Let's All Go to the Lobby!
Imagine a world without TV series, neither drama, police, soap nor sitcom. Okay, television as we know it still exists, but through some quirk in history, it is still regarded as just ‘radio with images’ and so it is used pretty much as an improved from of radio: for newscasts, sports reporting, talk shows and interviews and lots of music, but no CSI, SVU, NCIS, GOT, 'House of Cards' and 'Succession' and neither ‘Friends’ nor ‘Star Trek’
This is the world writer @CharlyFromTheFactory envisions in his 2021 timeline “Let’s All Go To The Lobby”. However, as the title implies, his focus is NOT on how this world came to be, other than a cryptic message about “Philo Farnsworth lent to the BBC for the War Effort” leading to “TV broadcasting being developed by the BBC and later followed by all other state-owned broadcast systems” who “ With typical state bureaucracy” never even considered using the TV format for something else than to “add moving images to the radio shows who would most benefit from it, namely newscasts and sport covering”
Instead of this, @CharlyFromTheFactory focuses his attention to the fate of the movie industry who now continues the path they started in the 1930’s with serials like the Zorro or Charly Chan franchises. Without TV, he argues, there will still be a market for cheap and mass-produced movies like “Tarzan and the City of Opal” in the Us, “The return of the Pirates of Insula Verde” in Cinecitta, Italy, the “Sato-Ichi, the Blind Swordsman” franchise in Japan and “The singing twins from the Immenhoff Inn” in Germany. (He gleefully notes that the last three examples were actually real-life examples of movies produced in their respective countries way into the early sixties to provide simple escapist fun in a society where TV’s were still not part of the mass culture) All this of course while Hollywood was still producing big-budget multi-hour epics like “Ben Hur”, "Rosemary's Baby", “Star Wars” and “Titanic”
PS, poked by questions and suggestions from the readers, @CharlyFromTheFactory declared that:
- Star Trek still exists. The original series being 49 75-minute movies filmed from 1966 to 1969… still 15 month short of completing their stated “Five Year Mission”. Like OTL, It was followed by 5 Two-hour specials and 80 75-minute episodes of “The Next Generation”. (No words on the franchises after that, other than a brief mention of a Captain Janaway and another captain played by Scott Bakula. )
- Doctor Who never started out as a series of ankward 20-minute episodes, but has been produced at a rate of one hour-long movie every month pretty much continuously since 1963. Like the original, the movie went through 14 ‘regenarations’ so far with – as OTL- Ncuti Gatwa slated to be the fifteenth Doctor from 2024 onwards.
- Marvel Inc. brought out defunct RKO pictures in 1955 and has been producing 45-minute superhero movies ever since. Since the 2000’s, it started adding a string of high-quality 2-hour blockbusters to their lineup. Not to be outdone, DC comics partnered with a Canadian animation studio and has been making superhero animations since 1960, while at the same time licensing out their characters to the big Holywood studios for blockbusters like the Christopher Nolan 'Dark Knight' franchise.
- The “The One With…” franchise (AKA “Friends”) was produced as a string of 90-minute movies again at a rate of twelve movies a year for 10 years straight before ending with “The one with the Six Keys” in 2004
(Yes, by times @CharlyFromTheFactory’s writings had a quirky romantic streak)
Then, in the mid 2000’s Shonda Rhimes appears on the scene and with her, the serial format has its heyday. After a brilliant start with “Grey’s anatomy”, “Grey’s House” and “Yang’s Dilemma” doing really good, specifically in the smaller serial-oriented theaters, Shonda, it is clear @CharlyFromTheFactory adores her tremendously, starts to play in not only on the market but on the concept of small three-room theaters as well. Eventually this would lead to the three-view system, where Shonda would film the same movie three times, each time through the eyes of a different doctor and release all three versions to be shown simultaneously in the same theater so viewers could –were even encouraged to- move from one room to the next to follow a certain doctor, or patient through the story, or keep seated and watch the main character this version is following through the whole show. Apparently the idea caught on and soon there would be multiple versions of "Doctor Who", "The Spiderverse Chronicles" and the "Chicago PD"/"Chicago Fire"/"Chicago ER" franchise … amongst others
Apparently feeling encouraged by the readers responses, @CharlyFromTheFactory kept envisioning more and more series like that, and for a while it seemed that the timeline would just continue focusing on more and more ‘simultaneous serials’ until the author lost interest.
But as said, the 2010’s were the heyday of the theater business and from there it could only get down. Increasingly the author started hinting at the rise of streaming services, still not for television, but for smartphones and tablets. And although at first no one would forego a night at the (movie) theater for unlimited hours of solo bingewatching on the phone, in 2020, the Covid pandemic hit. And in November of 2021, after four months of writing, 30 pages and over 800 fan posts, the writer declared that with the pandemic, the era of the small theaters had come to an end, Hollywood was now exclusively making either blockbusters or content directly going to its streaming platforms. Shonda Rhimes had started her own subscription service, complete with an app that let the user watch three films at a time and instantly swap between them just like beforehand he would physically move from one screening room to another.
In his last post, @CharlyFromTheFactory declared: “I do not know what the future will bring, but it is clear that the great time of the small theaters is over. Let this recollection be its elegy”
He has not posted on the timeline since. There were another two weeks of fan posts suggesting, sometimes even in great detail how a certain TV show would fare in a world without TV shows, or which TV shows would make great multiple version serials. One fan from Montreal, who apparently had studied in Paris for a while, wrote several updates on the state of French cinema in this timeline and posts speculating about the fate of anime in a world without TV-series moved to a completely new thread where the discussion raged on five more weeks.
By 2022 however, the thread was silent, and has been ever since.
Next up: choose one of the following titles and let your imagination reign:
- Cry HVAC ...
- ... and let slip the hogs of war
- Homeros homoeroticos or damn those cheeky Greekies
- Guns and Neuroses
- A Poke-Alypse
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