The nature of TV in America

Richard Burke

Richard Burke is Professor of telecommunications at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana

Part I: In the programming strategy, particularly of the networks, what has always been the case is this. Within the prime time, i.e. from 8 in the evening until 11 – that’s what we consider our prime time of the day – the networks traditionally were fairly successful at sharing the mass audience that was out there. That is to say, NBC would have roughly 30 percent, and CBC would have had 30 percent and ABC would have had 30 percent. This is in the prime time. Those numbers would be slightly lower if you took them over a day’s time, but I’m concerned only with the evening viewing time. And that other 10 percent of the audience traditionally would have watched public broadcasting or they would have watched independent stations or they might have, in the very early days of cable, been watching one of the superstations. But by and large the networks were reasonably satisfied to have 30 percent, 30 percent, 30 percent. Over the last 5 or 6 or 8 years that number has started to drop, and they are obviously very concerned about that. That number went down as low as 75 percent in the last 2 or 3 years. In a commercially based system every viewer that you lose and every rating point that you lose can be converted into dollars. And the advertisers are saying:”Well, now look. You used to be able to deliver to us, as they say, so many hundreds of thousands of viewers. You don’t seem to be able to do it anymore. Why should we pay the same advertising rate?” In trying to get this 30 percent the networks have been accused frequently of producing what some critics have called the least objectionable programming. And by ‘least objectionable’ what people mean is, it doesn’t have to be good. You don’t have to take any risks with it. You don’t have to put a lot of time into it. It just has to be less objectionable than what the other network is looking at. Because the theory is that large numbers of people don’t watch programs anyway. They watch television. They go over to the television and say, “What’s on?” and keep turning through or pressing the buttons, and somebody says, “Oh, that’s okay. Stop there. That’s fine.” Well, in this theory that I am explaining very superficially here, what you finally stop at is what’s least objectionable, at least for you. So the networks will take and have taken this position that you don’t have to win, you just don’t fail. You see if you take big risks, you are likely to fail. So don’t fail. That would be a primary rule. Don’t lose your one third, and try to produce the least objectionable programming possible.

Part II: Now, if you subscribe to this analysis of television programming, particularly by networks, what you find out is that there isn’t really as much diversity as there appears to be. I look at the schedule sometimes and in my best efforts to find something least objectionable what I have to conclude is that it’s all objectionable and I’ll be better off to go for a walk or listen to music or do anything but watch the television. And I think if you looked at this and if you look at a weekly television guide, you’d say, “Yes, yes fine, I see 15 or 20 or 25 opportunities here, but I don’t have any real choice at all. It’s all pretty much the same stuff.”Then, of course, the networks of those programs would say: ‘You are being much too demanding.’ This is after all a mass medium and you may have highly advanced tastes. I don’t really. I like police dramas a lot, but I can’t always find them when I want them. So the argument here is that this compulsion to do the least objectionable, the least risk in fact leads to a rather mediocre, rather bland diet of the kinds of programs that you would see listed here. In attempting to stay with programming that has the broadest mass appeal they obviously will take programs which are pretty safe. And they will take programs which aren’t very controversial, and they will do programs which have obvious large audience appeal.

Now in programming I think it is reasonable to say that the great bulk of it is designed for mass entertainment, as opposed to news, information, education, instruction. I think if you counted up the hours here and you looked at a week’s worth you’d say, ‘This is clearly an entertainment-oriented medium.’ Now, what is the nature of this entertainment, of all the possible formats that we produce, of the western, the action drama and the variety show and this kind of thing. This so-called situation comedy is by far the most popular format that you would see here and also over a long period of time. When people are asked in various kinds of surveys what have been their favorite programs since 1950, 60 percent would identify the so-called situation comedy, that is to say a situation which is artificially contrived and created each week with a cast of characters that essentially remains the same. People come in and out. And that’s really, not only this season, but over a long period of time probably the predominant format in this entertainment programming.