile of a Child subchannel (its .5 OTA) shows "The Funny Company" from 1963 very late Friday night/Sat. morning, 2 am EST/11pm PST. They run six 5-minute episodes together.

It has an E/I bug, and we learn pertinent things like how an LP record is made, parakiting (what we call parasailing today, I suppose), a trip to Coney Island, etc.

Interesting to watch, if only for us codgers.....

cd

 

[TheBigA]

It really depends on where you live.

K-CAL in LA is 24/7 local news. WNBC-NY has its own in house production company, creating local TV shows for its HD sub channel, and a few have even made it to national. WRC in Washington still does It's Academic, which used to be franchised around the country. KRON in SF produces a few local shows, mostly aiming at adults and seniors. Public TV stations do a lot of local production, depending on the area and funding situation.

But it's like radio: Format specialization and increase in the number of available channels diluted the size of the audience, and made local programming too expensive to produce. If you look at those old local kiddie shows, the production values were pretty embarrassing. You could get away with it then, but not now. Some of the local kiddie shows became franchises, like Romper Room and Bozo. You had to pay the franchisee for the rights to the name. That increased the cost to the station. At the end of the day, broadcasting is a business, and today, a lot of this doesn't make sense unless someone pays.

 

[Sammi Brie]

Another factor is that station groups are far, far larger.

It's easier to invest in stations when you own fewer of them and are closer to each individual outlet. But today's media groups are far larger (the TV landscape is a "survival of the fittest" jungle, and if you're scrawny, you're not fit).

Raycom, for instance, owns stations in markets as diverse as Honolulu, Tucson, Montgomery, Evansville and Cape Girardeau, MO. Each of those markets is very different. Remember when Sinclair tried News Central, which served markets from Las Vegas to Birmingham to Pittsburgh? Again, hard to do.

Small station groups, in all except the rare or small-market cases, are extinct. McGraw-Hill is no more. Freedom was swallowed. Outlet was fused into NBC then mostly spit out. Families have exited the business (KTVK, for instance). Only Dispatch (owning a whopping two stations) really remains along with a few precious others.

 

[ShawnHill1]

More to Raymie's point, not only do you no longer have smaller broadcast groups like in the past, but you really don't any more amibitious and creative program directors and/or station presidents/GMs that are willing to be patient and invest in local programming. As we know now, virtually every programming decision comes from corporate edicts, and a lot less from the local level. The only station group I could think of presently that at least attempts to produce its own local programming is ABC; I can't speak of other ABC-owned stations, but here locally, KABC produces some of its own programming (not counting its newscasts), such as Vista L.A., Eye on L.A. (both lifestyles shows), and On The Red Carpet (which is syndicated to the rest of the station group, as well as few other ABC affiliates--KGTV in San Diego also carries this show). They're certainly doing more than the other stations in town nowadays, maybe KTLA comes the next closest.

 

[Morgan Wick]

Big, impersonal station groups who only see their stations as [market] [network name] are the biggest factor.

For kids shows: Cable and the FCC goofing up kids shows not only with E/I but with other restrictions on how the shows could be paid for, such as by trying to outlaw the "30-minute toy commercials" of the past. Never mind that the pinnacle of the 30-minute toy commercial, Transformers, is now the pinnacle of 80s nostalgia and a big-time movie franchise. Really in all parts of television, the past 30 years have been a parade of the FCC using its alleged inability to regulate cable (and Congress' unwillingness to do so on its behalf) to tilt the playing field in its favor by over-regulating broadcast (see: Nipplegate). Some of the restrictions, like the ones on kids shows, might have worked if it weren't for cable being exempt from them, but ended up just having the effect of screwing over broadcast. Even so, PBS seems to be doing better than what passes for E/I on the commercial networks and stations.

Talk (both of the public affairs and celebrity variety) and talent shows might work, not to mention variety shows like Seattle's classic Almost Live; most of the others have little reason to be local, which means they'd be in trouble in the age of the Internet. Other than news, sports are the last bastion of localism on TV today, but that's a whole other can of worms.

 

[TheBigA]

Big, impersonal station groups who only see their stations as [market] [network name] are the biggest factor.

And yet it's the big, impersonal station groups like Comcast/Universal/NBC that still do a lot of local non-news production. Meanwhile, the small mom & pop TV stations are non-stop off-net re-runs & infomercials. Some don't even do local news.

 

[FredLeonard]

I saw on another board that "Bowling for Dollars" may come back in Detroit. Not exactly what I was hoping for but it seems a lot of people did like it. Some local markets also had real professional bowling back in the day, too.

 

[ding12]

Local TV is alive and well in certain markets:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_TV

 

[LKellerIII]

I've lived predominantly in 2 large media markets - Los Angeles and San Francisco. And really - you have to go back almost 50 years to find a time that there was a lot of locally produced programming. Even then, most of it was low-brow sports (wrestling, roller derby, demolition derby), kid's hosts introducing cartoons, and news. Local news is stronger than ever, and there is the occasional local program, but for the most part, "local" means off network reruns and syndicated judge shows.

Personally, news is about the only "local" program I have any real interest in. Most of the programming I'm looking for are on the networks, basic cable, or premium cable.

 

[landtuna]

KTVU in Oakland had an afternoon show in the early 60's hosted by a guy named "Mr. Bob". I have never been able to find his real name but he was basically a stand-up comic sort of guy who told bad jokes with the result that someone would hit him in the face with a shaving creme pie in between Three Stooges shorts. It was the highlight of my return home from high school every weekday. ;D

 

[KeithE4]

KTVU in Oakland had an afternoon show in the early 60's hosted by a guy named "Mr. Bob". I have never been able to find his real name but he was basically a stand-up comic sort of guy who told bad jokes with the result that someone would hit him in the face with a shaving creme pie in between Three Stooges shorts. It was the highlight of my return home from high school every weekday. ;D

We had one of those in Indianapolis as well. "Harlow Hickenlooper" (his real name was Hal Fryar) was the guy taking the pies and introducing the Stooges on WFBM-TV back in the mid-late '60s. He was basically a local low-budget Soupy Sales wannabe, paired with a singing cowboy named Curly Myers (no, he did not look and act like Curly Howard). Last I heard, both are still living and pushing 90.

 

[Ultimajock]

K-CAL in LA is 24/7 local news.

...since when do The People's Court, Family Feud, Phil McGraw, infomercials and the occasional Dodgers game constitute "local news"??...

 

[FredLeonard]

In Detroit, Soupy was a local, low-budget show. Actually, he was still low-budget in LA and New York.

In Detroit, Soupy also did a very, hip local late-night show with comics and musicians from local night clubs plus Mad Magazine type skits. Although, later on Soupy did guest host the Tonight Show, he never really pursued a career in late night talk-variety. He also did a comedy-talk show on WNBC radio in the 80s, sandwiched between Imus and Howard and did really well at that, too. Surprisingly, he was a really good interviewer. Another road not taken.

Baltimore had a really creative kids' show called "Lorenzo," where the host would open the show and then put on his Lorenzo clown-tramp make-up on camera before dancing to Yakety Ax.

Philly had a hottie in tights who flew around the studio on wires, like Mary Martin in Peter Pan.

 

[Ultimajock]

In Detroit, Soupy also did a very, hip local late-night show with comics and musicians from local night clubs plus Mad Magazine type skits. Although, later on Soupy did guest host the Tonight Show, he never really pursued a career in late night talk-variety.

...interestingly, Pat Buttram also did a local late-night talk show for KTLA/5 Los Angeles in '61, before Steve Allen's Westinghouse show became available. And that was before Pat's old pal Gene Autry bought the station (Paramount Pictures still owned it then). And, even though the 1959-61 Playboy's Penthouse was syndicated, Hugh Hefner actually treated that show more like the local WBKB/7 Chicago production it really was...

 

[ding12]

Chicago has a daily AM show "Windy City Live" which replaced Oprah. The big 4 can offer these types of programs. But they prefer economies of scale with syndicated or network programming.

 

[Markxxx]

Two words...Uncle Floyd ;D