If it weren’t for big companies, there wouldn’t be a whole lot of stuff around. Nirvana, for example, didn’t have the money for the studio time and the CD pressing and printing off their own bat; an A&R guy (I’ve got no idea what A&R stands for, but I think they’re the people who go around signing bands) convinced his money men to invest in them, and music was never the same again.

Think of all the movies and TV shows and music you like, and the unavoidable truth is that most of it was financed by a big company. Yes, I know, we all like to prance around yipping indy this and alternative that, and yes I went to see Hunters and Collectors and the Birthday Party twenty years ago in dingy pubs and bought shitty cassettes at the door. Yes yes yes we’re all very cool.However the fact remains that once they got popular, no matter how popular, they simply DID NOT HAVE THE CASH to press a hundred thousand EPs, and advertise, and book big rooms and hire all the extra sound gear and lighting they needed to play those big rooms. This was paid for, on spec, by big companies.

One day, hopefully, a big company will buy the Tribune (leaving us with complete editorial and creative control, of course), and they WILL have the money to print the number of copies the people really need and want, and do it on better paper, and pay some slave-geeks to design a rooly cool website instead of the patched-together-on-the-couch effort we currently run.

As a committed hater of The Man, it irks me, but I have to admit that we need big companies. We may need them, but sheesh I hate them. I hate them almost as much as I hate the AFL, and for pretty much the same reasons.

Without big companies, where the hell would a young Joss Whedon have got the money to make Buffy, or Angel, or (hallowed be The Serenity) Firefly? Rome, Deadwood, The West Wing, Battlestar (oh holy sexy Starbuck) Galactica, all these wonderful, intelligent, entertaining, ground-breaking shows would not have been made without money from big companies.

The networks may give, but boy do they find it easy to take away.

I’m going to try and get you thinking about all this, by giving you two slightly different yet diverging examples. Firstly, there’s the simple one of the Australian TV networks buying, then burying, good series. Secondly, there’s the sheer bastardry at play when the big boys just kill a show.

In keeping with my usual disorganised style I’ll start with the second, giving you a couple of my most heart-felt and heart-breaking examples.

I just finished watching three seasons of Deadwood in about a week and a half. Aside from what that’s done to my vocabulary and the lines of dialogue I have filed away in my head for appropriate occasions, it gave me pause to think how much, and why, I hate TV networks and the entertainment conglomerates that own them.

I won’t waste your time with too much detail about Deadwood, except to say that it’s set in a lawless but gold-rich town just after Little Big Horn, when Indian lands were being annexed, states being formed, and money and power were there for the taking, for those tough and depraved enough. I fell in love with it about ten minutes in, and thanked HBO for bringing it to my screen (via DVDs borrowed from a mate - we can’t afford cable).

Why is this heartbreaking? Because Deadwood finished last year, after three seasons, as a war was about to break loose between the two factions of the town, with hired guns eyeing each other from opposite sides of the street. Thirty-six episodes at forty-six minutes each equals over twenty-seven hours that I spent on the couch getting almost pathologically involved with the town of Deadwood, all its characters, all the twists, and the Shakespearean bend the writers put on the profanity. And then it stopped. It didn’t end, it just stopped. The sets have been dismantled, the cast and crew released, and there’s no coming back.

Deadwood just wasn’t rating quite high enough to make back enough money for HBO after the huge amounts they’d sunk into Rome, so they killed it, along with Rome. Just like that. This kind of shit happens all the time, and we just wear it, waiting for the next great series to come along, and hoping that it won’t get axed before it’s allowed to run its full course. We pay attention to their advertising, set aside our evenings, read the blogs, log into the official sites, talk it up to our friends, and they kill it.

Okay, you say, it wasn’t making money, so they had to get rid of it. That’s life, right? Yeah, it’s life, it’s the life that sees You Am I dropped by their record company so there was enough cash to pay for Australian Idol singles and videos. It’s the life that sees Australian drama and comedy shit-canned in favour of Big Brother and Bogan Backyards.

It’s also the life that sees we, the people, biting back. A few years ago there was this show called Firefly, created by Joss Whedon. It was a space adventure, it was completely different to any other space adventure out there, and it was seriously good. It lasted thirteen episodes and was killed mid-season, virtually mid-episode, with about a zillion Whedonesque plot twists and questions left hanging in the ether. Now, Firefly was actually rating well, had a cult following thanks to Whedon’s involvement, and had the potential to be as long-running and profitable as Buffy. But the network, for reasons known only to the suits, canned it.

The “browncoats”, those particularly dedicated, and yes, some would say nerdish, fans of the show, screamed bloody murder. Blogs went crazy. The cast and crew went nuts and stayed together. Joss Whedon got serious, and hit the ATM a few times.

They raised the money. They bought the sets and costumes off the network. The cast and crew stuck around. They built the hype. They worked for bugger all. They made a movie called Serenity. The browncoats love them for it. DVD and merchandise sales continue to be enormous, and the original network bastards are hopefully self-harming as they think of how much money they could have made if they’d stuck with it.

Joss Whedon had a fair bit of his own money to throw into the movie, and his name is usually pretty good for a loan, so you’re not going to see too many Serenity scenarios in the future.

But it’s a good example of the passionate link between creator and consumer, and how it can be put to good use. There are ways, thanks to the interwebs and stuff, that we can cut out the middle man, or maybe even force the middle men to look after us a bit better.

Which brings us back to my first (second) reason that it is righteous and good to hate the people who own and run TV networks and production companies, it also shows that there are right ways of getting product away from the suits, and there are wrong ways. Moreover, it’s a good example of how dumb they are and how much their contempt for us is costing them.

We all know the feeling that ranges somewhere from mild annoyance to blistering, wall-punching, telephone-throwing rage. You’ve got into a TV show, made the effort to sit up a bit late on a Tuesday or whatever graveyard the bastard network’s decided to hide it, and suddenly it’s gone. Or, they’re showing repeats on alternating weeks, or they’ve decided, just for tonight, to start it an hour earlier without telling you. You know the feeling.

A few years back, the West Wing started popping up all over Nine’s schedule like Whack-A-Mole, until they finally gave up on it entirely. When I called them to enquire exactly what the fuck was going on and why, they informed me that it was no longer rating. A bit hard for it to rate when nobody has any idea from week to week when you’re going to show it, motherfuckers. Sharing this heartfelt opinion with them did not achieve much, though it kept me mildly entertained for a couple of weeks.

Finally, after they’d realised that The Wing was actually too bloody good and far too popular for people to just forget about, they graciously sold it to the blessed ABC, who treated it with the respect and regular timeslot that it deserved. Of course, by that time, anyone who cared enough had bought the DVDs or downloaded it.

Almost exactly the same thing happened with The Shield on Channel Ten. The worst example, however, of corporate bastardry that I’ve experienced (other than my joys with the Commonwealth Bank), and the most screaming example of how absolutely mind-bendingly, earth-shatteringly Demetriou-defyingly stupid TV networks can be is what happened with Battlestar Galactica.

Permit me to rave a little bit. The original BSG, from the early eighties, was pretty cheesy and very simple. Evil Cylon Robots, all bad. Good humans, all saints. Zap pow, Cylons can’t shoot for shit, boom, cheesy romance, heroes all survive.

Then, a few years ago, some dudes decided to reinvent it. Cylons have evolved so that some of them look human. The human characters aren’t all good, and even the ones that are are deeply conflicted and flawed. Everybody smokes. Starbuck is a chick. And she’s hot (see above). It’s great. It rocks. It’s creative, and it’s brave, and it’s dangerous. Several episodes were direct references to the occupation of Iraq.

The Sci Fi network killed it, but somehow were persuaded to let it run its course, so the final season (four) is still in production (currently in a seven-month hiatus and I cannot wait), and all will conclude sometime in April 2009.

Channel Ten own it in Australia. Seasons one and two were buried (of course it had to be buried, they needed prime time for Big Bogan and Australian Idol and other quality shows) late on a Sunday night with absolutely NO promotion, and surprise surprise not enough people knew about it for it to rate the way it deserved. Then Season Three came along, and those of us in love with it knew this, because we trawled the interwebs constantly, looking for spoilers, cast and producer interviews, checking the blogs, wanting to know when it would be on.

Sci Fi ran it in the US, with webisodes as teasers, fantastic internet promotion, and even went as far as to commission a spin-off telemovie in between seasons, giving the back story to one of the more egregious moments in BSG history. Your editors, and many of our friends and workmates were going bug-nutty in anticipation, and just knowing that Ten were going to sit on it for weeks and then we’d probably miss it because they’d put it on at two am on a Tuesday without mentioning it in the Green Guide.

Now because Ten own the Australian rights, even if I’d had Sci Fi channel on a Foxtel package, it wasn’t being shown in line with the US. But the SciFi website informed us that we could buy it on iTunes for THREE DOLLARS an episode, an hour after screening. Bliss! Relief! Joy!

Shit. Not from Australia we couldn’t, because Channel Ten own it here. And we don’t know anyone in the US who could open an iTunes account over there for us, and that would be illegal anyway. Because Channel Ten own it here.

We WANTED to pay for it. We WANTED to show our support, for the makers to get some extra money for it, we WANTED to watch it in decent quality on our laptop, and we WANTED to keep the files for future BSG cravings. But we couldn’t.

In these days of the interweb and thousands upon thousands of illegal naughty persons who steal things and leave them lying around for thousands of other naughty persons to pick up and use and share with thousands of other… you get the picture…..

It was up on the web within hours of screening in the US. So someone I may or may not have known in some way may or may not have let me know that he or she may or may not have come into possession of what may or may not have been an illegally downloaded copy.

Then, by the time Ten finally deigned to screen it some months later, every BSG fan in Australia had already watched it.

So Channel Ten got zippo ratings for season three, and hence they haven’t even bothered showing the first ten episodes of season four yet, even though the last one was on Sci Fi channel in April. The DVDs are available in the US and Europe already, and it still hasn’t been on.

Do you see the stupidity of what they did? If they’d shown it in line with the US, we would have watched it, and it would have rated. If they’d allowed us to buy the episodes from the US, then the creators and owners would have actually made some money out of it. But we ended up watching shitty copies, downloaded from God only knows where, and NOBODY got any money except the illegal file-sharing sites.

It’s a similar situation with new release movies. Within twelve hours of the premier (sometimes even before the premier), you can find and download a shitty copy of the movie, filmed by some nebbish in the cinema with a hand-held video. Extra sound effects of the audience laughing, sneezing, talking and farting come for free, as does the epileptic fit you get from the wobbling picture and woeful sound.

The movie companies quite rightly hate this, so they do everything they can to stop it. The latest Batman, for instance, was delayed by several weeks while they re-synched the film stock into some kind of digital-unfriendly format. This extended the time from premier to illegal download by about eight hours.

Smarter and dumber people than me have come up with a simple suggestion for the film companies, and this is it:

Our new Vin Deisel costume drama is premiering on screens all over the world on the eleventeenth of Septober. You are, of course, welcome to come to one of our googolplexes and pay sixteen dollars for a ticket (and a box of popcorn and a cup of Coke will, naturally, cost you a kidney). Or, you can wait a whole twenty-four hours, and we will put it up on our massive great website FOR FREE!!!! There will be a small watermark at the bottom of the screen, and a couple of ad breaks, but it will be DVD quality, you can keep a copy on your pooter, and it will be FREE!!!

Simple, huh? They won’t lose the people who would go to the cinema anyway, and they get a fair chunk of cash for selling the ad space. The illegal fileshare websites will pretty soon go bust through COMPETITION, and we, the consumers, will be a lot happier, at least until we remember how shit Vin Deisel movies are. But they won’t do it.

I don’t know a lot about International Law except that bit about the Federation of Planets and the Justice League, but I’m sure it’s got something to do with keeping a lot of copyright lawyers’ noses deep in the feedbag.

They could do this with every movie they produce, and every TV show, but they don’t. They refuse to admit that the internet is there, and people have access to everything, and they won’t jump on board. Fuck em, you say. Me too.

Except, I go back to my opening about big companies. If Warner and Disney, and Miramax and HBO and Fox and EMI and all the other idiots in suits go under because they’re losing too much revenue to the internets, then who’s going to satisfy my need to watch violence and witty dialogue? Other than my wife, of course...

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