Portlandia's Pulse and AMC Networks's Price
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How hot is hip? Can anti-trend trendiness be turned into a profitable commodity? Those are the larger issues swirling around the "hit" cable show Portlandia, the brainchild of Saturday Night Live's Fred Armisen and former Sleater-Kinney alt-rock star Carrie Brownstein.
The program made its second-season debut last Friday on the Independent Film Channel (IFC), owned by AMC Networks (NASDAQ: AMCX). When last consulted, AMC Networks shares were trading at $39.11, up +0.36 (0.93%). Since December, 2011, the shares have been hovering in the $30s, but steadily rising incrementally. The question is, Will Portlandia add to the company's overall attractiveness? The show is certainly attracting a lot of attention to IFC.
But that may be because, by all accounts, local and national, IFC has been diligent, if not relentless, in its accommodation to the media to promote the program. For example, though a company called ClipSync, fans could socialize online with Mr. Armisen and Ms. Brownstein during the season premiere. The media have been brimming with coverage of the show, which mirrors the adulation visited upon Sleater-Kinney itself during its existence. A typical example is Margaret Talbot's swooning New Yorker profile of the platonic romance between Mr. Armisen and Ms. Brownstein, perhaps excessive but indicative of the pro-forma cred that the duo receive. For being the ultimate in cool alt-culture paragons, Armisen-Brownstein are uncannily media savvy.
Amid all the hagiography of the New Yorker piece, however, there is one telling moment. Ms. Talbot is talking to that other media darling, Miranda July, about the city, and she writes, "When Miranda July tried to explain why she and Brownstein had stayed friends since their riot-grrrl days, she began to say the word 'ambition,' but hesitated. Instead, she said that they shared "a steady focus on what we are going to do next. We'’re always asking each other, 'What's the next project?'"
This resonates. Portlanders of a certain breed, that thin crust of professional hipsters found "journaling" in Stumptown Coffee and other easily parodied activities, are very good at appearing disdainful or bored with the success that they are actively seeking. Portlanders of this class tend not to be interested in other people; instead, they can talk for hours about themselves and their "projects." This is because they have a lot of them. No one wants to be just what they are. Cartoonists want to be movie directors, sex models want to be photographers, and rock guitarists want to be actor-comediennes. Sometimes they are good at this aesthetic juggling, but versatility, to quote Professor Irwin Cory, the World's Foremost Authority, is a mask for mediocrity.(1) And in any case, The Simpsons has among other things been making fun of Portland, indirectly and under the guise of Springfield, for 22 years, thanks to the fact that Matt Groening was reared in Portland.
The first six-episode season(2) of Portlandia kicked off well with a song about the burg's sleepy ways (an old joke within the city itself used to go that if it is 9 p.m. in Manhattan, it's 1953 in Portland). But after that opening, the show slid into SNL country, populated with skits that sometimes started out well but either didn't have a punchline ending, or featured one that fundamentally contradicted the tone of the skit itself.(3) As one close observer of the show told this writer, all the skits are "about service. Either Carrie and Fred's characters give bad service, or receive bad service." This is logical for a city that is service-industry oriented. It's hard to believe that we are in a depression or that the city suffers 8% unemployment when a typical walk down some of the town's restaurant rows -- Northwest 21st and 23rd, Mississippi Ave., Hawthorne Blvd., among others -- reveals eateries thriving with noisy customers.
Portlandia confines itself to a narrow strata of Rose City residents, the hipster. It has not strayed -- yet -- into the city's other flavors, such as its heavy CW presence, especially the line dancing at Jubitz, the town's vital panhandling community, or the streetwalkers that march up and down certain broad traffic tributaries, nor even some of the local municipalities, one of which is the epicenter of crystal meth manufacturing. On the other hand, the show is supposed to be a comedy.
For its Friday night debut, Portlandia garnered 0.255 million viewers in its 10 p.m. slot, with 0.14 of them in the 18-49 age range.(4)
Besides IFC, the AMC Networks channels includes We, the Sundance Channel, IFC Films, and of course AMC or American Movie Classics, which besides showing old movies also mounts original programing that includes the ever-popular Mad Men, the superb Breaking Bad, the more talky-than-walky The Walking Dead, the disappointing adaptation of a terrific Danish series, The Killing, and the dull Hell on Wheels. IFC's original programing also includes Todd Margaret, The Onion News Network on IFC, and a few others, plus syndicated repeats of popular comedies and sit-coms. The uneveness of its programing, and the cultish but low ratings for Portlandia don't bode well for a drastic increase in AMC Network stock.
Portlandia may not be all it's cracked up to be, but hell, you don't have to like it, you just have to hope that enough other people do to spur on its stock value.
(1) For a more detailed account of what Portland is like, consult the present writer's account of a past Portland film festival.
(2) The second season runs 10 episodes, drawing even deeper on the skit-writer's shallow well of ideas.
(3) An example of this is a skit in the first season in which a couple show great concern over a dog tied to a pole and abandoned, and after a lengthy spell of self-righteousness, the pair walk around the corner to reveal that they have left their own child abandoned in a stroller. Not only is this obvious and yet unfunny, it is also unlikely that the pair would not also make sure that they themsevles would never slip up like that. Portlanders police themselves carefully for hypocrisy, so that their self-righteousness will always win out.
(4) These figures come from TV by the Numbers.
Fool blogger D. K. Holm does not own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this entry.
