Next TV's Daniel Frankel and David Bloom once again convene over text for their semi-regular melding of deranged screaming into the void and calculated risk aversion.
Daniel Frankel: Hello, David. Good to see you at that Parks Associates Future ’o Television event the other day in the Marina. At least lunch was interesting! … So I was just reading Elaine Low and Claire Atkinson's excellent Friday story in The Ankler about the Golden Globes’ “seven-week Hail Mary” to find a channel, any channel, that will air their January awards event. (They ended up announcing a new broadcast deal over the weekend — CBS.) Fascinating reference here to the “confusing ownership do-si-do” that now surrounds this awards event, which used to attract a huge audience on NBC every year. Even with regular host Ricky Gervais mauling the increasingly pathetic hand that inexplicably kept feeding him, the Globes still served as a rather predictive No. 2 sidekick to the Oscars. For decades, Variety was a stalwart backer of the Golden Globes, annually publishing awards specials sponsored by the event's backer, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. I know this, because I used to oversee some of those “special reports.” Then, a few years ago, Variety — now owned by Jay Penske — initiated a series of relentlessly breathless takedowns of the HFPA and its decades-long plague of corruption and lack of diversity. These reports weren't wrong. But these were hardly new problems that nobody already knew about all along. Penske has somewhat cornered the “for your consideration” advertising market via ownership stakes in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline. He might soon own the Los Angeles Times, too. A guy who runs a low-rent Hollywood trade told me that Amazon threw money at him trying to seed alternative FYC outlets, so the demand side has definitely been aware of consolidation on the supply side. But now, Penske also controls the Golden Globes through his ownership of the event’s longtime producer, Dick Clark Productions. So he now has the bowl, the spoon and the milk. If you’re an awards-aspiring studio marketing executive who wants cereal? … There aren’t a lot of other options. This may all be small monopolistic potatoes as far as D.C. is concerned. But shouldn’t somebody, you know, look into this?
