On the box

It's a fairly ho-hum time in television for the local market at the moment.

Any quick channel surf  reveals that the big networks are playing it safe. There’s that cooking show you watched a few years back, that knock-off of the renovation show you don’t intend to watch – or the revival of that singing show with that guy you liked in the 90s. 

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great viewing to get you through to that stage of the night right after dinner but before reading in bed, but it’s not exactly breaking new ground. Over in the US, it’s the most tumultuous time of year: renewals and cancellations. Many beloved shows have been given the executioner’s axe this week. Community, The X Factor (US) and The Carrie Diaries are but some of the high-profile programs to have bitten the dust. Some renewals this year have been obvious – with Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead both renewed for a fifth season and The Big Bang Theory renewed for another astounding three years (someone’s clearly watching that show). 

Interestingly, some of these renewals haven’t been so clear cut. Low-rating superhero programs Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Arrow were just announced for their second and third seasons respectively. This is clearly a reaction to the flavour-of-the-week pop culture phenomenon that has been the superhero film genre, which continues to churn film after film for its respective studio. 

The television networks are craving the “capes and cowl” money – there’s clearly a market for it with the way they perform at the box office. Despite the fact that Arrow and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. haven’t found huge audiences (either at home or in the US) both have been granted spinoff shows which will debut in early 2015.

So why isn’t it working as well as it should be? There’s a few different reasons for this, but the main ones are that on television there just isn’t the budget that’s present for feature films. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. suffered because, despite the fact that he runs the organisation, Samuel L. Jackson clearly couldn’t hang out in every episode. 

However it’s not just the actors themselves, sometimes these programs suffer from the unavailability of the actual characters, with the rights sometimes being locked up into other projects.  Both shows suffer from a lack of production values at times, and this also shows in some of the special effects and set design. Have you ever noticed that Oliver Queen does most of his character progression in a burger shop for the first season?

Let’s face it. Until the number of superhero programs on television grows to an unbearable rate (there’s also a new Batman-related one in the works at FOX) they’re probably going to be around for some time to come.  Just like with the films, we’re looking at the birth of a new genre.

That really begs the question: are superhero shows the new reality singing show?