I have a new favorite television show, although it will have to work hard to maintain that distinction once a new season of 30 Rock resumes – Baggage. Baggage, simply put, is The Dating Game for neurotics and misfits. Three contestants (“datees”) stand before a solitary “dator” and serially reveal three things about themselves that constitute their baggage – they believe they were descended by aliens, they save their hair from bikini waxes, they have specific sexual limitations or demands, they use coupons on dates, they were in a cult, and so on. After three rounds, the dator picks a winner, but the dator must then reveal his or her own foible – my mother will always come first, I live with my ex-husband, I once was a pimp – and the selected date candidate then decides if they’ll spend a romantic evening together at a restaurant in Beverly Hills or some such.
Well, where do you start peeling the onion? At the simplest level, Baggage is a tremendous will-he-or-won’t-she proposition. Will the New Age-y physical therapist, having weathered the selection process, be deterred when it turns out the guy who picked her is a bankrupt circus performer? (She did, I’m pleased to report. He seemed like a lovely guy and they looked genuinely pleased to meet each other.) Or, in perhaps my favorite episode, the geeky-looking Star Trek devotee reveals in his final “piece of baggage” (suitcases are used quite dramatically for props) that he’s an award-winning porn star, and the very good looking woman charged with the selection, who had shown no interest in, if not outright disdain for, him, up to that point now has an agonizing and instant reappraisal. She picks him (with the active encouragement of my wife and daughter from a distance), and then reveals her baggage – she insists that a man pay for everything on dates – she even pumps her fist Arsenio-style when the audience catcalls in response. In other words, an asshole. The porn star shrugs and tells her that he knows (and I mean knows) all sorts of beautiful women on a daily basis at the workplace and that he had hoped to meet someone with “more depth.” He walks away, leaving her stunned, but then again, people without depth are often stunned at such moments.
There is also the host of Baggage, Jerry Springer. I’ve always found him distasteful, but here, he’s in full flower. He projects a sense of detached and intelligent amusement with the proceedings, and his occasional quipping is at its best delightfully reminiscent of (and this is the highest flattery possible) Groucho Marx. It’s Springer, of course, so there’s a regrettable undertow to the smutty (and in Baggage’s second and subsequent seasons there was a lot more of this, which cost the show its charm) while the audience has been encouraged to voice their opinions, much as a similar audience doomed gladiators two millennia ago. But it all works.
Down another layer, Baggage is a field investigation into the calculus of mate selection. I don’t want to go all Gary Becker economics-of-marriage on you and talk about how there’s a market for marriage and that you have to maximize your potential value in exchange when picking somebody with whom you’ve created a call option for a lifelong risk sharing agreement. Character, age, looks, wealth, habits – all of it is somehow traded off in the mate selection market. As Marilyn Monroe tells Charles Coburn in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, after he’s accused her of marrying his son for the son’s money, “No, I’m marrying him for your money.” Money in a man, she goes on to explain, is like good looks in a woman – just another superficial reason why people don’t address intimacy as a facet of their self-actualization in a sense reminiscent of Fromm, or Carl Rogers – well, that’s not really what she said, but it’s what she meant, I could tell. Baggage looks at these transactions. Do a guy’s looks compensate for his ploy of trying to meet girls at gay bars? How does a market participant assess a woman who is good-looking, flirts in French, and has a graduate education, but who is saving herself marriage and may well be a religious crackpot? I have the fantasy that Malcolm Gladwell is a contestant on the program and intuits a selection who turns out to have a wardrobe of matching woman-and-dog outfits or is currently involved with an 80-year-old man. Look before you blink, brother.
And once we peel away these musing, we get down to the basics – economics. The New York Times reported recently that Baggage is the runaway hit of the Game Show Network, one in the endless series of life-splintering cable channels (moving inexorably towards my friend David Moore’s prediction, made years ago, of The Parking Channel). Game Show Network, says the Times, is up 20 percent in the last three years, with Baggage the flagship of its recent efforts to create new programming (as opposed to its staple, reruns of the iconic Match Game and Hollywood Squares. There are, apparently, 472,999 other households watching Springer. But GSN’s strategy is not just to create programming, but to use the cable network as a platform for on-line gaming, live gaming on television, and as a partner for such websites as Pogo.com, purveyors of Poppit, which can destroy your day’s schedule if you’re not careful and have my specific personality disorder.
And at the nub of the economics is the role of aggregators, people you pay to buy your television programming for you, like Comcast or Time Warner or Verizon or ATT. Their role was raised once again last week when Apple announced its revamped Apple TV device, a $99 box that plugs into your television and that delivers first-run television episodes for 99 cents each. Sure, I’d pay 99 cents – if I had to – for an episode of 30 Rock – heck, at $10 a month of whatever it costs, I was paying that or more for episodes of The Sopranos and The Wire by subscribing to HBO.
But Apple’s attempt to make this product work, and to make the pay-per-view model work for all of television, raises the question of whether people want to watch television that way. I’m sure many people have, at some point, looked at their cable (or fiber) television bill and thought, “Why am I paying $50 a month for all this crap like Baggage when all I really want to watch is CNN and the Food Channel?”
But what that complaint misses is that cable, fiber, or whomever is an aggregator – they use their scale and presence in the market to get you the best rate on the Food Channel, GSN, or whatever it is. The rights fees paid by cable television providers for something like the Food Channel is probably something on the order of 20 cents per household. If Apple TV were to be the dominant medium and model, the ability to sell programming to cable and fiber aggregators with tens of millions of viewers would disappear. Instead, networks such as The Food Channel would hone in on their core audiences and charge them the kind of rates others pay for HBO or Showtime, let’s say $10 a month. You do the math – if you raise your monthly carriage fee 50-fold and keep more than 2 percent of your old audience, you’re ahead. In essence, cable/fiber aggregators let you pay what you’d have been willing to pay for the stuff you watch regularly and then throw in the rest for free, and the free stuff is where I found Baggage, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and other light classics.
The proponents of Apple TV and the pay for service model note that the iPod put a fork into radio and records, and that the same will happen here. I doubt it. For one, they haven’t thought through the role of aggregators in getting consumers a mix of price and variety that will look attractive when they consider the alternative. Second, television has a live component that gives it an ace in the hole – sports obviously comes to mind. Fox’s regional sports channel only recently decided to pay the Detroit Tigers $40 million a year for ten years for the right to televise their games. It’s a fairly substantial amount of money, but where else do you find programming that people will watch real-time, including commercials?
And, most crucially, people watch all sorts of programming, from Baggage and Inspector Poirrot. But when you get down to it, my musical tastes run from A to B – my Pandora channels range from Bireli Lagrene to Count Basie to Art Farmer, with a Johnny Winter in case I need to amp it up a little. But three out of the other four think they should play Stan Getz. (When you ask Pandora for Red Shadow: The Economics Rock and Roll Band…well, I’ve never seen a digital device spit up before.) I get XM for the ball games – otherwise, my jazz collection anticipates my tastes as well as theirs and the Grateful Dead channel is only interesting in small bursts, and even then, only when the burnouts who host it shut up. I’m sure other people’s musical tastes are as limited, even if not as well-developed.
So my guess is that the much-anticipated iAssault on programming aggregators isn’t about to take down the citadel. In fact, other digital developments, like a monthly charge for access to up-market hulu, run the other way – they’re asking to be your aggregator, but on a different technological platform. But perhaps the last and final lesson in the nesting-dolls of Baggage implications is that I might be wrong. It’s happened before.
But it makes no difference. Content aggregators and pay-per-view (or click) providers are betting large quantities of money that they’re right, and we’ll find out soon enough. And when the policy debate in telecommunications talks about a “cable/telco duopoly,” it misses this point. Perhaps the most important competition underway in that world today is the competition of business models. What does the consumer want – aggregators, pay-per-click, steaming, storage, discounts for time commitments, all you can eat? Nobody knows, but people are investing to back up their guesses. And beyond static price competition, this model competition is the most important feature of the market today. It will decide who will become the next generation of Baggage handlers.