“It just doesn’t matter.”
- Bill Murray, “Meatballs”

We previously discussed the potential writers strike looming over Hollywood, and now, we shall argue that the current p!ssing match between the Writers Guild and the AMPTP (which sounds like the noise a baby makes when spitting up) just may be based on an economic model that will become antiquated sooner rather than later.

Today’s Daily News story on Current TV, the thing for which Al Gore won the Emmy and not the Nobel Peace Prize, and the upgrade for Current.com that’ll expand the horizons of citizen journalism, points to a very tricky crossroads in the history of television. Current allows You The Viewer to become You The TV-Maker, and given how attractive that is to some people, it’ll no doubt draw a lot of people to the network. (Current’s research suggests that at this point already, before the launch of the new website, the average viewer watches the network 7.5 hours per week.)

What this won’t do, of course, is make these people rich anytime soon. Of course, the way things are going, the broadcast networks aren’t going to be making anyone rich in the future, either: Costs for producing a show seen by 7 million people on a broadcast network are much, much more than those for a show seen by 3 or 4 million on a cable network, and the overhead is exponentially costlier. As one acquaintance in the industry put it, “Pretty soon, they're going to have a better chance recovering production costs by buying millions of Powerball lottery tickets.”

Simply put, networks feed into a fading notion that a mass audience and a consensus culture is going to remain out there. But there’s very little to suggest that we’re going to do anything but continue siphon ourselves off further into niche entertainments that speak directly to us rather than homogenous, even condescending, entertainments aimed at those larger audiences that are getting smaller every day.

My friend noted, “In political science terms, I think what is going on is the realization that the masses are only the masses when a Joe Stalin, or Mao Zedong coerces them into a mass. Or when the FCC allows just three large providers to compete for different sizes of market share for the entire nation. But once coercion is not an option, and the American viewing public breaks up like the former Soviet Union did, then you can no longer compete for their attention by being the same –broadcast network model – but by being different. As Darwin said, no two cable networks can survive in the same niche.”

(Did he just compare Jeff Zucker to Stalin? Just sayin'.)

We’re still in the era of the Hollywood Gold Rush, but it’s a Gold Rush that was inspired by the explosion of Entertainment Lite, by the “Entertainment Tonight”-ization of the industry, which occurred when the people who came to town because they were inspired by the art of films of the 1970s were hip-checked by the people who came to town because they were inspired by the glamour and big-bucks of the ’80s and ’90s.

As niche entertainment becomes more pervasive, that inspiration to the art that occurred in the ’70s will re-emerge, albeit on a much smaller scale, while there’ll be fewer and fewer successful mainstream/blockbuster kinds of entertainment being made, particularly on TV. The enticement for those who come to town for the glamour and end up as P.A.’s and grips could eventually ebb when, in the future, as niche programming proliferates, people are making crap money working 16-hour-days on crap reality shows that are seen by only a few hundred thousand people nationwide, and having “a job in the industry” no longer has the same cachet it once did when trolling the bars.

So in the future, if you’re going to work in Television, you’re going to really want to work in Television and not be so enamored with the material rewards it so obviously produces these days.

Again, my friend: “When you're looking for a small audience, it has to be a passionate audience, and passion comes not from how slick your producers are, but how passionate they are. And since you can't buy passion, production costs drop commensurate with audience size.”

That Al Gore: He invented the Internets, and now he re-invented TV.

What do you think? Whither Television? Does the big picture include smaller productions? Please keep your responses to 30,000 words or fewer.