If you want to know the future of television, turn on your radio.The medium that many once thought would vanquish the audio box is instead becoming it, following almost note for note its programming patterns.TV used to be dominated by three national networks, programming to the broadest possible cross section of America. So, too, was radio once dominated by 50,000-watt AM blow-torch stations with the same all-inclusive audience aspirations. Then bunches of upstart stations, most of them on the new FM side of the dial, began programming to ever narrower subsections of the once broad audience, chipping away at the franchises of the AM giants.Now the niches are so small that a powerhouse of a radio station draws 7 percent of a city’s listeners. Most get by with more parsimonious pieces of the pie: 3 percent or so, good enough to make money and even land them in the top 20.It works because advertisers, in this new economic model, are able to get a fair-ly precise idea of who will hear their pitch; they don’t waste money trying to sell scour-ing pads to college guys. Radio has you, the audience, carved up by taste: urban co ntem-porary music over here, Nashville’s idea of country there, and news-talk down the dial.And TV is heading – some would say, “careering” – down the same path.As the millennium turns, television, the infamous “vast wasteland” of yore, is subdiv-iding into a seemingly infinite number of fief-doms of waste, little pop-culture cubbyholes where each viewer gets his own kind of fare. The old ideal of broadcasting i s dead. Narrowcasting rules the land.The change raises questions about the responsibilities telecasters incur in exchange for their use of public airwaves, about the medium’s potential for furthering the isolation that has always been the dark side of American culture’s independent streak a nd about the impact of a cultural medium that, in segregating its viewership by interests, might never ask anyone to chance upon a program that challenges or broadens his or her tastes.But it also allows for the argument that smaller audiences make quirky, quality pro-gramming easier to get and keep on the air.In any event, there is little use in wringing your hands over it, because the change is the result of technology and technology can no more be slowed or reversed than can a signal once broadcast be called back.In a periodic series over the coming months, the Tribune will explore some of the effects and implications of this balkanization of the TV nation — in the process sketching a partial outline of television’s future. Among the questions that sparked this series: Who is hurt and how badly when television ceases to depict a diverse population? What will be the fallout from the explosion of new, television-related technologies, many of them designed to serve narrower audience niches? And is the tradeoff in the more idiosyncratic programming that can now make it to air worth the loss of an inclusive programming model?
What is not in question is the premise itself. The networks once used to aim at the whole American dartboard. Now, under pressure from new cable channels, startup networks, new entertainment media and their own affiliates, they target specific regions on the board, though often without much enthusiasm or savvy. The futile annual ritual of the fall television season, in which the three old-line and now three newcomer networks throw close to 40 new shows on the air, only about a quarter of which will stick, is akin to a blindfolded dart player tossing fistfuls of the pointy projectiles toward the wall where he thinks he remembers the board being.
NBC, the only broadcast network to show a profit in recent years, has zeroed in on the 18- to 49-year-old upscale urbanites and suburbanites. Fox is trying to graduate from 18-to-34-year-old men and women to an audience more like NBC’s. One upstart network, UPN, in its new programming plan, will use professional wrestling, action series and determinedly crude comedies to go after the younger men that Fox is letting go. UPN rival WB goes for teens and young adults, too, but especially female teens, with shows like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” about a wisecracking, bleached-blond, in-crowd high schooler locked in eternal mortal combat with the expansion-minded undead.
“You have your first urban contemporary FM television network — called the WB,” says WB CEO Jamie Kellner, who has pushed the TV-becoming-radio analogy in speeches for years and only recently encountered strong response to it. His network is thrilled that, since inception in 1995, it has become No. 1 among girls age 12 to 17 and that Crest has made a toothpaste ad, set at a slumber party, to specifically fit the WB audience.
That is how victory is measured now, not by how many are watching but by who and how cohesive that audience is. In some respects this has to be labeled a defensive posture, an adaptation to audience declines that are positively radioesque.
In the 1978-79 television season, even the least of the top 25 programs, “CHiPs,” drew an average of more than 20 percent of American TV households. For the season that just ended in May, the most popular show in the land, NBC’s “ER,” was seen in just 17.8 percent of homes, according to Nielsen Media Research statistics, and you only had to go to the program at No. 15, ABC’s “Drew Carey Show,” to find a “hit” show averaging audiences in the single digits, or less than half of what No. 25 routinely drew two decades ago.
“Having been out of broadcast television for 10 years, I look at the ratings for top shows now and they’re so different, so much smaller,” says Burton Jablin, a former news executive producer at WBBM-Ch. 2 who has gone over to the land of niches as senior programming vice president at cable’s HG(Home and Garden)TV. “And back in the late ’80s we were upset because the ratings then were so much smaller than 10 years earlier.”
The 1998-99 season was also the first time that not one of the networks was able to average at least 10 percent of the potential audience for prime-time, the programming segment that is most expensive per advertising minute, most popular, most heavily promoted, most potentially profitable and most discussed. CBS won the year’s ratings battle by pulling in an average of 9 percent of American households overall and 15 percent of TV sets in use at a given moment. In the 1983-84 season, before Fox, WB and UPN and when cable was still more potential than anything, CBS won the season with twice that number of households, 18 percent.
NBC, the dethroned champ, promptly dismissed CBS’ 1998-99 season win, saying, in effect, that household numbers don’t matter; demographics do. And, it crowed, we were in first place in the 18-to-49-year-old group that advertisers most like, while you, CBS, were in 4th. It was not, of course, an argument that NBC went out of its way to make when it was winning the households battle. And still, NBC’s victory among those young and presumably advertising-susceptible adults was tempered by a precipitous decline from the previous year: 20 percent.
Through all the flux, it must be said that ad rates and time-buyer interest remain up. Small advertisers like the fact they can now afford to put their spots on TV. And larger advertisers continue to believe that network TV, even with its ever more modest viewership goals, remains the most efficient way to reach a national audience. But observers question how long this logic can hold.
So where is the audience going? Much of it to cable channels, which try each year, with considerable success, to fashion subsegments from subsegments: aviation fans to this channel, dog lovers to that one and home restoration buffs to still another. In 1987, the three original networks — ABC, CBS and NBC — drew an average of 71 percent of the prime-time audience, basic cable about 9 percent. Ten years later, the big three plus Fox drew 57 percent, while basic cable’s share had climbed to 35 percent.
It is not that any one cable channel is rising to challenge the networks. Nor do viewers seem to be abandoning television for other media. Viewership for, say, the Top 10 cable stations has remained fairly constant in recent years. And overall TV viewing levels have been progressively rising, as high as they have ever been, to an average of more than 7 hours a day per household.
It is, rather, that new channels and the growing number of them on cable systems has resulted in, to use cooking show terminology, slicing and dicing of the audience.
That the TV audience is fragmenting is a point often made by everybody from Bruce “57 Channels” Springsteen (and doesn’t the 57 in his 1992 song seem a quaint number already?) to any standup comic who has ever surfed the cable channels, but the implications of it are still being sorted out.
“Television is going to be the test of the modern world,” E.B. White wrote in 1938, when the medium was not even as developed as the Internet is now. “We shall stand or fall by television — of that I am sure.”
A passive — OK, passive-aggressive — entertainment appliance may not bear the weight of all that import. “We’re basically a bunch of people tap-dancing on a stage trying to sell soap,” says Kellner. “To try to make it something grander than that is for somebody else.”
But as we saw most recently with the Littleton, Colo., high school shootings, which TV helped us to empathize with and was blamed for causing, the medium is undeniably a potent force, both baby-sitter and teacher, mirror and molder, Madonna and whore. And as its primary goals change, shifting from the amphitheater sound system model of communication to more of a Walkman model, it is important to understand what that change can mean.
The extreme narrowing of the TV target raises the specter of, not too many years down the road, the lonely viewer with his screen-based entertainment device (it may still be called a TV, or it may not), watching a program with an intended audience of one. Must-see TV, yes, but must-see only for a certain James Q. Citizen, of 17 Lonely Street.
It smacks of the warning Rudolf Arnheim, philosopher and art historian, issued in 1957, of “the pathetic hermit, squatting in his room, hundreds of miles away from the scene that he experiences as his present life.”
But one man’s loneliness is another’s choice.
“New technologies are obviously going to provide more of an opportunity to go closer to one on one,” says Kellner. “That’s what our population wants. They’re not willing to sit around and watch something they don’t feel was made for them.”
Still, the heyday of network TV represented perhaps the only period in world history when a national medium targeted all segments of society equally, as it tried to lure viewers from the Hamptons and the Appalachians with the same mix of entertainment programs and news, says Robert J. Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Center for the Study of Popular Television.
That is disappearing, and it may, at first, seem absurd to lament the loss of “The Beverly Hillbillies” as a tenuous cultural glue, but there is more to the argument than being able to call somebody “Jethro” and have everybody in the room know you are labeling him a bumpkin.
“That glue isn’t gone entirely,” says Thompson. “The networks (collectively) are still getting an enormous chunk of the audience.” But when he begins teaching a class in television now, he says, he can no longer assume that everybody has the same reference points. Some kids know the “Andy Griffith Show” from reruns or “Seinfeld” from current programming, but some have spent their adolescence essentially watching nothing but MTV. Among really young kids, the old-line networks are barely a blip in their brainwaves; to them far and away the leading TV network is Nickelodeon, a cable upstart.
And Thompson also reminds us that as much as people worry about today’s splintering of TV, “back in the 1960s and 1970s, while the entire country was watching `The Beverly Hillbillies’ and `CHiPs,’ most intellectuals and critics — thinking people — bemoaned the fact that the most powerful medium was being controlled by three networks that had a stranglehold on the American consciousness.”
Moving to the present day, it is also difficult to argue that on the one hand, American culture is becoming too homogenized, with a Gap in every strip mall, a McDonald’s on every main street, while at the same time trying to say that TV is growing too fractured.
But, Thompson contends, we can certainly grieve for the notion that television formerly helped create a feeling that we were all in this together, sharing goals and interests, however forced that togetherness sometimes felt. A sitcom like “All in the Family” was entirely entertaining, but it also prompted examination of casual bigotry. More potently, television news coverage in the 1960s moved the nation toward acceptance of the moral rectitude of the Civil Rights struggle, and did much to raise questions about the futility of the Vietnam War.
Would modern television — faced with similarly momentous events yet offering viewers so many more, and more amusing, choices — have anything like the same impact? Many observers doubt it.
“Even a landing on the moon probably wouldn’t draw the same audience,” says HGTV’s Jablin.
CBS is the closest thing to a traditional broadcaster American television has left, but with its programs appealing to an older, less advertiser-friendly audience, it is openly mocked by its rivals.
The result could be seen in May’s fall-season presentations, where the networks try to sell advance advertising time on their new prime-time schedules. Elderly viewers, minority viewers — anybody who did not fit the 18-49-year-old, well-to-do ideal — were eschewed, in some cases openly.
Fading, it seems, are the days of “The Jeffersons” or “The Cosby Show,” when a program featuring black stars could be made with the intent of reaching the whole country. There are probably as many minority supporting players in series as there have ever been, but all but two of the handful of remaining network programs featuring predominantly African-American casts occupy two prime-time ghettos: Friday nights on WB, Mondays on UPN. Bill Cosby’s current sitcom on CBS and “The Hughleys,” a family-based comedy on ABC, are the big-network exceptions.
In their book “Down the Tube: An Inside Account of the Failure of American Television,” William F. Baker and George Dessart argue that this kind of deliberate audience marginalization belies the ideals, if not the letter, of the Communications Act of 1934 that carved up the public airwaves for broadcasters’ use.
The chief regulatory body, the Federal Communications Commission, has consistently maintained that the 1st Amendment requires it to keep out of specific programming decisions, taking the stance that broadcasters know best how to reach and therefore serve the audience.
In the case of cable’s Discovery Channel, the answer has been to divide in order to conquer. With digital television on the horizon, and its attendant channel-lineup expansion, Discovery has become television’s ultimate narrowcaster. It has 12 separate channels up and running, including Discovery Kids, Discovery People, Discovery en Espanol and Discovery Home and Leisure. A 13th, Discovery Health, is on the way.
Johnathan Rodgers is president of Discovery Networks, a position he came to after first running WBBM-Ch. 2 in Chicago and then all of the local stations that CBS owned. As his current channel lineup would suggest, he is an enthusiastic booster of knowing who your audience is and trying to make programs to satisfy that audience.
“I’m more for democracy than social cohesion,” Rodgers says. “I was at CBS, and I thank God I was there, for `Who shot J.R.?’ ” the resolution of the “Dallas” cliffhanger that became a national cultural event. “That was fun. But everybody gathering to watch a television show wondering which fictional character shot which other fictional character? If that’s social cohesion, I’m not so sure it will be missed.”
Besides, he says, broadcasting by definition means aiming for an average, which tends to make things bland. “If I’m doing a newscast in Chicago, I’m trying to please the North Shore, the South Side, Gary, Indiana. They all have different interests, different economic levels. I had to try to design programs that served all of them, and I’m not so sure we served anyone.”
FRAGMENTATION IS HERE TO STAY
Two kinds of TV audience fragmentation are at work these days. There is the cable kind, where new channels try to split people up by their interests. And there is the network kind, where the splitting is done more by demographic categories.
The rise of demographic groups as the ultimate measure of a network audience has been coming for decades. ABC spent much of the early 1970s trying to convince advertisers that less important than its unimpressive raw viewership numbers were its better numbers among young adult viewers. In the 1980s, the argument was won.
To satisfy the demand for better demographic data, Nielsen Media Research, the only national service measuring the TV audience, introduced the PeopleMeter in 1987, which allowed telecasters and advertisers to know the next day exactly who had watched what during a programing period. And in 1996, in part to address concerns about the accuracy of its numbers as they were split into ever narrower demographic groups, Nielsen increased the size of its regular national viewership sample, from 4,000 households to 5,000.
In the 1990s the trend toward demographic judgment has solidified. Syracuse University television professor Robert J. Thompson, among others, has made the argument that the last gasp of broadcasting could be dated to 1998’s “Seinfeld” finale, which saw a massive audience moved to assemble in front of their sets for an old-time cross-cultural hit show.
It is not that there cannot be any more “Seinfelds.” A program that gets media and water-cooler buzz, and is available on a wide distribution system like an old-line network, could still catch the nation’s fancy.
But with each passing year, and each memo from your cable company saying, “Here are the five new channels we have added, and, please, try our Internet service,” the likelihood grows dimmer.
