Beyond Prime Time

Television Programming in the Post-Network Era

Amanda Lotz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415996693
• eBook ISBN: 9781135842604
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Daytime soap operas. Evening news. Late-night talk shows. Television has long been defined by its daily schedule, and the viewing habits that develop around it. Technologies like DVRs, iPods, and online video have freed audiences from rigid time constraints—we no longer have to wait for a program to be "on" to watch it—but scheduling still plays a major role in the production of television.

Prime-time series programming between 8:00 and 11:00 p.m. has dominated most critical discussion about television since its beginnings, but Beyond Prime Time brings together leading television scholars to explore how shifts in television's industrial practices and new media convergence have affected the other 80% of the viewing day. The contributors explore a broad range of non-prime-time forms including talk shows, soap operas, news, syndication, and children's programs, non-series forms such as sports and made-for-television movies, as well as entities such as local affiliate stations and public television.

Importantly, all of these forms rely on norms of production, financing, and viewer habits that distinguish them from the practices common among prime-time series and often from each other. Each of the chapters examines how the production practices and textual strategies of a particular programming form have shifted in response to sweeping industry changes, together telling the story of a medium in transition at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Contributors: Sarah Banet-Weiser, Victoria E. Johnson, Jeffrey P. Jones, Derek Kompare, Elana Levine, Amanda D. Lotz, Jonathan Nichols-Pethick, Laurie Ouellette, Erin Copple Smith

Chapter 1
I Want My Talk TV

Network Talk Shows in a Digital Universe

Jeffrey P. Jones

The persistent decline in network audience ratings has been a central factor in the institutional restructuring of broadcast television networks in the post-network era. While cable and other technological innovations provided audiences with viewing alternatives during the multi-channel transition, the vast array of digital technologies now available to consumers—and the migration of viewership across these new media platforms—has contributed further to the networks’ ratings decline. From 1980 to 2005, network audience share fell from 90 percent of those watching television to 46 percent.¹ During the same period, network news lost half its audience.² The continued ratings achievement of network talk shows is all the more remarkable when viewed in this context.

Talk shows have been a successful programming form throughout the history of television, typically comprising each network’s morning and late-night day-parts and often contributing significantly to brand identity. Audience loyalty to such programming has been remarkably consistent from the earliest days of television to the present day. Late-night talk show viewership actually increased by 40 percent from 1995 to 2005, and the form continues to have a dedicated fan base.³ Network morning talk shows are even so immune to ratings decline that industry observers have historically described them as “bullet proof.”⁴ It is estimated that morning shows produce over 1 billion dollars a year in advertising revenue, double what the nightly newscasts generate. In fact, these shows often help fund most of the networks’ news operations.⁵ Furthermore, because talk shows are comparatively cheap to produce, profit margins tend to be quite high. The Today show, for instance, reportedly earned $250 million in profit from $500 million in revenues in 2006.⁶ And, for two of the three networks, the morning talk show franchises have even expanded their programming hours in recent years. In short, while the network ratings decline has forced an industrial reconfiguration by the broadcast networks to address eroding audience share, talk shows as a programming form have not contributed to such need for change.

Talk shows are nevertheless important elements in the networks’ digital strategies and part of their overall organizational alterations in post-network architecture. The reasons for this include the particular features of talk show content and form as well as opportunities presented by new distribution technologies. Talk shows provide popular content and recognizable faces (often closely associated with the network brand) that can be used to hail viewers across crowded and dispersed media platforms. And because talk shows are created in specific segments, they have a natural structural advantage for easy distribution, downloading, and viewing as short snippets in a variety of settings and through multiple technologies (from web and mobile devices to out-of-home viewing screens). As such, the content and form of talk shows are conducive to addressing these changes in distribution, as opposed to the longer 30-and 60-minute long-form programming found in prime time.

But this process is intensive as well as extensive. That is to say, networks are also using digital technologies to craft different relationships with both audiences and advertisers. Networks have learned to exploit audience desire to interact and engage with programming, including sharing and discussing topics in online communities. The networks have recognized that talk shows have the potential to play an expanded role in viewers’ lives, more so than when such programming was available simply as a morning or late-night ritual (that is, what someone watches during periods of attenuated brain power or while doing something else). Instead, talk shows can become sites for extended viewer engagement with the network brand, as well as the means for engagement with other viewers. Furthermore, as audiences engage talk show content across platforms, these new technologies allow networks to monitor and aggregate much more information about their viewers—their tastes, interests, lifestyle, and patterns of behavior—than that typically available through the ratings data that have dominated the industry for decades. Networks are increasingly learning not only to exploit this information with advertisers, but also to use it to inform programming decisions.

This chapter explores these and other issues related to the role of talk shows in post-network realignment. I begin by discussing the talk show as programming form: its textual features and traditional role in network performance. The discussion then turns to a broader examination of post-network changes in the relationship between networks and audiences before offering an analysis of morning and late-night dayparts and how they are being used in network realignment strategies. But, first, it is important to define what exactly is under investigation here. Talk shows comprise an enormous swath of programming available to viewers across all dayparts and across both network and cable channels. The shows examined here, however, include only programs that are self-produced by the networks and fall primarily within the broadcast networks’ morning and late-night dayparts. While some popular syndicated fare (The Oprah Winfrey Show, Live with Regis and Kelly, The Ellen DeGeneres Show) and cable talk shows (The O’Reilly Factor, Countdown with Keith Olbermann) are connected to the broadcast networks either through distribution or appearing on cable channels owned by the same corporate parent, they do not have a similar central relationship to the network as those shows owned and produced by the networks for airing on broadcast television. The latter (as opposed to talk shows acquired from independent production companies) permit the networks much more leeway in how such programming can be used (including its editing and reuse, its franchising and off-shoots, and so on). Therefore, the focus solely on network talk shows allows for an investigation into how the networks are leveraging this form of popular and profitable content in their overall network-wide digital realignment strategies.

Network Talk Shows as Successful Dayparts

Network talk shows fall primarily into two dayparts—morning and late night—and have dominated those programming hours almost from the medium’s beginning. Among weekday morning talk shows are Today on NBC, Good Morning America and The View on ABC, and The Early Show on CBS. The Today show has been the ratings leader for most of the program’s history, including ranking continuously as the number one morning show since 1995. The program has been so successful that it expanded its original format of two hours to three hours in 2000 and then to four hours in 2007, using a slightly different format for the last hour. Good Morning America, another popular though slightly less profitable program, also expanded to a third hour (as Good Morning America Now) in 2007, although this hour is only available via cable, online and mobile media. As a genre, morning talk shows also include the long-running Sunday morning public affairs talk shows such as Meet the Press (NBC), Face the Nation (CBS), and This Week with George Stephanopoulos (ABC). Although the Sunday talk shows continue to garner strong viewership numbers, their specialized status and restricted broader appeal (not to mention their older demographic) has somewhat limited their value as programming that the networks can foreground in their digital strategies (and are therefore tangential to the discussions here).

Weekday morning talk shows are organizationally related to network news divisions (The View as exception), but are widely considered both institutionally and by audiences as “talk shows” more than “news” programs. These shows perfected the blend of information and entertainment into a popular format long before critics began using the pejorative term “infotainment” to describe the blurring of boundaries between the two. In fact, the prototype for morning talk has been the Today show, which first aired on NBC in 1952. In its first broadcast, host Dave Garroway explained how the program would bring viewers news, but also information about music, art, science, sports, and “all fields of endeavor we think we’ll be able to inform you better about ….” ⁷ By contrast, the content that largely fills morning talk today is focused on topics that the networks believe will best appeal to the women viewers who comprise the vast majority of the audience.⁸ The programs open with a news update and incorporate additional news segments and newsmaker interviews interspersed throughout the show. The bulk of programming, however, tends toward lighter infotainment fare, including segments on topics such as parenting and family, fashion and beauty, food and cooking, relationships and sex, homemaking and gardening, health, travel, personal finance, weather, celebrities, and musical performances. The historical contrast is instructive in that the focus on women as primary viewing audience and the gendered grouping of topics have become two of the central areas through which morning talk has been exploited in the networks’ digital strategies (as discussed below).

The infotainment approach to morning talk subjects has traditionally been designed with the “homemaker” in mind, recognizing that lighter content requires less concentration in viewers who are typically occupied by morning breakfast and family mobilization routines. Also central to talk show appeal has been the aura of intimacy and friendliness (between the cast members and with viewers) that the morning talk team is capable of creating. The casts are most successful when projecting themselves as likeable companions, even a family, such as the Today show’s co-anchors Meredith Viera as bubbly sister and Matt Lauer as steadfast brother, with Al Roker and Willard Scott as wacky but loveable uncles. Katie Couric (Today) and Diane Sawyer (GMA) are also two recent hosts that have been enormously successful in crafting a pitch-perfect relationship with viewers through their on-screen personas. Finally, morning talk shows also try to steer clear of controversial topics, although breaking headlines or long-running news events can sometimes make such topics unavoidable. When ratings began to sag for all morning shows in spring of 2007, networks and advertisers questioned whe...

Table of contents

• Beyond Prime Time
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 I Want My Talk TV
• Chapter 2 Like Sands Through the Hourglass
• Chapter 3 The Benefits of Banality
• Chapter 4 Home is Where the Brand Is
• Chapter 5 National Nightly News in the On-Demand Era
• Chapter 6 Everything New is Old Again
• Chapter 7 A Form in Peril?
• Chapter 8 The Dynamics of Local Television
• Chapter 9 Reinventing PBS
• Index