A few days ago, I was lucky enough to get a little time for a one on one interview with television producer Heather Ferreira and ask her some frank questions about her views on the state of the entertainment industry. This 41-year-old retro TV addict says American television is seriously out of whack, but she and her new NYC-based studio are going to turn it around.
You’ve been quoted saying that American television has lost its direction. Tell me what you believe is wrong with TV in the United States today.
The baseline answer is that art cannot be mass-produced like a hamburger, but our networks in charge think it can. Because it is controlled by corporate interests, and those corporations are mass-producing cheap shows like cheap hamburgers, American TV has completely collapsed. There’s a real conveyor belt mentality to TV, a sense of it being produced to meet the lowest common denominator. When corporations control artistic expression, creativity dies. Creativity takes unusual, unpredictable paths, and that scares corporations. Corporate America wants homogeneity – everything produced alike. That’s why radio sounds the way it does and TV looks the way it does. For example, for the last fifteen years a lot of songs
on the radio have all had strikingly similar chords. I would say a good 40% of male pop songs since 2004 have had almost exactly the same four-chord progression and melody as Tyrone Wells’s single “More”. There’s female versions of it, too. Not to fault the artists – they wouldn’t get signed if they refused to sound like that – but when you have corporate boardrooms deciding what gets played and seen, that’s what you get. Everything starts
looking and sounding the same. That’s fine if you manufacture widgets or shoot burgers down a conveyor belt. But music, television, and movies should not be produced that way.

