It's all about the big box sets these days, and the only reason Knots has no
active following is because it's not being repeated over and over again, unlike E.R. and Law & Order, two series that got 100+ discs box set treatment.
And being "in the red" as you put it proves that they've been doing a great job so far? Must have been those two Knots Landing sets that destroyed them.
It's not just about being a fan, it's also about common sense. Knots Landing is not some cheesy prime time soap knockoff like BERRENGER'S or BARE ESSENCE, it's a soap series of the highest quality. To me it makes sense to invest in quality.
This whole succumbing to WB's cynical coroporate approach is exactly what has allowed highly unqualified execs to ruin some of the best TV series (and perhaps their own company in the process).
I'm not asking for the moon and the stars, I don't need an Ultra HD 4K platinum grande deluxe version of Knots. If they would just "dump" the SD quality on DVDs (or let someone else do it) then that's perfectly fine with me.
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But the whole world wants to rewatch old crap like Gunsmoke even though most of the fans are no longer alive?
Studios, networks and channels aren’t in the red because of how they, in your opinion, treated some series years ago… or today; they are in the red because people’s consumption of media has changed.
Whether we like it or not, we no longer live in a period like the 1970s-2000s where families sat down together to watch a show every evening, where they went to the movies on the weekend, where they rented two movies at Blockbuster on a Friday and where they happily paid for cable including HBO.
It’s the same story across radio.
Advertisers don’t pay big bucks for their commercials not to be seen which is why TV and radio ad revenue is in the dumps whereas Netflix is being overrun by ad bookings for its basic tier with ads. Disney is looking at selling off ABC and even ESPN and at the same time is copying Netflix by launching a basic tier of Disney+ with ads because that’s where advertisers want to go.
Add to that the general change in consumer behaviour which means less businesses which advertise. The last decade has lost huge amounts of companies which used to spent massive amounts on advertising - Sears, KMart, JCPenny, Neiman Marcus, Toys’R’Us, Circuit City, Fry’s, Blockbuster, Sam Goody among many more.
Malls are deserted and people buy online. The problem with that is that a company like Amazon, despite a few commercials every now and then, doesn’t need to advertise. So ad revenue is down, down and down some more.
No ad revenue = no money to produce. Whatever is being produced must be profitable on its own and that usually means streaming as people pay for it and more recently there are ads as well. There’s not much room for failures.
To make things worse, younger people want it all - they want to pay as little as possible, preferably nothing at all and they want it when they feel like it. That's why Paramount's Pluto TV is such a massive success. It's free, it's got something like 200 FAST channels with many dedicated to single shows back-to-back, movies and everything you previously had to watch when dictated by TV channels or record (or couldn't watch at all because no channel was showing it)... and on top of that it has a massive on-demand catalogue which adds up to more than even the biggest Blockbuster store ever had available. Oh, and it's FREE.
Same with Freevee and Tubi, although a few years behind Pluto.
The thing is, streaming makes it possible to watch stuff that would never have been put on a TV channel again, let alone on physical media. One example to bring this back closer to the actual topic - Tubi has the award winning 1976 Spelling drama "Family" available to watch (for free!). I knew my mom was a massive fan back then but there had never, ever been a way for me to watch more than a clip here and there on Youtube. There was one release on DVD in 2006 which utterly flopped but even when stock didn't shift the price never dropped below $40 and no way in hell would I have paid that, even back then when I was buying DVDs. Fast forward to lockdown 2020 and I find it on Tubi and I binged it in a week. Beautifully made, intelligent, in parts even groundbreaking for its time and a pleasure to watch. Without streaming it would have gathered dust somewhere in the back corner of an archive.
