Photo by Tanner Almon
You may have noticed a severe lack of original Australian programming on television lately. Or more likely, you may not have because you don’t watch Australian TV anyway. Its British and American counterparts have always pushed the Australian TV industry into obscurity, but now it seems as if they’ve completely given up.
The three commercial stations (Seven, Nine and Ten) have to fill an annual quota of 55% Australian programming between 6am and midnight. This includes other quotas regarding first run Australian drama, documentaries and children’s programs. Furthermore, 80% of all the space reserved for advertising has to be Australian produced.
But are these quotas a good or bad thing? On the one hand, we want to produce Australian shows, but on the other hand, New Media has changed the way we watch programs and the networks have had to change their content.
Nowadays the commercial networks stack their schedules with news and news-related panel shows, possibly due to the advent of the Internet and 24 hour news channels. Each commercial network has at least six hours of these programs every weekday, which is over half of the daily average required to fill the Australian programming quota.
Sports programs also count as Australian content, even if they are international sporting events, just so long as the broadcast is Australian produced. The commercial networks clamber over each other for the rights to sporting events because they are impractical to watch online and sponsors are desperate to be a part of the coverage. And we all know how popular sport is in Australia.
The other types of programs the commercial networks love are reality type programs. These programs are hyper-frequent, therefore again impractical to watch online, and again sponsors throw themselves at the TV stations. Product placement in shows such as ‘Masterchef’ or ‘The Block’ is so ubiquitous, the real contest of the shows aren’t to do with cooking or building, rather how many brands you can cram into a 90 minute slot. Because these types of programs are cheap to make in the first place, the networks have made a profit on them before they go to air.
All of these shows are highly accessible, not specifically targeted to a certain age demographic, rather just a shotgun approach in an effort to keep as many people watching the telly as possible. It seems the commercial networks have given up targeting shows specifically at the 16-35 demographic, possibly because most of the Australian shows produced in the past to that demographic have been as modern and relevant to them as a Furby doing Zumba whilst simultaneously bluetoothing the Crazy Frog Song on a Nokia phone.
Now that’s not to say there hasn’t been quality Australian-written programming, once upon a time there were a plethora of shows that were genuinely entertaining. However these shows are often squeezed until they have nothing left in them, or alternatively hidden away on the digital channels or ABC2 where they are destined to die. Ultimately, the most gripping original drama Australia has produced in recent memory was the AAMI ads. And even that was done to death.
What’s lacking from the commercial networks is ambitious programming. By that, I don’t mean the aspirational TV you see in the US that wills people to be perfect and shiny and leads them to do the 5-2 diet and hold elaborate, choreographed proposals for their girlfriends because that’s the kind of thing they’d do in glamorous TV Land. No, I mean ambitious, risk-taking programming that doesn’t ride on the coat tails of tried and tested formats. That’s how we see mega stars like Chris Lilley or Hamish and Andy get born, through taking risks. In fact, both of their original ventures into TV were failures (See The Hamish and Andy Show and Big Bite)
Instead we have reality shows, panel shows and sports. And most of our dramas and comedies are imported from the U.S, which again are tried and tested formats and highly accessible. It’s far cheaper to buy an American program than to produce an Australian original. And even when they do produce original drama or comedy, they’re dismissed as rubbish by people like me, or completely ignored altogether by viewers.
So is it really worth the commercial networks creating original content? I think so. But if most of us get our TV online anyway, doesn’t it make sense to produce programs that reach as many viewers as they possibly can? So is it really a bad thing if Australia produces less and less original content anyway? If an industry falls when nobody is watching, does it make a sound?
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