Can a live variety series have the same up-to-the-minute effect on its audience as a sports game?

Maya and Marty, the new live show starring Saturday Night Live alums Maya Rudolph and Martin Short, is selling itself as the return of the variety hour, that loose grab-bag of fun and fading celebrity that was a staple of early television. In fairness, it was only really a marker of fading celebrity as it petered out in the ‘70s, when it became a kind of televised Vegas residency. In the early days, when TV was still pretty close to vaudeville on screen, hosting a variety show was basically as big as your star could get on the small screen. photos:black evening dresses uk Not that the history really matters too much here, except perhaps as a way to tweak the flipping thumbs of people who were alive and watching the last time a variety hour denoted anything good — or Sonny and Cher, anyway. Maya and Marty is much more a beast of television’s current reality, the latest in a line of network TV’s splashy attempts to convince people that television remains thoroughly worth watching in its classic, when-we-say-so-and-with-ample-commercial-breaks form. That is where network television in particular makes most of its money, a model that has been under threat for about a decade, and has settled, like most legacy media money-making ventures, into a slow bleed towards oblivion. The first blow here was not so much the internet as what we now call time-shifting devices, DVRs (and the like) that let you more or less seamlessly record shows through your particular digital television receiver, and watch them on your time, usually zipping through the precious ads. NBCNeil Patrick Harris in Best Time Ever doing what he does best: singing and dancing.Comparatively, the internet actually offers slightly more hope than DVRs: though the dreaded millennials and their cord-cutting ways are a longer-term existential threat, people of all ages have shown some willingness to directly pay for their “television” — or, failing that, at least sit through a short block of ads on the official streaming sites. DVRs, for however long they are still a thing, only give money to the cable companies packaging them with their boxes. Whatever your poison, though, the only way to cure it is to convince people that they simply can’t afford the social capital they would expend on not seeing things in real time. The classic example, and really one of the few things keeping networks reasonably safe, is sports, which of course no self-respecting fan or even bandwagoner even thinks about delaying. Communally glorying in victory or agonizing in defeat is an unquestioned live activity. Event television like Maya and Marty, or live musicals, are meant to ape this feeling. NBC’s attempt right before this one, Best Time Ever with Neil Patrick Harris, even worked in some little sideline features that you had to be watching live to have a chance of participating in, adding some stakes beyond the general “anything theoretically might happen (even though it probably won’t)” vibe to live broadcasts. The events have proven reasonably popular, although that might just be because they are promoted to the hilt: the fact Best Time Ever was cancelled less than a half-season in should give you some indication of how well these things fare when they are more than one-offs. The only shows for which the live aspect really seems to be a draw are the competition ones where, like sports, the stakes actually change Which makes sense, since being produced and aired live is not actually a spell that dazzles our attention. The only reason sports is still religiously consumed in an up-to-the-minute fashion is because we all agree it must be so. Sure, that’s probably influenced by the fact that the emotional and narrative stakes change with the outcome of every game, and the next game is right around the corner, but if we collectively decided it was socially acceptable to watch a sports game whenever, we would do it. Just look at the rise of spoiler culture: because we don’t particularly care when or how we soak up our art and entertainment options — maybe because a story doesn’t fundamentally change if we see it live or read it 300 years after it was written — we feel comfortable putting the onus on the people who are up-to-date not to ruin it for the rest of us. Try to convince someone they are a jerk for talking about last night’s Stanley Cup final, and they’ll scoff at you; they will probably check what episode of Game of Thrones you’re on before they make a “hold the door” joke, though. The only shows for which the live aspect really seems to be a draw are the competition ones — your Voices and So You Think You Can Dances and so on — where, like sports, the stakes actually change. Everything else, though, is just another thing to consume, and though the references may not always be scintillatingly fresh a few days or weeks or months down the line, we have effectively missed nothing by not seeing them when we’re told. Maya Rudolph and Martin Short do not become less charming or triple-threaty or funny if I wait to binge all six episodes in their run. But, hey, a variety show. Haven’t seen that in a while. Read more:light blue prom dresses