The Avengers cartoon on Disney XD is surprising good. With the success of the Marvel films, I imagine that S.H.E.I.L.D. will have huge early numbers but without any real superheroes, it's difficult to predict whether or not it'll keep an audience.

It is pretty good, but it's nowhere near the quality of the Avengers cartoon that it replaced. Kind of a shame.

I'm actually enjoying Hulk and the Agents of SMASH, although it's about as dumb as the title would indicate. LMAO

Have you seen Beware the Batman on Cartoon Network? I've been really surprised at how good that one's been, after seeing how bad the new Teen Titans cartoon turned out. I'm not a big fan of the animation style, but the storytelling has been good so far.

No, I haven't seen it yet. The kids are too young. I'm lucky I got to watch the Phineas & Ferb/Avengers crossover this past weekend.

It's worth checking out. There's a new dynamic with Alfred being a former MI6 agent, and a new asian female sidekick named Katana, both of which make it feel a little bit fresher than it might otherwise. They're also pretty heavily involved with the League of Assassins (who are also showing up on Arrow this season). It's hard to make a Batman cartoon feel like something new, after god knows how many reboots in the last 20 years, but I think they've been successful so far.

Someone needs to kill this man.

I'm pretty sure 10 minutes of him talking could convince me to **** my dog for Jesus because global warming is killing the sand snakes in the Sahara...

I think my string of misses is busted on this one.

Oh, just shut the **** up.

And his premise if flawed.

Once you and everyone else in America pays $7.99 per month to watch Fox, CBS, ABC and NBC, things will change.

Until then, no.

The big 4 aren't what they used to be. The landscape has changed dramatically just in my/our lifetime, with the advent and explosion of cable and satellite and streaming, and I think it's a safe bet that it's going to continue to change over the next 40 years. Now, into what, I wouldn't venture a guess.

It just struck me that I actually remember a time when we had a television with rabbit ears that got (I think) ABC, NBC and PBS (I don't remember fox). I remember getting cable for the first time, and a VHS player (never had beta, eventually got DVD). And now I'm sitting 10 feet away from a flat screen TV with access to hundreds of channels, many of them in HD, along with a bluray player. And at a computer with access to youtube and hulu and hbo go. Near a Kindle with the same.

And I wonder why I get nothing done.

As long as the "Free" networks remain advertiser driven, pilot season will exist.

It's really easy to sit back and say "Netflix has a great model!" when Netflix is charging $7.99 a month for their service. They have money to spare and if House of Cards was a failure, they'd still be profitable.

Fox, CBS and NBC shell out a billion dollars a year for the NFL alone and barely break even. Those networks just can't put any old show on the air and expect to earn revenues.

Again, it's driven by advertisers, not by people willing to pay for their service.

I think that's what's going to change. Eventually.

You may not have seen my addition to my last post. Go back and look if you didn't. You'll probably mirror my recollection.

And that's how the landscape has changed, in a nutshell: we're overwhelmed with entertainment options and choices that I don't think we could have even imagined 35 years ago.

The NFL, to me, is their advertising budget for the year. Get people to sit through and see the commericals for their other shows.

LMAO

He'd make a damn good politician, wouldn't he?

Networks are showing they're willing to adjust, albeit slowly. You're already seeing an variety of program formats. A decade ago, who would have imagined 12-13 episode shows on major networks. NBC had Hannibal last year (and next year). Now CBS has, err, what's it called, Hostages, which is I think running 15 weeks? They're basically adapting the kinds of shows that have been and are succeeding on premium channels (something that as I recall people said would never happen a few years back), and audiences are responding to at least some of them. You're even seeing corroborations between NBC and foreign networks (Crossing Lines this summer). And serial dramas now seem almost the norm, where they barely existed a decade ago.

I realize this seems like a tangent but my point is that I think they're getting creative because they know they have to in order to stay competitive. In the same light, some programs in recent years have tried varying their advertising format (with varied degrees of success). I think the major networks realize they have to adjust if they want to keep being the major networks. There's just too much out there to draw viewers away from them.

There is still a large segment of our population that do not have basic cable, let alone premium cable, and an even larger segment that do have have Netflix or Amazon or any other streaming service.

Also, keep in mind that many of these other channels and options you speak of are owned by NBC/Universal, ABC/Disney, Fox and CBS/Paramount.

HBO, TNT, TBS, FX, FXX, Showtime, Cinemax, blah, blah, blah. These aren't independent entities. I think that the studios and programmers do a pretty damn good job of knowing what will work on Network vs. Cable.