Jon Stewart and company on the future of television

The cover story of the September issue of Wired magazine is an interview with Jon Stewart and the executive producer of The Daily Show, Ben Karlin on the future of television and the internet, and the role that The Daily Show plays in that evolution.

Some excerpts:

Wired: Let me ask you about the Crossfire thing - not about your critique of that show, but about the reaction to it.
Stewart: Ben was there, by the way. I remember looking out into the audience and seeing his face and realizing, "I guess this isn't going well."
Karlin: Well, we had hand signals, and before the show I made the mistake of saying that this [drawing his finger across his throat] meant "Keep on going, great, do the exact same thing." So I was frantically doing this [draws finger across throat fast].

What was the symbol for stop supposed to be?
Karlin: [Gives thumbs-up.]
Stewart: It was a stupid way to do it.

What do you make of the quality of television now?
Karlin: I firmly believe that the number of quality programs on television right now is probably higher than it has ever been.
Stewart: It's a constant level of goodness.

What is that level?
Stewart: I'd say it's around 12 percent. I'd say 12 percent goodness, 88 percent crapola. I'm calling it the Goodness Theorem. The goodness is a constant, like pi, and it stays that way. What happens is, as the environment expands around it, the goodness expands at the exact same rate. So the ratio of goodness to crapola remains the same. And the percentage of goodness on network TV is probably the same as 30 years ago.

So applying your Goodness Theorem, if you start putting real content online, then you're going to get more outlets for good stuff.
Karlin: Sure. But it's not done that easily. Obviously, there was this first wave of people during the bubble who thought, "Oh my god, we can put TV on the Internet," and all those people, all that money, went into all these digital things, Internet network plans, everything like that. And they are all pretty much gone. They were probably too soon, and the technology and the bandwidth weren't there. The stuff that works on the Internet right now is short things that don't really need production quality or anything that has an underground guerrilla quality to it.
Stewart: The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom. That's all it is. All those media companies say, "We're going to make a killing here." You won't because it's still only as good as the content.

Yet there's a lot of venture capital going into video-delivery technologies that could allow more shows to go online. Isn't there something promising about new ways to watch television?
Stewart: Sure. But how much do you need TV to be available in convenient form? It already is convenient - we have the DVR. Do you need TV on your watch as you walk from your cell phone to your BlackBerry? At what point do we get saturated enough to say, "OK, I get it! We can get anything we want at any time! Let's go sit around a large table and eat a meal in silence"? Sometimes this shit's just overkill.

It's good to see that Stewart and the gang are focusing their efforts on the quality of their content, while still monitoring the way it's digested by their audience. These guys "get it", but they're not willing to waste their time overanalyzing the technology behind it. They leave that to "the guys in white coats". Essentially, it means that we'll continue getting quality material from the guys who coined the phrase "Mess-o-potamia".

Stewart's makes a great point about how media saturation can only go so far. There's no reason to be watching a screen every waking minute of the day. There's a lot to be said for a couple minutes of silent reflection, or staring off into space.