The thing I hate most about Grey's Anatomy isn't the way it shot its thematic wad in the first season. No, it's the rise of the hour-long drama that should be a half-hour-long comedy. Take the latest Anatomy knockoff: The Deep End.
It's the same formula, except with with first-year lawyers instead of first-year doctors. There's the overwrought sexual tension between everybody; there's the plunky, plucky, omnipresent soundtrack. I'm not sure sure which is more annoying.
The formula makes sense, of course: You use people who are new at what they're doing (medical interns or first-year lawyers) so that the audience can learn with them and so that the characters have a clear arc ahead of them. You use attractive actors and amp up the sexual tension so that the audience can get wrapped up in the inevitable soap-opera that will ensue. You have an obnoxious soundtrack because you have to justify the expense of the show, or something.
All I can say is that I hope this formula fails. It killed that adorable little show Defying Gravity (which was billed as "Grey's Anatomy in space"). And, God willing, it'll kill The Deep End too. The only thing it has going for it is that it's a guilty pleasure show, but the plot is so contrived--and transparently so--I have a hard time watching it without feeling like I'm getting dumber.
While on the subject of hour-long dramas, am I alone in thinking that The Life Unexpected is just adorable?
In other news, John Gruber has a delightful review of the iPad up. He writes:
Used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated. Then came the automatic transmission. With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away. The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.
That’s where Apple is taking computing. A car with an automatic transmission still shifts gears; the driver just doesn’t need to know about it. A computer running iPhone OS still has a hierarchical file system; the user just never sees it.
That’s not to say there aren’t trade-offs involved. Car enthusiasts (and genuine experts like race car drivers) still drive cars with manual transmissions. They offer more control; they’re more efficient. But the vast majority of cars sold today are automatics. So too it’ll be with computers. Eventually, the vast majority will be like the iPad in terms of the degree to which the underlying computer is abstracted away. Manual computers, like the Mac and Windows PCs, will slowly shift from the standard to the niche, something of interest only to experts and enthusiasts and developers.
Intrigued? Go, read.
Tyler Cowan says:
My theory is that Apple wants to capture a chunk of the revenue in this nation's enormous textbook market -- high school, college, whatever. Why lug all those books around? The superior Apple graphics, colors, and fonts will support all of the textbook features which Kindle botches and destroys. Apple takes a chunk of the market revenue, of course, plus they sell the iPads and some AT&T contracts. There are lots of schoolkids in the world.
Well, yeah, duh. Gruber makes the point best:
Lastly, a thought regarding the iPad’s aggressive pricing. Apple is obviously leaving money on the table here. They could easily charge $999 as the starting price and have hundreds of people lined up outside every Apple Store ready to buy one on day one. Then they could drop the price later in the year, as the holiday season approaches.
Clearly they’re more interested in unit sales than per-unit margin. The mobile computing landscape is in land-grab mode, and Apple is trying to stake out a long-term dominating position.And Cowan is right, Apple is staking out the ebook market, the future of which is textbooks
Prepare to bow down to your Apple overlords.
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