television landscape

Its “House of Cards” is nominated for outstanding drama, the first time that a program distributed on the Internet has competed at the Emmys right alongside programs distributed through rabbit ears and satellite dishes. And the prospect that a streaming video service like Netflix could end up a winner at the Emmys ceremony on Sunday night has cast a spotlight on just how profoundly the television landscape has changed.

Still, most television critics and other self-professed Emmys experts suspect that it’s the cable channel AMC, not Netflix, that will have the most to celebrate at the awards show. “Breaking Bad,” which has been nominated for best drama four times before but has never won, is the clear favorite this year. In an e-mail, Debra Birnbaum, the editor in chief of TV Guide Magazine, borrowed a phrase from the series’ meth lord Walter White: “ ‘Breaking Bad’ is the danger this Emmy season.”

And that’s with just the first half of the show’s final season in contention for an Emmy this year. AMC broke the season into two parts, and only the first half was televised before the May cutoff date for Emmy eligibility. But the second half started to be shown in August, just as Emmy voters were receiving their ballots in the mail. What’s more, the reviews have been uniformly glowing, and the ratings have been building as the Sept. 29 finale approaches. Last Sunday’s episode, which generated more than 16,000 Twitter messages a minute at one point, was the most-watched episode yet, with at least 6.4 million viewers.

So it stands to reason that the Emmy results might reflect all the excitement. (Ballots were due on Aug. 30.) This week the Web site Gold Derby, which tracks Hollywood’s horse races, called “Breaking Bad” the “overwhelming front-runner.”

As it turns out, the series will be competing with the Emmys (televised by CBS) on Sunday night. The three-hour backslapping ceremony will begin at 8 p.m. Eastern, while the 75-minute penultimate episode of “Breaking Bad” will begin at 9 p.m. Since the drama prize is handed out last, “Breaking Bad” viewers can change channels afterward to see if the show won. (And if it doesn’t, well, the second half of the final season will be eligible again in 2014.)

For AMC, an Emmy for “Breaking Bad” would be a welcome acknowledgment of how it, like Netflix, has changed television. Until 2008, the only winners of the top drama Emmy, the most coveted of all, were broadcast networks and HBO. Then “Mad Men” came along and AMC became the first ad-supported cable channel to win the top drama award. “Mad Men” kept winning, for four seasons in a row, until Showtime’s “Homeland” snapped its streak last year.

This time around, both are nominated again, along with “Breaking Bad,” “House of Cards,” PBS’s “Downton Abbey,” and HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”

Netflix won’t say how many people have watched “House of Cards.” HBO’s “Thrones” might be the most popular of the six; HBO said the season finale in June attracted nearly 14 million viewers once on-demand viewership was calculated. About 12 million people saw the season finale of “Downton Abbey”; more than seven million saw “Homeland”; and nearly five million saw “Mad Men.”

For the second year in a row, no dramas from the big four broadcast networks were nominated. But the broadcasters were somewhat better represented in the best comedy category, where ABC’s “Modern Family” is vying for its fourth straight win. It is up against NBC’s “30 Rock,” which ended in May and is eligible for the final time; CBS’s “Big Bang Theory”; HBO’s “Girls” and “Veep”; and FX’s “Louie.”

The one Netflix comedy series that some thought would be nominated, “Arrested Development,” was not. But one of the stars of “Arrested,” Jason Bateman, is up for best lead actor in a comedy. Back on the drama side, Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright are both up for lead actor and actress for “House of Cards.”

Bruce Rosenblum, the chairman of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, said that Netflix’s nominations illustrated the evolving nature of TV.

“This is just the beginning,” he said. “If you look at the quantity of product being developed at Netflix and Amazon and Hulu and Xbox, it’s certainly reasonable to expect that this evolution will accelerate. Having said that, the quality of content on broadcast and cable is certainly at an all-time high as well.”

Netflix’s presence at the Emmys is the result of rules that were amended about six years ago to allow some (but not all) Internet shows. Netflix is technically already a winner: it picked up two awards for casting and cinematography last weekend at the Creative Arts portion of the Emmys. But to put that in context, HBO picked up 20, including eight for its TV movie “Behind the Candelabra.” The recorded Creative Arts ceremony will be shown by FXX on Saturday.

The prime-time ceremony on CBS will take stock of what many observers have called a golden age of TV. There remains a wide gulf, however, between the audience for the Academy Awards, which drew about 40 million viewers this year, and the Emmys, which attracted about 13 million in 2012. The Academy Awards have some advantages: namely, movie stars and 10 brand-new films in competition each year. The Emmys, on the other hand, often celebrate returning shows with relatively small audiences.

But Mr. Rosenblum voiced confidence that the ratings for the Emmys would defy trend lines and grow over time. “The industry is accelerating from a quality standpoint and from a buzz and pop culture standpoint,” he said, “and that at some point will be reflected in our ratings.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/21/business/media/emmys-highlight-a-changing-tv-industry.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

“With your call, the bad guys fall,” the host and producer John Walsh likes to say, reminding his viewers that he’s working in partnership with them — and with law enforcement — to capture fugitives. He says the show has assisted in 1,149 captures since its premiere in 1988, an average of one a week.

But the weekly broadcasts of “America’s Most Wanted” are almost up, at least on Fox, which said on Monday that it was demoting the show to quarterly specials, starting in the fall. Mr. Walsh was caught off guard by the effective cancellation; he said in an interview on Tuesday afternoon that he was planning to seek other outlets for the show. “I really have to weigh all my options,” he said.

To call “America’s Most Wanted” merely a show may diminish the public-service role that Mr. Walsh and others say it performs. (The United States Marshals Service, for instance, calls it a “tremendous partner.”)

For decades it has been a visual and visceral version of the government’s bulletins about fugitives, and for that it has received acclamations from all manner of public figures, including President Obama, who was interviewed by Mr. Walsh last year for the 1,000-episode anniversary.

“It’s a remarkable record,” Mr. Obama said, referring to the capture count.

Equally remarkable is the show’s cultural influence, now spanning a generation. Its true-crime storytelling and its reliance on re-enactments of events have inspired producers across the television landscape, including even some those of behind the scripted crime procedurals that now rule prime time.

“ ‘America’s Most Wanted’ is an example of the reality genre in its initial stages,” said Cynara M. Medina, a professor who teaches media courses at Trinity University in San Antonio.

Mr. Walsh, for his part, sniffs at what the genre has become. In the interview, after he mentioned “American Idol” and “The Biggest Loser,” he labeled them “the dumbing-down-of-society shows.”

So much of the success of “America’s Most Wanted” over the years has been wrapped up in Mr. Walsh’s personality — and in his identity as a crime victim and an activist. After his young son Adam was abducted and murdered in 1981, he testified before Congress and campaigned — quite successfully — for tough-on-crime laws. He helped to form the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and in 1988 he started producing and hosting “Most Wanted.”

In 1988 the nation’s crime rate had been climbing for years, and the climate of fear had been climbing even faster. Within that climate “Most Wanted” was one of the first hits for the Fox network, then brand-new.

Some say that “America’s Most Wanted” exploited that environment, contributing to an inflated sense of the threat of serious crime. In his 2008 book, “The Science of Fear,” the author Daniel Gardner asserts that Mr. Walsh and others who have come since, like Nancy Grace, a commentator on HLN, have for years misrepresented reality. Mr. Gardner wrote of this “universe of true crime” that “sad and horrible tales are the stock in trade.”

“Accurate statistics,” he continued, “are rarely or never mentioned.”

Mr. Walsh’s answer to that charge was pointed: “We turn down 50 cases a week.”

“We live in a dangerous world,” he added.

Like virtually all other shows that have been on television for decades, “America’s Most Wanted” has given up audience share over time. It has averaged between five and six million viewers this season.

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