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Michelle_Z comments on The Classic Literature Workshop - Less Wrong
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This is probably stating the obvious, but most people watch television to be "entertained." They don't sit and think about the plot. They don't wonder about the character's motivations. They just passively watch. Producers probably know this and don't feel the need to spend extra money to appease a small portion of the population, even if it would make the show better all-around. They have no incentive to make better characters.
It probably depends on the show. There's a lot of Internet-driven TV fandom these days, which has helped make more complicated shows (such as "Game of Thrones") successful.
In other words, it depends on the target demographic.
And then there's surprises like My Little Pony. Wait, a committed artist assembled a dream team of writers, animators, designers, voice actors, musicians, and so on, and set them on a challenging task ("making a girls' cartoon that is awesome"), with a body of executives that was supportive and friendly?
It would have been a surprise if they had failed.
Even the IDW comics are awesome, and are the best-selling IDW series in, like, ever! Does anyone here read those?
When you put it that way, it's not surprising that the show turned out to be good. Merely being good certainly doesn't guarantee that there will be a big enough audience to achieve financial success, though.
It's a base factor that is correlated with popular success (financial success, to a creative type, is secondary, as long as they're making a decent living; the important thing is to have "lots of people watching your shit", as Trey Parker and Matt Stone put it). Increasing it is no guarantee, just like raising your child with excellent values and work ethic and a good school doesn't mean he'll get the Nobel or even do anything important with themself, but still, it's what you do if you want them to succeed as much as possible.
However, for the record, I'd argue that a show must be "good" for a purpose. There's no such thing as "good" in abstract. MLP;FIM was designed with the main purpose of attracting little girls and their parents, keeping their attention, and selling them toys. The authors made sure it was "good" for that purpose.
The other important thing about Game of Thrones is the model of payment: the people watching are the customers, not the product.
Many shows that appear on advertising-supported TV stations have been making substantial amounts of money through DVD sales. (Cable networks also get to charge cable companies for merely carrying their programming - so if a channel is popular enough that people complain when it gets dropped, the channel ends up being subsidized by everyone who pays cable bills, even if the actual number of viewers is relatively small.)
No, this isn't stating the obvious, it's cheap, unthinking cynicism. In reality, TV shows compete against each other very aggressively, and having more complex, interesting, realistic characters can and does bring a huge competitive advantage to one show over another. That depends on the genre, in the more lowbrow sitcoms you may want a very stereotypical character instead, but those do not capture all the market or even most of it. What you're saying is easily falsified just by reading a few articles on which shows get cancelled and speculations as to why.
TV shows die due to bad writing all the time (Heroes is a particularly striking recent example where a show was off to a great start and fizzled out due to bad writing and characters the viewers couldn't care about in the later seasons). Unless the show is particularly formulaic, the producers have all the incentive to organize better characters, and in fact the networks interfere in the shows' character development and plot arcs all the time, demanding this or that change because they're convinced their audience will like it better. Every major TV show has a huge amount of attention devoted to characters.
TV shows do compete aggressively, but having complex and realistic characters is only a good investment for the small minority of shows that are highly serialized and oriented around complex characters (Mad Men and Breaking Bad are good examples). There is a market for shows like this, but it is small and not terribly profitable.
The big money comes from shows with simple cardboard characters and one-off storylines like The Big Bang Theory (which set a record for biggest per-episode syndication deal ever) and Baywatch, which was syndicated in 142 countries. They have mass appeal and--most importantly--are easy to sell into syndication, where they become permanent cash cows.
Not too long ago, the highest rated TV show in the U.S. was serial drama The Walking Dead...
Nope. To check this I just looked at the average ratings of The Big Bang Theory and compared it to The Walking Dead. TBBT had higher average ratings all three seasons The Walking Dead has aired. A quick check confirms that Two and a Half Men also had more viewers.
Really?
That's only 18-49. Wikipedia sources TV By the Numbers, which includes people not in the 18-49 demographic.
To be fair, TTBT episodes are short and easy to watch. It's the fiction equivalent of candy, or of a casual game. Could you have a look at the DVD sales?
Thank you. That does make sense- you might have found some cached knowledge of mine. I would like to point out that there are quite a few painfully crappy shows that people enjoy, but now that I think about it, they tend to go off the air in a couple seasons.
My father watches Revenge. He acknowledges that the writing is terrible and says he watches it to see what kind of moronic and unbelievable plot twist they're going to come up with next.
Oh, they most certainly do. Who doesn't want their work to become a Cash Cow Franchise that people keep utterly obsessing about years or even decades after it came out? It it just costs one little extra effort in term of paying for good writing (we assume good acting and directing are par of the course).
And, of course, the whole art of Hollywood is to make stories that are fun and compelling on many levels, enjoyable to the sharp and the dull in equal measure. Pixar is especially good at that.
TLDR; the reward for good art (whose virtues include being accessible to all and being entertaining and emotionally cathartic) is boatloads of cash. Forever