Divergence? Surely You Can’t Be Serious

I am serious, and stop calling me Shirley.

That line became a part of the culture a generation ago, and some might argue it was popular enough to still be recognized before the recent death of Leslie Nielsen. What you may not know is how much of a landmark that line (and the genre of humor around it) truly had become.

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From TV to Tinseltown

When Airplane debuted in 1980, viewers didn’t know what to make of it. Conventional wisdom dictates that no audiences would put up with a lightning fast barrage of slapstick, puns and highbrow parody. The humor hit at too many levels at once. It was too “busy.”

Leslie Nielsen’s Dr. Rumack was as straightlaced a performance as you’d see in the movie, which was not the norm. He was the calm, deadpan center, despite the appearances of such noted comedic talents as Lloyd Bridges and Barbara Billingsley. Yet it was enough of an impact that he was cast in the pilot for the Zucker’s upcoming “Police Squad!” as Lt. Frank Drebin.

“Police Squad!” ran all of six episodes.

Six episodes of sheer genius, but just a half of a half of a season.

It turns out that home audiences weren’t ready for those things after all. People weren’t used to comedy that made you think — they weren’t prepared for an experience where one had to pay very close attention to the minutiae in the background. There were a LOT of jokes buried in there, with no laugh track to signal a response.

After “Police Squad!” was canceled, the characters and the concept were revived in the theaters. The three “Naked Gun” movies ended up running almost twice as long as the show (253 minutes to 132) and grossed more than $200,000,000.

Screen Tests

Some would venture that “Police Squad!” was just an idea ahead of its time. People weren’t ready for what they saw at home, where movies like Airplane and Kentucky Fried Movie had already seeded the expectations. There’s a little truth to that, but a larger truth at play.

When you plunk down your hard-earned cash to go to the movies, you have an expectation of escape. You want to get lost in the experience – and since you’re paying for it, you want to soak in the details. That’s why you scrutinize the backdrops, and stay to the end of the credits.

When you’re at home, there are distractions. The phone rings, the kids want a snack, there’s the newspaper you haven’t read, the laptop just got freed up and you can check Facebook, someone is making dinner ——

Distractions.

Television is made for people who are being distracted. It requires punctuated action, and moments designed to draw you back into the show. It tries to leave you at the end of a segment wondering how the next segment resolves after the commercial break.

Distractions.

What makes for good TV doesn’t always make for good cinema, and vice-versa. (See Avatar, the Last Airbender.)

Which makes me wonder about the supposed convergence of all the platforms.

Convergence is an Attitude, not a Vector, Victor!

When you hear about Convergence, you can’t help but think of the physical nature of that word. “Things coming together.” Different aspects all pushing into the same physical space, on a collision course.

The simple implementation is when you look at how people will cross-post their Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn feeds, and businesses will do what they can to “leverage” their “content” across “multiple platforms.”

(Pardon me, while I go find some industrial-strength mouthwash.)

A better example might be Netflix, and how it is breaking barriers by bringing entertainment objects into your home through a different pipeline. Yes, it’s a movie on your computer, but it’s not really “Convergence.” Because you can’t do the things with that movie that you can do with your kids’ birthday movies you’ve taken with your home camera.

Even then, not all experiences are the same. That really inspiring hi-def YouTube video you created for your marketing campaign might not look good on a mobile phone. The website you designed probably looks even worse.

“Convergence” plays best when you are thinking “Divergence:” a single goal, which gets replicated across several parallel platforms. Like the Nintendo Wii game that interacts with a compatible Nintendo DS game, or the marketing effort that treats moms who blog differently than people who cover the wireless industry. The challenge for communicators is how to be in so many places at once, with minimal replication of effort, and maximum interchangeability.

We’ll likely see new forms of communication that play across screens, that carry elements of the same narrative from text to location-based involvement to video to mail.

Mail? Surely I can’t be serious!?!

I am serious… and stop calling me Shirley.