Last year, Channel Seven landed itself in hot water when its new cooking show Restaurant Revolution bombed the same week as it launched legal action against Nine, claiming Nine’s cooking show The Hotplate was a ripoff of Seven’s more popular cooking show My Restaurant Rules.
Facing the previously unfathomable idea that there was a limit to the variations of TV shows about piquant flavours and plating that may be possible to create or interesting to watch, Seven dug deep and got desperate. Like many of us do at the end of a long and intellectually challenging day, it gave itself over to YouTube, strung a bunch of cats together, and replaced the Tuesday airing of Restaurant Revolution with a brand new show: Cats Make You Laugh Out Loud.
Of course it worked: a million and a half people around the country watched it. Ratings slid a little over subsequent weeks as they explored different topics, but still held at more than a million. And early this month the show returned with a second season, and continues to edge towards seven-figure ratings every Tuesday when it airs. In the past three weeks, puppies, toddlers and pensioners have all made us LLOL (literally laugh out loud).
As programming, it is easy and cheap – not to disparage the fine work of the producer who must work long into the night, looking for the most engaging, most crowd-pleasing, most LOLworthy example of a nana losing false teeth in her soup. It’s YouTube, a voiceover and some grabs from otherwise excellent comedians, who make only slightly wittier voyeur comments than you do to your flatmates.
Basically it’s the same as being on YouTube, except a responsible adult cuts you off at 30 minutes and you don’t find yourself still there at 3am, desperately seeking the joyful release of the first laugh, like a porn addict but even more embarrassing.
The TV industry has known for decades that the internet is coming for it, and has desperately tried to cling to those fickle eyes for as long as possible. Some attempts have been, to put it mildly, more successful than others.
Surprisingly enough, Make You Laugh Out Loud isn’t the first Australian YouTube TV show: there was Friday Night Download in 2007, which lasted for just two episodes before being pulled. For a show that cheap to be pulled from a time slot that undemanding is a failure of almost impressive proportions.
Then of course, there’s what we usually refer to as reality TV – in actuality, mainly competition shows – which have a prominence they haven’t held since the heyday of the variety show, due to the added element of “interactivity” and “engagement” afforded by the internet. You can vote for your favourite ventriloquist/venison! The Voice, The X Factor, The Other One Whose Name I Can Never Remember – they all count on the audience following up, voting, sharing, clicking, clicking, clicking, delivering more eyes to online advertisements than to the broadcast.
Traditional late-night comedy shows also have their eye on the YouTube market, but in the opposite direction. Jimmy Fallon, James Corden, and Stephen Colbert are now watched far more online than on traditional broadcast, or even catch-up services. Loose chats between hosts and bright young things have been replaced by games or segments that work as their own show within a show. A prime example of this is Lip Sync Battle, which took things to the logical conclusion and spun off.
Lip Sync Battle is less strong as a half-hour show than it is as a seven-minute YouTube clip, adding all the peripheral padding – sweeping crowd shots, awkward host banter, frequent teasing and recapping – that audiences first went to the internet to avoid.
Far more interesting is stop-motion animation Robot Chicken, which strings together interrelated sketches, some only a few seconds in length. Ditching the traditional TV structure of hosts and framing, it’s like watching YouTube clip after clip, with the absurdity of the material mimicking that slightly psychedelic spiral that accompanies a YouTube binge. It’s almost as if the sketches are not only getting faster, but you’re actually watching them faster.
And yet, after a decade of what must have have been some hilarious urgent executive meetings involving highly paid professionals sitting in boardrooms analysing Charlie Bit My Finger, the real winner has been Netflix, which lured the audience back not by trying to squish and stretch linear TV into another beast altogether, but by returning to what television has always done better than any other screen medium. Plots push forward, characters evolve, worlds expand.
Recaps, live -tweeting and bespoke hashtags aside, we watch Game of Thrones or Bojack Horseman or Mr Robot the same way we have always watched TV. Hour after hour, week after week, year after year, we enter the lives of loved (and occasionally hated) characters, and invite them into ours.
• Make You LOL airs at on Tuesdays at 7.30pm on Channel Seven
