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The Television Academy began nominating candidates for TEFI

This week TV academics began work on the shortlist for their professional awards. TEFI, as always, is in a fever, corporate, personal and public interests are becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile, the number of academicians has already increased to 285 people, and everyone must take part in the voting... This year, as in the past, the prize is awarded in 42 nominations, but to approve the three finalists in each category, academicians were divided into professional guilds (guilds of creators of entertainment programs and talk shows, creators of programs for children, educational and educational programs, producers, documentaries, designers, promoters and production designers, feature films, operators, directors and sound engineers, creators of news programs, reporters and commentators). Since Monday, the guilds have been meeting almost daily, discussing what their colleagues have created in the past season and choosing applicants, those whose fate will be determined by open voting at two ceremonies that will take place on September 19 and 21. This time, 455 works are participating in the national television competition, which is almost 60 more than last year. As usual, the capital's majors are ahead: only 21 works are participating in the competition from St. Petersburg, 11 from Khanty-Mansiysk, and nine from Yekaterinburg.

For some nominations, the top three finalists have already been determined. No one is particularly interested in information programs - in this election year they are behaving like confused schoolchildren before communion - tense and embarrassed. Children's, educational and popular science are eternal outsiders; there is not enough budget, people, or ideas to create them. This time, the TV Center channel is in the lead among the top three programs for children: for some reason there is “One Hundred Questions for an Adult” (an excellent program, but its childishness is very doubtful), as well as the products of the oldest children’s company “Class” - musical the improvisational “Without Rehearsals”, which has existed since 2004 (this season it was performed without the participation of musician Sergei Vladimirsky, who died in April 2006) and perhaps the only non-capital program on the list is “Trouble” by the Ugra company. Is it with this reserve that a children's channel is being created?

The main players are now in the entertainment field, their pioneers have also already been appointed, and it is clear that there will be no surprises. Lolita Milyavskaya in two categories - as a talk show host and an entertainment program host. In one case, she is accompanied in a duet with her ex-husband Alexander Tsekalo by Ivan Urgant and Maxim Galkin, in the other by Tatyana Vedeneeva and Andrei Malakhov. All the faces are familiar... Among the talk shows there is a permanent “Cultural Revolution”, which is understandable. It is supported by “Closed Display” on one side and “Let Them Talk” on the other. In the “TV Game” category, the most representative company topped the ratings throughout the season: “Stars on Ice”, “Minute of Glory”, “Kings of the Ring”. And you can’t say that the selected programs are bad - no, they are, perhaps, really the best, and have been the best for a long time, and are habitually and certainly the best. And among the humorous programs, everything is quite good - the good old “Town” in the company of the constant Maxim Galkin with his evening, and finally the new one - “Look who came!”

But that’s the trouble: seriously speaking, no one came. The television season turned out to be surprisingly uneventful, going smoothly along a well-trodden path that did not involve any steep routes. It seems that the gold mine of domestic television has been exhausted and current miners are fishing for the remnants of golden sand on a few shallows. At the same time, the number of programs is growing all the time, and accordingly there is more and more slag, and less and less metal, the proportion changes, and the public gets used to thinking that the television box is, at best, a supplier of cheap relaxation, and at worst, a source of garbage, from which children need to be protected.

It is clear that no one specifically wants to create bad programs, shoot bad TV series, or reel in miles of lame humor. But for some reason a paradoxical situation is emerging - the conveyor belt is working, the number of workers is growing, there is more and more money, but the quality is getting worse. But what’s interesting is that the quality of the image, the picture, as professionals say, is improving. Lighting, sound, studio design, even the weakest side - makeup and costumes are gradually becoming better and better. But the content side is losing. If you remember the programs of at least five years ago, how much smarter, subtler, more vital and more specific they were! And I recently had to look at the transcripts of Tatyana Cherednichenko’s television conversations - well, it’s just surprising: were they really shown on TV in 1998? And these smart people, scientists and thinkers spoke directly on the air about the world and man? And no one demanded that they be simpler and closer to the people? Probably their rating was irreparably low...

The notorious ratings are the main problem today. Basically they are not great - records are rare, and there is always a lot of noise around them. The ratings champion is the President's New Year's address on Channel One. The leader among channels is “First”, it is first everywhere, even in Moscow, where there is a choice of 18 channels. But even in the capital, between “First” with its average daily share of 18% and all sorts of “MuzTV”, MTV and “Zvezda”, which close this row, the gap in the number of viewers is almost ten times, that is, there is no spread across channels, in in general, if everyone is watching, then it’s the same thing. It’s clear that a habit has been given to us from above, our country is such that there is one city in it - Moscow, one trunk, one vertical, which does not want to branch, no matter how you cut it. Moreover, although our television advertising market is growing and feeds television, it has still just overtaken the Czech market in terms of volume, and until recently it was equal to the Israeli market. So the fight for it is serious, and all sorts of small channels get a line of advertisements instead of advertising clips, but you can’t make money on it...

But still, probably, the point is not in the rating and the advertising pie directly associated with it, but precisely in the fact that no one asks for good quality on television. Nobody tells the producers: make your program smart, honest, raise real problems in it, make them reach the viewer, make them understandable... They say something else: simpler, livelier, more famous people, funnier, more exciting... Full-time editors work to simplify things - complexly constructed sentences are crossed out in TV series, unusual words are not accepted by the audience. It is necessary that it is not difficult, that it does not hurt - the viewer wants to have fun, wants to relax, beer producers, whose advertising was removed for “after eleven”, demand that the programs attract their audience - that means more blood, adrenaline, brighter spectacle, but there’s no point, the beer gives me a headache afterward...

This is a scheme, a system, a machine, it works for one thing - the picture is brighter, the content is simpler, the speeches are shorter, the characters are more familiar, the plots are more intelligible. Originality is not only not welcomed here, it is erased. Because the new is more difficult to perceive, but it is necessary to make it simpler, so that it is complete... So that you can interrupt the transmission with advertising anywhere without compromising the meaning, so that three bears or a white penguin can easily fit in between two replicas. This is the main task, without solving which channels cannot survive: how to make sure that the largest, simplest and most undemanding audience comes to us, which, as it turns out, is the most voracious, ready to watch for hours, everything and not switch to commercial breaks .

That is, in essence, today television is structured in such a way that it does not need meaningful work, competition goes in the opposite direction, because if it is possible, without particularly straining, without striving, without striving for perfection, but simply to film something technically competently, then why not. Moreover, it is cheaper. In Nosov's fairy tale about Dunno and his friends, the artist Tube began to draw portraits of short girls, and each one asked him to make her eyes bigger and her nose smaller, so in the end the poor creator made a template and simply painted the slits in different colors, depending on he drew a blonde or a brunette. The short ones were terribly happy, but Tube said that only one of his portraits - the first one, Sineglazki - was worth something, and the rest were only good for covering pots with.

Alena Solntseva