On Wednesday afternoon (a national holiday in Japan), around 10,000 stupid ass wotas gathered at Yomiuri Land for a special Mobekimasu concert, a Hello! Project event bringing together the manifold talents of Morning Musume, Berryz Kobo, °C-ute, S/mileage, and Erina Mano (FOREVER ALONE). But more notable was the crowd of over 40,000 that signed into the Niconico video website, hoping to catch a live-streamed broadcast of the show. The demand was so great that many users who logged in found themselves kicked out by the site, as Niconico’s bandwidth capabilties could only allow so many connections at once.
But, I already sang the praises of web streaming last year (and would like to think that I have been at least partially vindicated by the Mobekimasu turnout), so this isn’t really about that.
Today we’re talking about how New Media is influencing Old Media!
The OLD way of doing things.
The changing face of television
Right now, TV is still pretty much the dominant, mainstream form of Old Media entertainment. You can go on all the livestreams and webshows and be on ALL THE BLOGS and become your own meme, but in the entertainment world, especially in fuddy-duddy physical-CD-sales-still-matter-more-than-digital-sales Japan, you haven’t really made it until you’re on TV. But TV shows are starting to take on a different from tenor from ten or even five years ago.
The explosion of The 48′s in Japan’s pop culture landscape has caused repercussions in how all entertainment programming works. In the OLDE DAYS, you would have your National Idol Group and they would show up on their flagship TV show once a week and the girls would mince about playing goofy games and performing silly skits and tell you which songs are coming out this week. Wotas Of a Certain Age may recall this format as Hello! Morning; even older veterans will probably laugh me out of the room and tell me to get that n00b shit out of here.
But it’s a much more fiercely fought battleground now. Not only are AKB48 and all their sister groups clamoring for public attention; seemingly every agency now has a stable of young female entertainers who want to win you over with their charm and occasional performing-arts skills. And the obvious dilemma is this: (1) You cannot stick them all on TV at once. (2) Even if you could, the costs would get prohibitively high for producing EVERY SHOW about EVERY GIRL GROUP.
Thus, Japan faces the following TV-programming challenge:
(1) Produce idol variety shows that aren’t total clones of all other idol variety shows.
(2) Do it in the most efficient, low-cost manner possible.
Out with the old
The cornerstones of idol programming continue to be what I call “old” TV show formats: you know, the kind where the girls are situated in a studio, and hosts or comedians lead the way with various games and activities. Sometimes, the girls themselves conduct the proceedings; either way, this format accounts for something like 90% of AKB programming, which is why I only bother to watch about 25% of all AKB shows. Similarly, this was Hello! Project programming before they were taken off TV due to their own irrelevance.
But like I say, old formats are ooooold. And at some point you realize you’ve been watching AKB Dodgeball for the last two and a half years now, and you know all the pranks and punishments and which players throw the hardest and the only change that came as a result of adding Team 4 girls is that now you get to see AKB Dodgeball being played by Team 4 girls. An even worse example was The Sashiko Show (not its real name) starring Rino Sashihara, who in her exploits seemed constantly intimidated and outnumbered by the male comedians who co-starred alongside her. A formula for success, recycled over and over again, gets diluted over time.
In with new media
Can it ALWAYS be Yuuka time? Please?
That’s why some of the most interesting developments on idol TV shows are seeing how New Media and web/viral/social/crowdsource mechanisms are changing the paradigm. (Oh gosh did I just use the word “paradigm” in a totally serious way? brb shooting myself.) Funnily enough, Shitty Mid-00′s Hello! Project may have been one of the pioneers in this regard; remember in the dying days of Haromoni@ when Morning Musume would take Youtube submissions from random fans and play the videos while commenting on them? Yep, that was early Web 2.0. It was also a cheap< way to generate content because now you could take up extra runtime just with crowdsourced video footage.
A couple of new shows this year show the New Media influence on Old Media reaching ever greater heights. Hello Pro Time, which premiered in spring 2011, runs on the premise that you can get closer to the Hello! Project girls than ever before because they’ve been given handheld digital videocameras—which are cheap enough now that they’re probably just an incidental cost for the TV studio—and are asked to film themselves going about their daily activities. The results, if sometimes uneven, are at least refreshing: you see Saki Shimizu playing with her adorable pet dog, Sayumi Michishige trying to cook a meal, Yuuka Maeda training with the junior S/mileage-ettes when they were first brought on board. And of course who doesn’t love the footage of Berryz just roaming the streets of Seattle IN AMERICA.
Even more avant-garde in concept is this fall’s Yonpara, starring AKB48 sub-unit Not Yet, in a “Skype conference call” format that may be the first of its kind. Yuko Oshima, after all, is a busy woman with busy priorities, so if you want to summon her up with the rest of her bandmates, you’ll need to find a free hour in between all the other stuff she does.
Well I must say those matches just look charming.
While at first an entire TV show based on videoconferencing may have seemed like a recipe for disaster—the early episodes were only funny because the girls didn’t quite understand how to use the Skype screen, and Sashihara’s laggy connection made her appear to be 1.5 seconds slower than the rest of the universe—Yonpara‘s unusual constraints have led to some pretty clever party games. Sometimes the girls have to demonstrate teamwork using the four quadrants of the screen; sometimes their locations (like a restaurant or cafe) provide the basis of that day’s entertainment; sometimes you get to see Yui Yokoyama’s barefeet (which is fanservice enough in itself).
And the most important thing about programs like this is that you save so much on the usual costs of running a studio-based show. Who’s paying for Hello! Pro’s or Not Yet’s cameramen? Nobody! In the first instance, the girls ARE their own camera crew, and in the second, the PC webcam is doing the job. And what about renting out studio space, especially in Tokyo, with the highest property costs EVAR? Not even a concern! Wherever the handheld camera or the webcam is, that’s where the studio is—and it costs the producers nothing for Saki Shimizu to hang out at the Shimizu household, or for Yuko Oshima to take a break in her dressing room (if anything, the company shooting her drama is the one paying her). As we seek new forms of idol variety programming, and producers seek cost-efficient ways to create that content, we will probably see more Web 2.0-styled content like this—not always the most skillfully polished product, but the kind with its own unique flavor.
As the episodes press on, however, some concessions have been made to the needs of Old Media. The Not Yet show recently abandoned Skype due to laggy software and poor picture quality, switching instead to a setup with HD cameras synced over broadband. But the quadruple split-screen format remains, so the spirit of videoconferencing is still there. And recent Hello! Pro Time episodes have hewed closer to a traditional reality-show format, especially with all the new names and faces joining the collective—it’s just easier to take the cameras out of the girls’ hands for a few moments, and let the pros film what’s going on. After all, the job of idols is to perform in front of cameras, not operate them, right? But no doubt, the best part of H!PT is still the girls mugging for the cameras—and each other—when the pros and the fans are long gone.
Even if these shows like this are wildly unpredictable at times, we can probably expect to see a lot more New Media creeping into the Old Media as everyone becomes more computer-literate in general, and the need to cut costs breeds new, surprising solutions.
Tags: AKB48, AKBingo, Hello! Morning, hello! pro time, Hello! Project, mobekimasu, not yet, yonpara
