Blockbuster TV

Must-See Sitcoms in the Network Era

Janet Staiger

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780814783511
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Archie Bunker. Jed. Laverne and Shirley. Cliff Huxtable. Throughout the entire history of American prime-time television only four sitcoms have been true blockbusters, with Nielsen ratings far above the second- and third-rated programs. Weekly, millions of Americans of every age were making a special effort to turn on the set to see what Archie, Jed, Laverne, and Cliff were doing that week. The wild popularity of these shows-- All in the Family, The Beverly Hillbillies, Laverne & Shirley (and its partner Happy Days ), and The Cosby Show --left commentators bewildered by the tastes and preferences of the American public. How do we account for the huge appeal of these sitcoms, and how does it figure into the history of network prime-time television?

Janet Staiger answers these questions by detailing the myriad factors that go into the construction of mass audiences. Treating the four shows as case studies, she deftly balances factual explanations (for instance, the impact of VCRs and cable on network domination of TV) with more interpretative ones (for example, the transformation of The Beverly Hillbillies from a popular show detested by the critics, to a blockbuster after its elevation as the critics' darling), and juxtaposes industry-based reasons (for example, the ways in which TV shows derive success from placement in the weekly programming schedule) with stylistic explanations (how, for instance, certain shows create pleasure from a repetition and variation of a formula).

Staiger concludes that because of changes in the industry, these shows were a phenomenon that may never be repeated. And while the western or the night-time soap has at times captured public attention, Blockbuster TV maintains that the sitcom has been THE genre to attract people to the tube, and that without understanding the sitcom, we can't properly understand the role of television in our culture.

[1]
Introduction

Sigmund Freud writes at the beginning of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious that two reasons exist to study humor. One is “an intimate connection between all mental happenings.”¹ The other: “A new joke acts almost like an event of universal interest; it is passed from one person to another like the news of the latest victory” (p. 15). Two notions are important in this latter reason—“person to person” and “news of the latest victory.” In studying the history of culture, history (as well as culture) must be explained. The processes of social interaction and change are important. Thus, as Freud and many others note, descriptions and explanations of the circulation of cultural discourses are worth studying.

For example, popular knowledges and social life are filled with materials from entertainment media. In the area I will be examining—several television sitcoms—I could turn to a most recent example, Seinfeld. This program has popularized many catchphrases such as “soup Nazi,” “double-dipper,” the “yada-yada-yada” conversation filler, the euphemism “master of his domain,” and others. Even if one doesn’t watch the program, it is difficult to evade Seinfeld’s discursive impact.

Figuring out why some programs and movies produce a widespread cultural awareness of their fictional worlds would be a great achievement, but an impossible one. However, describing parts of the processes by which some television programs became extremely noteworthy is at least a contribution toward this broader research question. My focus in this book is, Can we explain the phenomenon of the unusually popular TV sitcom within the contexts of American entertainment media?

One of the most powerful sites for both discourse creation and discourse circulation is the American television situation comedy. In the medium of television, the sitcom has proven to be the most popular genre. Year after year, sitcoms appear in the top-ten ratings. Network executives and television critics have attempted to explain this. Among the answers suggested have been that the half-hour format fits the audience’s attention span; situation comedies can reflect rapidly the interests of the contemporary audience; and the humor of sitcoms flatters viewers who feel superior to the sitcom characters or identify with their plights. These and other suggested answers I will review below, but while all of these explanations are likely part of the story, none of them—or even all of them together—can quite explain a second phenomenon about TV sitcoms. In the history of American television, breakaway hits in the ratings are most likely to be sitcoms. By the term “breakaway hits” I mean that the ratings for the shows significantly exceed those of their second- or third-rated (or even lower) competitors; the programs are “ratings busters” or in Hollywood movie terms “blockbusters.” These programs are constituted somehow as more than routine programs.

“Least objectionable programming” (LOP) is an industry theory about why people pick what they want to see—when they want to watch TV, they choose the LOP channel. This hypothesis about viewers probably covers a great deal of the time they spend with the TV. However, the blockbuster phenomenon suggests something more than LOP is occurring. Ratings-busting programs are garnering audience attention beyond normal viewing behaviors, evidenced by the disparity between their ratings numbers and those of the average success. We are familiar with individual instances of such audience focus—the season opening for the “Who Shot J.R.?” episode of Dallas, the miniseries Roots, the final show for M*A*S*H, the annual Superbowl game. These and other individual television moments become American mass events, authenticating the metaphors of television as a national hearth or a global village.

Thus, studying how a program, or in this case four sitcoms, could weekly achieve the repeated semblance of this group experience and focus is important for understanding how mass media institutions and American audiences interrelate. The four blockbuster programs are The Beverly Hillbillies, All in the Family, Laverne & Shirley (with Happy Days), and The Cosby Show. While the theoretical and critical explanations often provided for the popularity of sitcoms can account for the wide appeal of the shows, it is necessary to add historical and institutional factors to understand the ratings buster.²

For one thing, diverse public institutional systems stimulate the broadening, or even the focusing, of audiences. “Surrogate consumers,” spokespersons for these public institutions, praise or challenge these hit programs for various reasons, bringing in different subaudiences to view the sitcom.³ Surrogate consumers most obviously are critics, assigned to give the public an idea of what might be in the product were they to choose it, but any public commentator might become a surrogate consumer. In criticizing Murphy Brown for supposedly parading a single mother as a model, Dan Quayle functioned as a surrogate consumer.

Obviously, some surrogate consumers reach many more potential customers than do other surrogate consumers; some critics are much more influential than others. Yet almost any notice, even by individuals not considered to have the same tastes as the subaudience, can produce an awareness of a program. As the saying goes, no publicity is bad publicity. The consequences of public awareness of the hit can be the “must-see-TV” syndrome, propelled in part by desires for social community and cultural currency. Then familiarity breeds interest and repeated consumption.

This sequence does not always work in such a top-down matter. With literature, theater, film, music, and television, at times surrogate consumers find themselves struggling to explain the popularity of a text, song, or program that gathers audiences for reasons the surrogate consumers consider unfathomable. In these cases, the explanations for the unusual success have to be drawn from other factors. Yet even the public accounting for the disjunction between the surrogate consumers’ opinions and many customers’ views increases the visibility of the show.

For either case—programs developed as a result of significant public discourse or programs “spontaneously” drawing in large numbers of viewers—the period of convergence is brief. Although often written to the same formula, the series’ days of celebrity are fleeting, usually three to four years. While the programs may linger on the air, they peak and then drop into LOP levels. New thrills replace them or the public is fickle, moving on in its interests and tastes.

What is noticed about these programs by their surrogate consumers or the mass audience differs from case to case, and the composition of the audience reached changes as well. Thus, the particular histories of the ratings busters are distinct although the institutional processes are similar. These processes are not unknown to the networks and their publicists, but what works is highly unpredictable. Even good word of mouth from surrogate consumers can’t insure the attention of subgroups. NBC can label its recent successful Thursday night lineups as “must-see-TV,” but it cannot force people to turn on the TV or tune in its affiliate channel. Hence, I will not be able to supply any magical formulas to produce a new blockbuster but can only trace what happened previously.

I May Not Know If It’s a Sitcom, But I Know What I Like

The notion of “situation comedy” likely requires little explication given its common use. In fact, trying to define it would be very difficult. As soon as one set of terms is applied, exceptions are obvious. For example, Gerard Jones suggests the network situation comedy is typified by the formula of The Cosby Show:

Domestic harmony is threatened when a character develops a desire that runs counter to the group’s welfare, or misunderstands a situation because of poor communication, or contacts a disruptive outside element. The voice of the group—usually the voice of the father or equivalent chief executive—tries to restore harmony but fails. The dissenter grabs at an easy, often unilateral solution. The solution fails, and the dissenter must surrender to the group for rescue. The problem turns out to be not very serious after all, once everyone remembers to communicate and surrender his or her selfish goals. The wisdom of the group and its executive is proved. Everyone, including the dissenter, is happier than at the outset.⁴

This description does work for The Cosby Show, but Jones then has to backtrack almost immediately in his discussion of I Love Lucy, where the resolution is “authoritarian” (p. 80).

The same problem occurs when distinctions among types of comic formulas are attempted. The purpose of Horace Newcomb’s TV: The Most Popular Art is to define the prevalent TV genres through a neo-Aristotelian critical method of describing their setting, situation, characters, and values. Newcomb distinguishes between the situation comedy and the domestic comedy. On the one hand, the situation comedy is determined primarily by the narrative complication: the central character takes an “improbable” response to a situation that produces confusion until it is resolved.⁵ On the other hand, the domestic comedy has “a richer variety of event, a consequent deepening of character, and a sense of seriousness” (p. 43). It is set in the home and its environments, with strong gender typing for the parents. The event produces a learning process, with the family as a “sheltering unit” (p. 55). Yet, for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Jane Feuer argues that “the situation itself becomes a pretext for the revelation of character”⁶—creating a plot formula that Newcomb has assigned to the domestic comedy. A response to this apparent contradiction in definitions might be to point out how the workplace in The Mary Tyler Moore Show has become the family home, placing the program in the domestic comedy arena. Yet it is still the situation rather than a “richer event” that precipitates the humor.

The point is that as soon as one tries to define situation comedy or domestic comedy, or warmedy or dramedy, exceptions can be noted. Moreover, these terms and the formulas and complications of situation comedies have a history in radio and film prior to their applications in television. For example, in 1946, in a discussion of what would work on the fledgling new medium, broadcast commentator John F. Royal predicted that “television comedy will be the key to the success of video.”⁷ Moreover, presciently he indicated that the comedy would not be gag comedy but “the legitimate or situation-and-plot format” (p. 1).

The notion of “domestic comedy” was also already well established within radio and the movie industry before the beginnings of commercial television. In a listing of proposed films for the 1939–40 season, the following movies were labeled “domestic comedy”: three to-be-titled “Blondies” from the newspaper comic strip for Columbia; “I Love You Again” (MGM); untitled “Hardy Families” and “American Newlyweds” (also MGM); and Twentieth-Century Fox’s “The Jones Family.”⁸

Thus, for the purposes of the discussion here, I intend to use the term situation comedy (and sitcom) as self-evident and rather all-encompassing. While I will be discussing how public discourse perceived features of the programs and sometimes marked them out as innovative, I shall not try to define narrowly or exclusively the constituents of the genre. Moreover, although I would not go so far as to claim with Newcomb that “it is even possible to say that the television mystery or Western is more comparable to the television situation comedy than to the literary forms of either of those two standard formulas” (p. 23), I do believe along with him that the success...