Through the meat grinder

FEW things are as perversely entertaining as entertainment about the entertainment industry. Done right, there’s nothing like a heartfelt gob of spit and vinegar splattering against the machine to uplift the mood -- even if, as my friend Glasgow Phillips puts it in his new old new media memoir (it takes place mostly in the ‘90s), “The Royal Nonesuch,” you long ago realized that “the entangled monolithic mass of networks and studios” is “too huge for any objection to it to be effective or audible.” Meaning that obsessively cranking out work that only exists in opposition to it is a little like “standing on the sidewalk outside a network complex or studio lot, stamping your feet and shrieking, ‘Quit it!’ ”

In Jake Kasdan’s “The TV Set,” David Duchovny plays a television writer who suffers the great good luck and terrible misfortune of getting his show on the prime time schedule of a major broadcast network. Anyone familiar with the process will know that he’s lucky, because the odds of achieving this fall somewhere between a Powerball win and sweeping “American Idol.” He’s not so lucky because by the time “Call Me Crazy!” (changed by the network from “The Wexler Chronicles”) emerges through the development meat grinder and is unveiled to advertisers at the upfronts, its resemblance to Mike’s original concept is glancing at best.

“The TV Set” is part of a long and pretty glorious tradition that includes “The Player,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “S.O.B.” and “The Big Picture.” Which is to say it isn’t particularly cheerful or optimistic, but it rings satisfyingly true. Kasdan doesn’t lampoon the business like the disappointing “For Your Consideration,” nor does it pretend that the sitcom in question -- your average semiautographical, upper-middle-class, coming-of-age dramedy -- is any kind of magnum opus to begin with. Instead, it focuses on the soul-sucking weirdness of corporate-manufactured entertainment, which panders to the lowest common denominator while simultaneously condescending to it.

This season, on HBO’s “Extras,” Andy Millman (Ricky Gervais) went through a similar experience after scoring a BBC sitcom of his own, which quickly devolved into a cringe-inducing workplace comedy called “When the Whistle Blows!” (Coincidentally, “The TV Set” has a character played by Ioan Gruffudd, a British BBC programming executive lured to an American network, where he slowly but surely capitulates to the prevailing standard. That standard is set by a 50-ish female executive who thinks and talks like a 20-year-old boy and runs all her decisions past her 14-year-old daughter. Her certainty as to what works and what doesn’t, what will play and what won’t is as absolute as her identification with that un-ironic sweet spot where commercial interests, adolescent enthusiasm, good work and disposable income converge.)

Andy is bullied into accepting the status quo or burning his bridges with the BBC, but after finding himself in front of a studio audience in a wig and big glasses, sandwiched between a handful of broad stereotypes, and mechanically spouting an annoying catch-phrase, he is despondent.

“This is not the comedy I set out to do,” he tells his useless agent Darren Lamb (Stephen Merchant). “I wanted to something real that people could relate to.”

“Don’t worry,” Darren says. “Because people will watch anything.”

So true, and yet so not. So maddening for the massive media conglomerates! For years they hone the art of monitoring and catering to our every market-tested whim, delivering the most unobjectionable, preapproved, shiny, sexy product possible, and this is how we repay them: fragmented viewership, niche-ification, knee-jerk disaffection, snark. But media conglomerates don’t get mad; they get out their wallets so the same companies that own the networks and studios that make the shows and movies that get lambasted and lampooned or fawned over or recapped (Television Without Pity, MySpace and YouTube, it’s a new, new paradigm now) will soon own all the well-known online distribution channels they are currently not suing. Even this can get complicated, as Valleywag recently reported on the whole Viacom-YouTube-Comedy Central legal pile-up, but not so much that it will stop the march of consolidation. Marshall McLuhan said that the content of any medium is another medium, and never has this seemed truer than now.

It’s ironic how far we’ve come in the 10 years since the days of the new paradigm, back when movies were all going to become interactive choose-your-own adventures, Hollywood bigwigs still made their assistants respond to their e-mail, and “content” was “king.” (If we’ve learned one thing, it’s that content is, at best, a rook, and content providers -- Remember? The quaintness? -- are pawns. Well, at least some things never change.) Hollywood has traditionally acted as a gatekeeper and arbiter of public taste, reflecting back to us what it says we have asked to see. The post-tech-bubble Internet, now enjoying its second wave of corporate colonization, offers the promise of unmediated artistic expression. But this great outpouring of originality is still somewhat limited to spoofs, parodies and self-promotion. And there’s nothing like listening to executives cite studies predicting the future of the medium to put a little damper on the dream.

Roland Barthes didn’t have TV in mind when he talked about the death of the author, but the idea applies nonetheless. Kasdan, who directed the pilots for “Freaks and Geeks” and “Undeclared” (where he worked with Judd Apatow, who serves as executive producer on the film), says in the press materials that what really made him start thinking that the story of the making of a network series was interesting was its resemblance to the campaign process.

“You can hear the influence of market testing in every speech, the way every word has been vetted as not to alienate anyone. This process of constant compromise is so relentless that, eventually, the actual candidate is completely obscured by the act of campaigning.”

Whether it’s a text, a candidate or a property, the result is about the same: Very few voices make it through the channels of distribution unchanged.

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carina.chocano@latimes.com