Tom Brokaw stood on a raised platform above the crowd, a hint of joyâor was it smugness?âpeeking through the corners of his mouth. The Brandenberg Gate loomed in the night shadows behind his head. A horizontal band of graffiti-covered concrete bisected the backdrop. A few brave Berliners had already climbed onto the top of the wall, ignoring meekly flowing jets from a water cannon aimed halfheartedly by unseen authorities on the other side. It was Thursday, November 9, 1989. The Berlin Wall was coming down. And Brokaw was the only anchor on the scene to cover it live. 1
A few days earlier, Jerry Lamprecht, then the vice president of NBC news , had a hunch. Given the disorder in the East German government that led up to the world-changing events of that early November, Lamprecht could not have known how quickly the wallâs end would come. 2 Nonetheless, Lamprecht perceived that something was happening and happening fast, so he convinced Brokaw and the showâs producers to take The Nightly News to Berlin. Thus, Brokaw happened to be at the seemingly mundane but now famous press conference when East Germanyâs propaganda minister made the unexpected announcement that East Germans were immediately free to travel west. The minister had jumped the gun, and the border guards were not ready for the crowds that surged to the wall. The moment caught even West German television news unprepared. Thanks to some bold producing and a lot of luck, Brokaw had the best view in the world that night . 3
It was a big Thursday night for NBC. 4 Then again, Thursday night had been a big night for the Peacock for most of the eighties. As Berlinâs impromptu freedom party continued through the night, NBCâs juggernaut prime-time schedule kicked into gear. On The Cosby Show (NBC, 1984â1992) at 8:00, Dr. Cliff, the patriarch of the middle class, African American Huxtable family, has a wild dream; Peruvian spores have contaminated the American water supply, impregnating every male. Cliff awakes with a new appreciation for his wife and the toil of mothers everywhere. 5
Next up at 8:30 came a spin-off of The Cosby Show. A Different World (NBC, 1987â1993) followed a group of students attending a historically black college. Parenthood was also a theme in this episode as a main character, Ron, starts dating a young female classmate who has a child. 6
Cheers (NBC, 1982â1993) followed at 9:00 with the darkly comedic news that waitress Carla Tortelliâs latest husband was killed by a Zamboni. Tortelli, always unlucky in love, discovers at the funeral that her husband had secretly married another woman. 7
At 9:30 came Dear John (NBC, 1988â1992), a sitcom about divorcĂ©, John Lacey, who attended a support group for other lonely hearts. In this episode, John reads a self-help book that motivates him to try to publish his own poetry . 8
Finally, at 10:00, the lawyers on L.A. Law (NBC, 1986â1994) deal with a variety of cases ranging from the serious (a black college professor charged with murdering a white woman who was his student and lover) to the scandalously silly (an S&M obsessed insurance agent falls for the tough lawyer prosecuting him for fraud). 9
From 1984 to 1991, The Cosby Show at 8:00 and Cheers at 9:00 served as the foundation of NBCâs consistently strong Thursday night schedule. Two dramas, Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981â1987) and then L.A. Law, anchored the 10:00 slot. That lineup consistently beat the other networks in the Nielsen ratings throughout that period . 10
The night the Berlin Wall opened, 24,406,500 households watched The Cosby Show; that was a 26.5 Nielsen rating, multiplied by 921,000. (Nielsen is a market research company best known to the public for its TV audience measurements. Each Nielsen point is worth 1% of the number of households with television sets in that television season. In 1989â1990, Nielsen counted 92,100,000 American households that owned a television. 11 ) Nielsen recorded a 42 share for The Cosby Show, which means 42% of the television sets turned on in America at 8:00 were tuned to NBC. 12 Compared to current audience totals, those numbers seem impossibly high. In fact, they were consistent for The Cosby Show; the week before, The Cosby Show scored a 25.4 rating and a 39 share, and it averaged 23.1 for the whole season. 13 The Cosby Show did not need a breaking, world-altering story to boost ratings; tens of millions of Americans watched the series every week throughout its run.
The State of the Television Industry in the Nineties
Through good fortune and good management, tens of millions of Americans would keep watching NBC throughout the next decade. This book examines some of the shows that replaced Cheers and The Cosby Show in the nineties and managed to maintain what NBC would call its Thursday âMust See TVâ lineup. But this is not only a story about NBC, as we will look at some of the most popular and significant television shows on all four of the major American broadcast networks in the period between the end of the Cold War and 9/11.
Like the fall of the Berlin Wall, September 11, 2001, is a cairn in Americaâs history. While the historical impact of the date can be overstated, accentuated by the memory of those who watched the trauma unfold on television, it is nevertheless a crucial moment, politically and culturally. Admittedly, periodizing scripted television with respect to geopolitical events, even significant ones, is an artificial exercise. Even considering the lengthy production process that delays scripted television seriesâ reaction times to news, there is no clear-cut difference between TV created before and after Brokaw broke the news from the Berlin Wall. And even 24 (Fox, 2001â2010 and 2014), the network television series that dealt most directly with post-9/11 themes in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, began filming long before September 11th .
Still, those two dates frame the historical context of nineties culture, and the next chapter will discuss the broad strokes of that context. Meanwhile, the television industry was on the verge of drastic changes that had nothing to do with communism or terrorism. The new millennium just happened to be the moment when the effect of several crucial technological developments coalesced, shifting the ways Americans watched television. As a result, the nineties were the last decade that the broadcast networks held their ratings dominance. Basic cable finally surpassed broadcast networks in year-long ratings in 2002, and network TVâs share has continued to decline . 14
Once upon a time, television viewers could count their TV options on one hand. Around 1980, specialized cable channels started to proliferate. ESPN went on the air in 1979, CNN in 1980, and MTV in 1981. The percentage of American homes with cable rose steadily from 20% in 1980 to 57% in 1989, to 68% in 1999. 15 Unlike the entirely ad-driven broadcast networks, cable channels like ESPN, CNN, and MTV make part of their money from commercials and part from cable subscription fees. But it was a commercial-free premium subscription channel that first aired a series that signaled a new era in TV ratings. HBOâs The Sopranos (1999â2007) regularly reached an audience size cable channels had never before approached. At its peak in 2002, it was averaging 18.2 million viewers per episode. 16 Other cable channels, like FX and AMC, chased HBOâs success, airing television series that were edgier and more artful than anything the FCC-regulated traditional networks would or could broadcast.
Meanwhile, digital video recorders (DVRs) started to propagate, making it easy for viewers to record shows and watch them at any convenient time. On the industry side, DVRs ...