Television Entertainment

Jonathan Gray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135253486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television History & Criticism

Television entertainment rules supreme, one of the world's most important disseminators of information, ideas, and amusement. More than a parade of little figures in a box, it is deeply embedded in everyday life, in how we think, what we think and care about, and who we think and care about it with.

But is television entertainment art? Why do so many love it and so many hate or fear it? Does it offer a window to the world, or images of a fake world? How is it political and how does it address us as citizens? What powers does it hold, and what powers do we have over it? Or, for that matter, what is television these days, in an era of rapidly developing technologies, media platforms, and globalization? Written especially for students, Television Entertainment addresses these and other key questions that we regularly ask, or should ask. Jonathan Gray offers a lively and dynamic, thematically based overview with examples from recent and current television, including Lost, reality television, The Sopranos, The Simpsons, political satire, Grey's Anatomy, The West Wing, soaps, and 24.

Chapter 1
Art with strings attached: creativity, innovation, and industry

However dirty, compromised, or implicated in operations of power, television is an art … the world’s most vast, varied, and influential narrative medium.

Jeffrey Sconce (2004b: 111)

Although [American TV] executives may not be allergic to what they deem quality, the networks as a whole aim to create not purposeful or coherent or true or beautiful shows, but audiences. Any other purpose is subordinated to the larger design of keeping a sufficient number of people tuned in.

Todd Gitlin (1994:56)

Art or industry? Or, how do we study television?

Libraries close, theatres go dark, and webmasters must sleep, but most television channels just keep going. Older viewers remember an earlier age when television stations ended their broadcast day with the national anthem, and some countries such as Iceland used to maintain a television-free day of the week, but increasingly nowadays, television just keeps going. This places the average television channel in the odd position in media history of having to fill every waking and sleeping hour with content. Thus, television experiences an almost unrivalled amount of pressure to be creative. Meanwhile, exacerbating this pressure for many producers is the need to sell. Public broadcasters, such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) or the American Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), in theory have the luxury of concentrating on what is best for their audiences, but commercial broadcasters must always be adding to their audience, scrambling to gain evermore viewers.¹ In many corners of the world, and with the likes of News Corporation, Time-Warner, Disney, etc., buying up great swathes of the world’s television channels, cable providers, and production houses (see Chapters 3 and 6), television is one of the world’s most successful and fastest-growing businesses, thereby requiring content production to keep pace.

These pressures often create a paradoxical situation for the medium. Television is our world’s premier storyteller and artistic creator, as Jeffrey Sconce suggests … at the same time as it is frequently a capitalist enterprise. Such is the nature of television’s hold over viewers that many readers of the previous sentence may not see the inherent paradox, but for anything to be positioned simultaneously as an art and an industry bucks a centuries-old trend of defining art as precisely not industrial.

Art has traditionally been held to be made of greater stuff than money, fashioned of a nobler, even more divine, membrane than is the humdrum, cold exploit of making a buck. A parade of Western intellectuals have looked to art as a balm to cure the soul from the quotidian worries and annoyances frequently created by the world of industry. Admittedly, definitions of art run the gamut from the pragmatic to the sublime. On one hand is Howard Becker’s (1984) suggestion that art is whatever the art world says it is. On the other hand is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s declaration that poetry/art “awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought,” and “enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight” (1991[1821]: 317). But the pragmatists have only recently had their day, as throughout much of Western intellectual history, art has been seen as the result of a divine connection between God, nature, or muse and the individual, becoming a sort of middle kingdom between humankind and enlightenment. Many have defined art with another slippery term, as being “beautiful,” whereby beauty can be understood as inspirational and uplifting. And as supposedly above and beyond everyday life, art has been envisioned as a reflective zone, and works of art as those that carve out this space for us, wherein we can step back and analyze the world as it is and as it could or should be. One of the more lasting beliefs of art, echoing Shelley’s, is that it “defamiliarizes,” in Viktor Shklovsky’s terms (1988[1917]). Creation requires novelty – something which was not there before and is thus created – and many have seen art’s powers of defamiliarization as creating new ways of seeing and thinking. Many regard art in hopeful, even utopian terms, seeing it as a sign of cosmological order and design, offering evidence that something more important, vital, and meaningful exists beyond the everyday, and given art’s longstanding assumed relationship to Heaven, godliness, and enlightenment, the belief in art as sublime is as tenacious as the belief in the glorious afterlife.

Thus, if we were to approach television entertainment as a creative art, we might draw inspiration from Jurij Lotman’s comments on the nature of the literary text. Lotman proposes that art uses language (and, in the case of television, let us add image and sound) in a unique, impressionist manner that plays directly on the reader’s or viewer’s feelings, working in a way that no straightforward exposition ever could. Poetic speech, he argues, “allows us to transmit a volume of information too great to be transmitted by an elementary, strictly linguistic structure. It follows that the information (content) given can neither exist nor be transmitted outside this artistic structure” (1977:10), existing instead as a special entity and a uniquely enriched form of communication. Lotman further quotes famous Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who remarked of his Anna Karenina that, “If I were to say in words all that I intended to express by way of the novel, then I would have to write a novel identical to the one I first wrote” (1977:11). Art, Tolstoy and Lotman intimate, is its own language and mode of communication, full of messages for the taking, yet composed with such precision that those messages transcend mere summary: they are given life and energy by their manner of rendering. As I will discuss in Chapter 2, art works on and speaks to the emotions in ways that hint at transcendence and/or the sublime. Hence, to study television entertainment wholly as art would be to delve into questions of how images, performances, and scripts help and/or inspire us to consider the human experience. What might The Young and the Restless or The Sopranos tell us about life? How does Lost allow us to better understand the struggle of science and faith? How is The Simpsons’ structure able to comment on the nature of consumerism?

However, a classic account of television, based on numerous inter views with its creators and executives, Todd Gitlin’s Inside Prime Time (1994) attempts to debunk the idea that innovation or artistry are at the core of television. Instead, Gitlin opens on the note that “innovation is still rare as the networks and their spinoffs and successors relentlessly go on straining after that American icon, Fun,” leaving “virtually no place in American television, commercial or public, for a serious writer or director to make a career” (1994: xi). Gitlin concludes that creativity and aesthetics are clearly lacking, as instead television is an industry first, foremost, and often only. Television, he states, represents “the Triumph of the Synthetic” (63). Here, he echoes one of the more famous critiques of modern media as industry, lodged by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1972[1944]). Looking at the film and popular music industries of the 1930s and 1940s, Horkheimer and Adorno noted an apparent inability to create new and more challenging modes of thinking. They argued that with such industries we were witnessing a shift from art as innovative, challenging, and new to an industry of mindless repetition. They saw the industrialization of art as the de facto replacement of the work of art by formula, arguing that, “there is the agreement – or at least the determination – of all executive authorities not to produce or sanction anything that in any way differs from their own rules, their own ideas about consumers, or above all themselves” (1972[1944]: 122). Industrial production of culture now followed the wholly familiar, amounting not to art and style, but to the “negation of style” (129). To follow Gitlin, Horkheimer, and Adorno with regards culture industries such as television, the medium has no higher purpose, little artistic expression, and hence provides nothing worth studying as artistic expression. Instead, then, our task as media analysts would be to chart the industry’s perversion of art, and its business aims and practices as constituting a wing of the advertising industry that funds commercial television.

Ultimately, though, as this chapter will argue, neither an artistic nor an industrial perspective is wholly satisfying. Television is not just art, and to ignore its industrial imperatives and the multiple effects of these on the nature of television would be romantic but irresponsible. However, an industrial account provides little explanation as to why we as viewers spend so much time in front of television, unhelpfully implying merely that we are all somewhat mindlessly devoted to repetition, formula, and always more of the same. Clearly, we cannot dismiss Gitlin’s painstaking empirical work offhand, but equally clearly, more of the picture exists to be studied. Therefore, this chapter will examine the dialectic – the back and forth – between art and industry, innovation and imitation, originality and repetition, that characterizes television. It will interrogate Gitlin’s suggestion, from the quotation that opens this chapter, that industry necessarily subordinates art, as I examine television entertainment’s capacity to work as an artistic and creative entity. First, I will offer a brief over view of the creative/industrial process of making television, discussing how the television business works. Then I will examine the dance between art and industry that takes place in this system, before, at chapter’s end, offering some contextualizing comments on reruns, repetition, and familiarity, lest the chapter fetishize originality and innovation as the only forces of value in cultural production and consumption.

The television industry: who does what?

Television shows are surrounded by various discourses of authorship and creation: on one hand, the list of household name showrunners seems to be growing yearly (Joss Whedon, Matt Groening, J. J. Abrams, David Chase, Aaron Sorkin, Shonda Rhimes, David E. Kelley, Dick Wolf, John Wells, Amy Sherman-Palladino, Rob Thomas, etc.), and on the other hand, viewers are quick to invoke and to blame the specter of the anonymous “producer,” “writer,” or even “network” when they dislike what is before them. Thus, at times the process sounds intensely human and aesthetic, while at other times it sounds wholly robotic. Precisely how, then, is television created, and by whom? Before we can assess the system’s capacity for creativity and artistry, we first need to know that system. For illustrative purposes, I will focus first on the American commercial television system, before later in the chapter examining how public broadcasting as model (whether BBC or other) limits or encourages creativity.

The industry can be divided into its three main components: production, distribution, and exhibition/transmission. Beginning with production, a preponderance of primetime programming is produced by one of the five major production houses/studios (see Table 1.1), with Viacom’s DreamWorks increasingly active in television production too (having made shows such as Band of Brothers, Spin City, Rescue Me, and The Contender). Production is not so simple, though, for behind each program are often numerous production companies. Hence, for instance, Fox Television Studios produces 24 alongside Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment, and The Simpsons alongside James L. Brooks’ Gracie Films. A production company may be as grand as an entire studio, or as rudimentary as a business name for a single individual, whose involvement with production may range from creating the initial concept, to lending executive help and weight to a project, to keeping an active show running. Most shows, though, require the full force of a studio behind them. Television is an expensive business, requiring potentially millions of dollars worth of equipment that only a few studios can afford, and hence, by the end of 2005, production of primetime scripted series for American network television by unaligned, independent producers was simply unviable (Lotz 2007b: 95).

Because of the huge capital investment required to film a television show, however, production rarely if ever begins until a distribution arrangement has been found. As such, while ideas and creativity usually begin at the level of production, distributors make a project real. Distributors take on the task of finding a show a potential audience, both securing a transmission deal and advertising it. Options for distribution in the US include the networks (ABC, CBS, CW, FOX, NBC, or the Spanish-language Univision), a cable station (such as Comedy Central, F/X, Lifetime, or USA), a Pay TV channel such as HBO or Showtime, first-run syndication, and off-network syndication. A network deal guarantees that the network will distribute the show to all its affiliate stations, who agree (with a few restrictions and escape clauses) to play the program at a set time each week, as, for instance, when the Warner Bros.-produced ER is distributed by the NBC network to NBC affiliates such as WPSD in Paducah, Kentucky, or WNBC in New York. A deal with a cable or pay TV station ensures that they will play the show at a set time or times each week, as, for instance, when the Warner Bros.-produced Nip/Tuck is distributed by the cable channel F/X and transmitted through a cable or satellite package by the likes of Comcast or DirecTV.² “First-run” syndication refers to when new episodes are sold directly to affiliates (hence bypassing the network), and though license fees from networks are substantially higher, several shows in TV history have fared very well in first-run syndication, including Baywatch and The Muppet Show, daytime talk shows (The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Ellen Degeneres Show), and most entertainment news programs and game shows playing in the 7–8 p.m. slot, such as Entertainment Tonight, Extra, Wheel of Fortune, and Jeopardy. “Off-network” syndication – commonly known as “reruns” – refers to the sale of previously aired programs directly to cable, satellite, or broadcast stations, including affiliates (importantly, a network’s contract for transmission is only for one to three broadcasts, and rerun deals are nearly always handled separately).

Table 1.1 Television production and ownership

In broadcast television, the distributor pays license fees to the producer, and in turn the network and/or transmitter makes money by selling ad slots. In each television market/city, television stations may seek affiliation with a network or else run independently. Those that run independently must commission or produce their own programming, or else buy programs on the syndication market. By contrast, affiliation with a network guarantees a station anywhere from two (8–10 p.m.) to twelve (8–11 p.m., national news, morning show(s), late night, soaps, and/or special events) hours a day of programming distributed directly from the network. In any market, only one station can serve as an affiliate, and since the networks still garner the largest audiences and distribute many of the most popular programs, advertising rates are highest on-network. The AC Nielsen company then measures viewing by a combination of: (a) set-top boxes in a small sample of American homes, used predominantly for national viewing figures and ad sales, though also and increasingly in some larger markets for local viewing figures and ad sales; and (b) viewing diaries circulated during the “sweeps weeks” in November, February, May, and July, used for local viewing figures and ad sales. These figures allow advertisers to “purchase” the viewers they want – some opting for the maximum number of eyeballs, regardless of demographics, many aiming for specific audiences, such as the much-desired young highly educated male.³ During a standard half-hour of television, eight minutes are withheld for advertising, about six of which are the networks’ for selling national ads, and about two of which each affiliate sells locally. By contrast, commercial cable and satellite television channels receive anywhere from 5 cents to $2 per subscriber from the cable or satellite provider, although the cable/satellite providers also frequently receive a small portion of ad space in the deal.⁴ Pay TV channels (such as HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax) offer no ads, earning the bulk of their money instead by splitting per-channel subscription fees with cable/satellite providers.

With ad dollars flowing fast and furious for most distributors and transmitters, distributors and transmitters frequently garner the largest profits. Hence, for instance, at FOX’s 2006 “upfront” (pre-season) sales of ad space, the network notched approximately $1.8 billion, while new kid on the block, CW, earned $650 million (Consoli 2006b). In total, ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC were projected to earn $17.1 billion in ad sales for 2007 (Consoli 2007). By contrast, producers must frequently rely on “deficit financing.” While some producers manage to “barter” for ad space (being paid in ad space instead of money), and while particularly reality television producers have found new revenue sources from lucrative product placement deals, most television entertainment is licensed to primary distributors for no or negative profit. Lotz (2007b: 84) estimates that prior to syndication, an average primetime network drama will lose between $4.4 million and $8.8 million per season. Rather, then, television’s cash cow for producers is often the off-network syndication/rerun markets in the US and abroad. Once production has wrapped, and hence costs are already invested, and if the show continues to play on television stations worldwide, the producers then reap the rewards. Since syndication works on a station-by-station basis (i.e.: every station in the US – and the world – that plays a rerun must negotiate separately with the producers), it is reruns that make producers and royalty-owning cast members rich. For instance, Lotz (2007b: 85) notes that by 2006, Friends and Seinfeld had each earned over $3 billion in syndication revenues.

Reruns aside, distributors hold inordinate power: transmitters need distributors for lucrative content, while producers need them for the money that will allow them to make content. Consequently, many of the industry’s key gate-keepers are to be found at the distribution level. A great idea with a great cast and a great writer means nothing without someone willing to fund and show it. Also, precisely because they are gate-keepers, distributors are inundated with ideas, or “pitches.” Network executives in particular are constantly hearing pitches and meeting with would-be producers. From all these pitches, they commission a small few to write a “spec” (speculative) script; from the scripts, they commission a smaller few to produce a pilot episode; and from the pilots, they put an even smaller few on television. One estimate has the average network hearing 5,000 pitches, and commissioning 500 scripts, 50 pilots, and 5 actual new shows each year … of which 4 will likely be cancelled by year end (Steemers 2004:121).

As such numbers suggest, television is risky. Nobody quite knows for sure what will fly and what will bomb, and the volatility of personnel changes at most networks highlights how quickly a master developer can turn into a dud in the eyes of a fickle bu...