An emancipation proclamation. They didnt know there would be a civil war yet they built families. Do you know that there were only 388,000 africans who were brought to the United States in the whole history of the slave trade. You know how many were brought to brazil . Rose how many . Five million. The 42 million African Americans today grew, thats what the phrase was, were going to grow our own slaves out of this body of 388,000. So that means these people, despite the fact they were slaves, believed in the principles of democracy in this great republic. Rose a look at the golden age of television and a look at African American history when we continue. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our Studios New York city, this is charlie ros you all know exactly who i am. Say my name. Do what . I dont i dont have a damn clue who the hell you are. Yeah, you do. Im the cook. Im the man who killed gus fring. Rose television is entering what is called a new golden age. Rich story telling and Character Development are bringing back audices and talent. Some of hollywoods best are choosing the medium over film. Technology is also channg how we experience our favorite shows. Mobile devices, video on demand and streaming have altered the economics of distribution. I am pleased to have an esteemed group join me now. Josh sapan is the president of a. M. C. Networks. The companys hits include mad men breaking bad and the walking dead. Terence winter is a writer for boardwalk empire. He was also a writer and executive producer for the sopranos Emily Nussbaum is a tevision critic for the new yorker magazine and david carr writes the media equation column for the new york times. Im pleased to have all of them here. I dont know who to startith so ill just ask this question. What do we mean by the golden age, the third golden age of television . David . Um, i think that when you have this many windows opening up for content. So theres all manner of places to put content now. Great stuff is going to get through. I saw john goodman in the new coen brothers movie but then i went to the set and there he is, hes making a great Big Television show for amazon and it written by gary trudeau and its when window after window opens, youre going to see more opportunities for great stuff and part of what happens is the great stuff sometimes we have to wait for emily to tell us that its good. Rose right. But other times it just sort of gets personned up by everyone and they say youve got to see. And were able t program our own universe so we can go and get it wheneverwe want to. Rose emily . I agree technology is very much at the center of whats happened with t. V. To me there was this amazing confluence that happened at the turn of the century between the rise of a set of Television Writers who were very cantankerous and rebellious against the old rules of t. V. And its relationship with the audience and then d. V. R. Es and the internet which happened esstially simultaneously enabling people to save shows andause them and rewind them and archive them and then discuss them with strangers online. I think when both of those forces came together you could create shows with far greater complexity because people could decode them together and they could kind of last instead of squeezing into your living room like cook kay dough which is almost hard to remember back when that was the only way you watch television. Rose terence, you make one of them. Certainly the hbo model of being able to do a show like the sopranos for an adult audience that craves challenging t. V. The manner which those stories were told. Not just the ability to use adult language or or nudity now tell a longform story for hours and hours and hours that doesnt spoon feed the audience answers and is challenging. That at the same time as all these other technologies coming together i think really made a huge difference. I thi whateveryone said resonated but particularly emily. The technology of being able to watch wn you want allows you to be in some state of greater concentration not distraction. So if something is more subtle and ruires more attention and patience and Character Development youll get into it and i think this is a big change in technology. D. V. R. S, on demand and the internet and then it feeds ba into linear. So i think what has really facilitated and maybe stimulated this great golden age is fundmentedly technology and its found the great artists and that stuff has risen to the top. Rose and what are the economics of it . Fundamentally today the economics have been almost aacross the board good so if yourin the business were in whichs table t. V. Channels thats been a Good Business and aided by these ondemand technologies. Cable on demand, d. V. R. And sfod Services Like netflix, if youre in that business, those stocks are trading welland theyre flourishing. We were just talking about amazon and amazon prime. So at the moment the t. V. Business is a Good Business and everything is pretty much working. Rose so breaking bad will live because you can access it wherever you want to now . I think it will live very differently than the honeymooners lived because you can fi it and call it up on any device you have mostly any time you want anywhere. So i think it will ha a much fferent life than other old t. V. Shows. Rose what relation we missingere . Its attracting good writers and talent. John goodman one example. When you look at the talent on breaking bad. Fantastic. Its a very explosive moment because what youre talking about in terms of the economics of television and im hardly an expert on the enomics of television, im mostly interested in whether i like the shows or not but nonetheless it does seem especially if youre criticizing television its portant to recognize the completely different styles of production that are operating simultaneously so you have cable shows that are made for high budgets, for ten episodes. Yo have Network Shows that are under much more pressure for ratings and they have to make 22 episodes a year. Theres theini serie the netflix concept. Theres interesting stuff going on f x where you have Something Like ouis or lways sunny where the shows are made for extremely cheap budgets and they have a far more sort of personal thing. Theres always these different types of t. V. And the difficulty of the conversation is extending it because theres so many different routes th t. V. Comes to us thateing able to talk about whats good and valuable and draw attention to things gets hder because theres so much of it. And so many different audiences for t. V. As well. It also goes hand in hand whats happening in the feature business. Fewer movies are being made and they are big action oriented cartoondriven films. Im flown on planes just glanced up and with theound off watched movies and realized i know the entire plot without hearing a word because its good guy, bad guy, fight, explosion so actors and writers, directors, are frustrated with the lack of ability to tell real stories. You get a show like breaking bad or mad men or like my own where you can tell stories over dozens of hours. I mean for an actor to get to play a role like that or writers to develop a longform novel in a Television Series is irresistible as opposed to youll see a small movie gets made and i ask myself wow, how did they do that . How did they get that movie made toy when all they want to hear is superhero concepts. We used to say show up thursday night at 8 00 and well light a big bfire and everyone will gather. Now that people are able to program their own universe. The other thing i people are annotating with what people are seeing in plain sight with social media so it becomes a different cultural object something doesnt have to be as wonderful as breaking bador board walk empire to be a great viing experience bause all your friends are wisecracking while its on and you end up with a different cultural object thats a hybrid project. So even this stuff that isnt gras that great like watching the oscars or the grammys or the Video Music Awards becomes an exciting realtime event. Rose because on twitter and wherever else youan communicate with your friends watching at the same time. Sure. And its not just its not just oh, this is low culture, this is highculte. We can take something thats high culture and bring it down to our level or take something low and bring it up. Not only is everybody hanging with it and disdiussing it but the tact that it makes it endure and instantly accessible allows you to get at it and have fun with it in ways that used to be reserved for film. So people would study the shining this film we distributed called room 27 27 about all these people flipped out about the shining. Now you can take a t. V. Show after the fact or in between seasons and you can study it to death and you can have fun with it and dissect it. There are recaps of each episode as if its a chapter in a novel its mindboggling. Recapcaps of jersey shore. V. Has become a text people can revisit rather than something that just an experience. They can take it apart and they have more knowledge of the idea of t. V. Writers behind thecene which is didnt used to be such a thing. Show runners are now celebrities which is a big changen how people experience it. I have this feeling about the last 15 years in t. V. That have do with at the beginning of this people were defensive about the idea that t. V. Could be good. And there was this initial move where people compared it to books and movies so to praise a show you had to s this show is as you know, the wire is good because its like dick kens. And to me this was the status anxiety that Haunted Television because earlier it was always in the position of being the medium where people thoughtf it as a commercial junk that was made collaboratively and experienced and went away. But i feel like the last 15 years have been this fantastic period because people have begun to move past that notion of comparison as necessary to talk about t. V. And have sarted to talk about the value of television as a medium itself. As something that takes place episodically over time and is in a way a little bit lik a Live Performance which is whatyou guys are talking about theres a level at which it alters over time because of the way the audience reacts to it. At least thats historically the way t. V. Has been made. One of the nicest things ever said about my show was that this may forever blur the lines between television and film. Martin scorsese directing the first episode. And the fact that the scope of it and how big it is and what we can do visually now. It almost doesnt matter. Its almost incidental that it happens to be a t. V. Show. Maybe 20 years from now it wont matter at all or people wont necessarily identify it certainly with netflix, is it a t. V. Show . But rewind ten years ago and almost all the t. V. Shows were made with market considerations. Very first and foremost. Almost exclusively. Will it sell, how many people will watch . It has to be a big, big number that you have to get to. And today truly outlets like hbo, show time, f x, sun dance channel we are making t. V. Shows and saying if the material is great and if the writing is exquisite it will find its audience if we just if we have some patience and thats not an irrponsible business decision, that is because it actually happens. But that is enabled by technology because t patience is allowed because if it doesnt work in season 1, there there will be a life and theyll cch up and find in the season two. And you see that phenomenon of building seasons two, three, four and five. And the ability to reach knish audience is crucial in terms of artistic ambition because some shows are never going to be for everyone. T. V. Historically y had to have the main character be someone likable so you could invite them into your living room every week. Like a vampire situation when you had a smaller audience you can take different kinds of risks. I talk about the thing i call the threeepisode show because people ask me is the show good . If its doing something thats new for television that unsettles people, say, like enlightened or Something Like that where the rhythms of it are different or its denser it takes a few episodes to actually get into it and im so hppy wherever there is any kindf model that allows trains the audience to watch it differently because otherwise you just get repetition and to me this year has been exciting the last three years theres all sorts different shows like orange is the new black. What scandal is doing on network is interesting in terms of the way people respond to it. I talked about the gritty sit comes. Also sun dance is putting out all of these amaining mini series where it doesnt have to be a series that comes on for years and years. It can have its native ending so you had jane campion doing top of the lake which blew my mind when i watched it because it was so visual compared to how t. V. Is but in a different way. And i watched the return. The return was so good french zombies or rectify. An rectify. You have a show the expectation that television makers bring to the audience and say they almost dare you rectify i loved it. But youre basically wching six episodes waiting for a guy to smile. Is he going to smile . laughter thats true it was an artsy little bit pretentious people had mix feelings. I loved it and he did end up sming but its the kind of thing where you guys, come on you should be celebrating for goodness se thats the great thing about whats happening now. People dont have to grade on a curve. They can say when there are problems with an ambitious show because thes enough stuff out there that people its the old style of t. V criticism was this thing whe did you watch rectify . I loved rectify but it was artsy, pretentious i wasnt saying that i loved the show. And it was a mixed bag. But it was new and parts of it were stirring. Rose jus saying, not agreeing. Its also happening across the board in termsf because of whats now produced for the iernet. And l ranges of television programming. Almost everybody week somebody says theyre doing charlie rose. It means theyve got a room somewhere th no set and theyre talking to interesting people. Right. The lack of a barrr to entry is its lead to a lot of content, it doesnt necessarily lead to great content. And part of the problem i think what were going to see is this is a great time to have a script in your pocket. Because you have everybodyrom sony to apple and some people might call them dumb money or new money. I think there will be a secondave of stuff thats not that great. I think it helped meaning theres a limit on the creative capacity of writers to come up with toeed the monster. Yeah, theres s only so much quality to go around. Think it was a great thing for over the top, over the internet tevision that house of cards came first. You have David Fincher, 200 million. Kevin spacey and it had ts movie push out io the mketplace and it trained people, hey, stuff can come over the web and look really great and wonderful and it upped the bar for everything that came behind it. The fact that orange is the new black is good is great. The fact that they busted open the door was something that was large and good it will play an Important Role in web t. V. Going forward. To me one of the tricky things is as intoxicating as house of cards one and as many prestige markers came with it and it opened the door and it was an addictive watch i feel like it did a lot of familiar things. It was a dark criminal antihero drama with a main character about who you had mixed feelings, was this seductive powerful all of it very much intended to remind you you we watching telesion. Ihink that was by design. You ape t. If you want to be seen as t. To me orange is the new black was theore original show and actually i wrote this piece comparinghouse of cards to scandal and scandal i made differently but it that has similarity, the hypedup melodrama. This is a fraught subject but to me problems about the discussion of t. V. Is its focused on a set of particular brilliant masculinity shows that have been powerful dramas th necked open the door. But the fact is i think that people need to be able to value medy and the craftsmanship of comedy as much as drama. Things la that look sketchy and low budget as much as things that look cinematic. Just to talk about that and whether either of those shows did it for t. V. On the web, confessions of an awkward black girl was on the web. Drunk history was on funny or die. Between two ferns was on the web and is pretty modest and quite hysterical. Charlie rose on the street between two ferns. lghter so the interesting thing to me is in a sense what impact is it going to have on the restf television. I mean, if so much of this is and how much of telesion at night in terms of the internet isurned to netflix its over 50 of Online Television is netflix. Not just one show but netflix in general. Very significant. The story is not yet told. The Network Share is down, now the real Network Share is down in the 30s somewhere from what was 25 years ago in the 80s but theyre prospering economically. And preum cable, hbo, show time, stars are all prospering interestingly and the basic cable chans were a part of are prospering and the internet the overthetop services each of which has different ownership and construction, particularly amazon which is of course owned by amazon is seems to be prospering. Rose amazon is doing something different. Maybe different, you would know. I just talked to jeff bezos. They are using their audience, a huge audience, to test things, to test pilots. I mea its not just a focus group its a focus group thats 250 Million People big and part of what were going to see ming behind it is theyknow not only hat time you tuned in, at what point you tuned out. Theyut their pilots up for grabs. F yo think about how piloting has gone on the Network Level whh is take a huge bowl of pasta, fling it against the wall, 30 shows, pick u two of them, pick up three of them. I can remember being up in the canyons in l. A. At at a party at norman lears hous and he says see all this . Because the are all these Beautif