Television studios

I thought of this while just watching the beginning of SportsCenter, which was just on in the background while I do the Times Sunday crossword...and apparently, surf SportsJournalists.com. But it looks like the damn starship Enterprise. They have Josh Elliot alone at a podium, surrounded by dim lighting, and interjections of red. Then they cut to Stephen A., who's in front of a slanted monitor, and more dim/red lighting, strange shapes and jagged lines.
Why the hell is television so visually confusing? This isn't just SC. It's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, which always looked to me like a scene out of Apocalypse Now. It's Deal or No Deal. Hey, I'm not asking for a studio that looks like Aunt Betty's living room, but not being on the cusp of a seizure every time I turn on the tube would be awesome.

 

I find your comments really interesting. Good thread. Do you have a sense of what you might like better?

As somebody who works in TV, my best answer is that set design is a lot like fashion -- it's about trends. There are some good ones, some bad ones, and then there are leg-warmers-- in 5 years we'll be saying, "What were we thinking?"

 

I think the sportcenter set looks cool in HD. but then again, anything looks cool in hd.

 

Does that make John Anderson Sulu or Chekov?

 

As someone who worked in TV (Web only, nothing for the on-air "product"), let me say that not all TV sets are like SC. At my old shop, the anchors looked like they were working in a cave ... they had a slogan from three branding statements ago all over the set because corporate hadn't changed it ... the lighting was horrible ... you could hear the chairs make noise DURING THE BROADCAST! ... the plasma at the standup looked like it was going to fall off the wall. EEK!

 

Some of them are pretty traditional. I work for the web site in my area associated with both a television station and newspaper (We love convergence!). We do reporting as well, specifically for the web site. Until this week, the television station was doing web casts for the site, but this week, the reporters for the site took them over. We are completely changing the set because young people don't want to see someone sitting behind the desk. We're snarky and opinionated and we want to reflect some of that in our web casts.

I think that television execs need to realize that young people aren't watching the news. It's the same as newspapers gearing design to a younger crowd. Television stations need to be doing the same thing. Web sites certainly are doing that.

 

Here's the problem with that, though: I'm not at all convinced you can attract the younger viewers/readers with that approach, but you can sure as hell drive the older ones away. The younger demo is great, but I don't want to add two 25 year old viewers at the expense of fifty 40 year old viewers.

For what it's worth, I'm getting really tired of snarky. Every day my local major metro paper now has a full page dedicated to mocking celebrities, and each day I think "If these people are so contemptible, why the hell are you giving them a full page on the back of a major section?" Cute for a blog, badly overused in the mainstream media these days.