In an anatomical curiosity, the knee-jerk response to television is a sneer.
How a twitching leg joint connects to a curled upper lip is one for the physiologists, but there is no denying that people tend to dismiss the medium with virtually no consideration, little feeling that they even need offer evidence.
TV, in this entrenched popular view, is the boob tube, the idiot box, the vast wasteland. Case closed.
And TV guides, apparently, never opened.
For there is at the same time a feeling among many critics and scholars of television that the medium is in an age as golden as it has ever known. A given week’s TV listings are thick with quality dramas, too many of them to survive even with today’s lower viewership thresholds. Comedies with a unique viewpoint and fresh format turn up in surprising places, such as on cable channels that didn’t exist a decade or two ago. TV-movie production is in overdrive, luring top stars and directors from the big screen and occasionally even turning out first-rank projects.
How to reconcile these seemingly conflicting viewpoints, the casual and the critical? In a word, narrowcasting, the new television reality that sees programmers offering shows not for all of America, as in TV’s three-network, broadcasting days, but for little sections and subsections of it.
Because the television universe has splintered into so many pieces, it is easier than ever for people to judge television, as they have always done, by its worst fare. Flipping glassy-eyed through dozens of channels, one sees mainly a mass of non-specific junk.
At the same time, again because the television universe has splintered into so many little pieces, series are coming to the air that are the result of a vivid, creative vision rather than a string of compromises, and shows that would have been canceled quickly 20 or 30 years ago not only have healthy lifespans these days, but are viewed as hits.
People have lamented the cable-driven fragmentation of TV for many reasons. It takes away common ground from an already Balkanized society. It pushes older viewers, ethnic minorities and the non-affluent to the margins, as programmers chase the societal fragments advertisers most desire.
But there has also been an up side, the remarkable boom in quality television that, while it may not serve all audiences, serves many of them better than TV has ever done. The new, lower hurdle for survival means a series such as the sophisticated crime drama “Homicide: Life on the Street” runs for six seasons on NBC prime-time, making familiar faces of memorable characters such as Andre Braugher’s Det. Frank Pembleton.
Put “Homicide” in an earlier era, and its average last season of 14 percent of the comparatively few viewers watching TV during its Friday night time slot would have spelled doom. The rigid, almost biblically righteous Pembleton would have been just another writer’s bright idea and actor’s vigorous characterization fondly remembered by their parents, TV critics and few others.
“We kind of stumbled along,” says Henry Bromell, a lead writer on “Homicide” who remembers the cast and crew expecting cancellation at the end of each season, sometimes at midyear. Yet the show managed to slip the noose until after Braugher had departed the cast.
It left the air in May, at the end of last season, ranked 62d in Nielsen Media Research reports, exactly as popular as the still-running “Sports Night,” another smart, literate series that today’s diminished expectations are keeping alive.
” `Homicide,’ I think, survived because of the assistance of critics,” says Bromell, currently part of the team working to bring CBS’ “Chicago Hope” back to dramatic relevance and popularity. “It kept winning awards for the network, and they like awards. And because the network was a co-owner (of the show) and because we ran it so efficiently, the show made money even when it wasn’t doing that well.”
Compare those reasons for survival with the old minimum standard: a 30 percent audience share. Without significant competition, ABC, CBS and NBC were used to splitting more than 90 percent of the viewing public on a given night, a hegemony they saw as almost a divine right.
Indeed, CBS canceled “East Side/West Side,” a well-regarded 1963 drama starring George C. Scott as a New York City social worker, after a single season because it only averaged 26 percent of the people watching TV at a given moment, says Robert J. Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Center for the Study of Popular Television.
Last season, only the top two series had that large a proportion of viewers: NBC’s “ER” at 29 percent and “Friends” at 26 percent.
“For all of this fragmenting and taking away of our national culture,” Thompson says, “never has television had the ability to be as serious, as literate and as mature an art form until its mandate to appeal to everybody was finally taken away from it.”
The theory under the old, broadcasting model was pejoratively referred to as “least objectionable programming.” Under narrowcasting, with a landscape so much more vast than former FCC Chairman Newton Minow could have imagined in 1961, when he made his “vast wasteland” speech, the theory is beginning to at least hint of “least dull programming.”
There is more than altruism at work here, of course. In a business model where networks are rewarded less for total audience than for specific audience traits, it makes sense that more and more programs play to educated tastes. If you can’t get all the viewers, you try very hard to get the “right” viewers.
The general trend in the culture is toward “good” taste, as well — not conspicuous consumption so much as discerning consumption. In coffee (e.g. Starbucks), in clothing (Banana Republic), in furniture (Pottery Barn) and in many other realms, retailers are creating mass markets out of what were once rarified tastes. And TV in the last 15 years has similarly come to accept “quality” as a positive value.
Many, if not most, of those on the roll call of the finest series over that time period survived not because the mass audience took them to heart, but because a smaller and fiercely loyal audience did.
In addition to the rapid expansion of cable television, we can thank the burgeoning number of broadcast networks for shows as good, and as diverse, as “The X-Files,” “thirtysomething,” “King of the Hill,” “The Sopranos,” “Roc,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist,” to cite just a handful. “Twin Peaks” and “My So-Called Life” only lasted one year each on ABC, but they were very influential years.
“We take for granted shows like `Ally McBeal’ and `The X-Files,’ and these shows are serious, comparative hits,” says Thompson. “But it’s likely they wouldn’t have survived” under the old rules. Even “Seinfeld,” a mass-audience hit by the end of its run, escaped the knife early on thanks to the new, more tolerant rules.
Those rules also mean, of course, that a Jerry Springer can become a celebrity by finding a steady audience for what he does, that pro wrestling can take off once again, and that an irredeemable show like “Baywatch” can become a cultural touchstone. Thompson labels this the “toxic waste” of the new era, but any means of creative expression has its offal and kitsch. The trick is in knowing how to navigate to the good stuff.
Thompson’s 1996 book, “Television’s Second Golden Age,” extols the rise of literate, thematically rich dramas in the 1980s (“L.A. Law,” “Hill Street Blues,” “St. Elsewhere,” “Moonlighting” . . .), and the continuation of that trend into this decade (“Picket Fences,” “NYPD Blue,” “Homicide”). It is no coincidence, he argues, that the flowering of cable came in the mid-1980s as well, as the sensations of MTV and ESPN, especially, drove new cable subscriptions.
“Cable’s breaking up the audience made it possible for mainstream networks to put on the type of shows that you could never get a third of the country to watch, but maybe a sixth or a seventh would,” Thompson says.
With an average last season of 17 percent of the audience during its Monday night time period, “McBeal” is right at one-sixth. “X-Files” drew 14 percent, or one-seventh, a number that is impressive not in raw terms but for being achieved on Sunday night, when viewing levels are highest. Both shows are considered hits, the country’s 21st and 26th most popular programs.
Jeff Sagansky, the former top programmer at CBS, recalls that when he started at that network in 1977, “I was sat down by the head of research and told that no matter how badly I did I could not drop below an 18 (percent) share.”
That, it was explained to him, was what the network could count on just from viewers randomly dialing the channels. “If I ever saw an 18 share, I had failed miserably,” says Sagansky, now CEO at Paxson Communications, the company whose PaxNet, as the nascent seventh broadcast network, is itself an example of the new niche-driven reality. The irony is that the chosen niche of Pax is the family-oriented programming that the networks have largely abandoned in the search for more narrowly defined audiences.
To highlight the differences, Sagansky points to “Star Trek.” The original series, so resonant in its many spinoffs and reruns, barely made the network cut, hanging around for three seasons in the late 1960s but in its best year coming in as only the 52d most popular program.
“It used to be conventional wisdom that if you put on a piece of sci-fi, it can’t get a 30 share,” Sagansky says. ” `Star Trek’ was getting a 28. But now in the narrowcasting model, sci-fi does very well because the audience is big enough to support it.”
With the expanding TV universe comes a voracious demand for programming, which in turn makes it possible for programs to come to the air in a manner that more resembles the making of art than of sausage.
Rather than the overstuffed, underdifferentiated products network committees helped turn out in decades past, series now are more able to be the vision of one writer, like David Chase’s edgy peek into suburban mob life, “The Sopranos,” the HBO series that was last season’s breakthrough drama. Needing not only material but attention in a crowded marketplace, TV channels almost have to take the chance on the quirky idea, the original viewpoint.
Shows such as “South Park” on Comedy Central and “Beavis & Butt-head” on MTV became, if not out-and-out hits, then cultural sensations, thanks to their decidedly warped, but undeniably funny, assaults on most everything sacred. Now “B&B’s” Mike Judge co-produces the more mainstream, but no less original, “King of the Hill” for Fox, a cartoon about a suburban Texas everyfamily.
That’s not to say quirky automatically succeeds, or that networks always take the chance. Fox passed on “The Sopranos” before Chase took it to HBO. There is little doubt that the curse- and nudity-friendly series would have lost some of its gritty realism had it been made for a network, where standards on language, not to mention actor attractiveness, are tighter.
Doug Herzog, who brought “South Park” to Comedy Central as that cable channel’s president and took over the programming reins at Fox this year (a predecessor let “Sopranos” go), doesn’t completely buy the changing-landscape argument. He thinks quirkiness and quality are still easier to achieve on cable than networks.
For network chiefs, the audience goals may be smaller than they once were, he says, “but I’ve still got to be grabbing big numbers, large chunks of them. It’s a whole different world. I used to run a boutique; now I run Macy’s.”
And his first season at Macy’s has been a rough one, as some risks taken on behalf of good material have gone unrewarded. In particular, “Action,” a sharply satirical comedy series about a foul-mouthed movie producer that garnered great reviews, is on hiatus, a victim of especially low viewership.
“In the broadcasting world, sort of the big, broad, very simplistic ideas are the ones that take off the fastest: `Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,’ wrestling, `Greed,’ ” says Herzog. “And for the weightier stuff, a little more substantial in content, whether a `Now and Again’ or `Sports Night’ or `Action’ or `Get Real,’ you’ve got to really hang in there a long time.”
Henry Bromell, the “Homicide”-turned-“Chicago Hope” writer, cautions, too, that the old-line networks are showing signs of retrenchment, battered by the prospects of one more year in which another 5 percent of the prime-time network audience migrates to cable. “I’m not sure the niche thing applies to NBC, CBS and ABC yet,” he says. “I think they’re going to have to lose more money before they realize it’s the way to go.”
Indeed, he adds, “I think it’s harder now to get a good drama on the air than five years ago, because (the networks) are scared, hemorrhaging money. They’ve become superconservative.”
From the perspective of a writer trying to sell a specific series, perhaps; but in the big picture, it is hard not to think that TV these days looks pretty daring. Even CBS, with the most conservative programming of anyone, took a huge chance this season by bringing to air the almost undefinable series “Now and Again,” a perfect example of trusting in a writer’s vision.
From “Moonlighting” creator Glenn Gordon Caron, it’s part romance, part sci-fi, part absurdist comedy, and it is also proving a surprise success for CBS, bringing viewers to a time period (8 p.m. Fridays) where CBS had none and winning that period in key demographic groups.
At the same time, the hottest writer for TV right now is David E. Kelley, who came to fame with the aggressively offbeat and never wildly popular “Picket Fences.” Kelley now has four separate series running, “Ally McBeal,” “Chicago Hope,” “The Practice” and “Snoops.”
Although “Snoops” is lighter than the others, all of them, at a minimum, ask of viewers intelligence and attention. And Kelley was rewarded by his peers in September with unprecedented twin, top-series Emmys. “The Practice” took best drama in the industry awards, while “McBeal,” which tests the boundaries of what series television can do nearly every week, won best comedy.
But perhaps the new rules of television aren’t telling us so much about the present as about the past. One of the main achievements of audience fragmentation, says J. Fred MacDonald, history professor emeritus at Northeastern Illinois University and author of “One Nation Under Television,” is “it dispelled the notion that there was An American Taste, as if everybody bought into `I Love Lucy’ or the western. We know now that those were trends that were popular because there was nothing else on, or it was the best of three offerings at the time.
“There were always `audiences,’ in the plural, different tastes and subgroups. It was never a big, massive, homogenized country. Now we have a much broader menu of choices — although there are still times when I’m sitting there with my digital TV and I can’t find a damn thing to watch.”
