COMM 1500 Chapter 10

Argument 4: The Inherent Biases of Television

For Mander, television's ultimate purpose is to serve the interest of advertisers, which he characterizes as an inherent bias of the medium: Along with the venality of its controllers, the technology of television predetermines the boundaries of its content. Some information can be conveyed completely, some partially, some not at all. The most effective telecommunications are the gross, simplified linear messages and programs which conveniently fit the purposes of the medium's commercial controllers. Television's highest potential is advertising. This cannot be changed. The bias is inherent in the technology. Mander saw the technical limitations of television as covering up the more serious problem that television was inherently boring. What was being called "good television" referenced the quality of manipulation than a quality of content: Television is an exceedingly odd phenomenon. On the one hand it offers nonunique, totally repetitive experience. No matter what is on television, the viewer is sitting in a darkened room, almost all systems shut down, looking at light. But within this deprived, repetitive, inherently boring environment, television producers create the fiction that something unusual is going on, thereby fixing attention. They do this in two ways: first, by outrageously fooling around with the imagery; second, by choosing content outside of ordinary life, thereby fitting the test of unusualness. Obviously what Mander did not envision when he made this argument was that the technology of television would be replaced. What we still call television programs are no longer delivered primarily by broadcasting, since most viewers receive programming via cable television. A cable television company typically receives signals relayed from a communications satellite and sends those signals to its subscribers. Those who use satellite services receive similar signals, which are "relayed" instead of "broadcasted." Then we have television programs that are delivered via the Internet, and which are provided without advertising. Of course, we pay for the privileged of watching "television" without commercials by subscribing to Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime. Clearly, we have moved technologically beyond the world Mander was writing about. The question is whether those changes have significantly altered the experience of watching television programming in ways that affect the validity of Mander's argument. Although his primary focus is on the medium of television, Mander also indicted the content of television programming, enumerating "Thirty-Three Miscellaneous Inherent Biases" which includes the ideas that "War is better television than peace," "Violence is better television than nonviolence," "Superficiality is easier than depth," "Competition is inherently more televisable than cooperation as it involves drama, winning, wanting, and loss," "The bizarre always gets more attention on television than the usual," and "Quantity is easier than quality."

Idiot Sitcom Era (Early to Late 1960s)

What was considered the ultimate idiot sitcom, Gilligan's Island, debuted in 1964 when the small charter book Minnow, out with a sightseeing party for "a 3-hour tour" ("a 3-hour tour") was caught in a storm and wrecked on the shore of an "uncharted desert isle" somewhere in the South Pacific. "The Ballad of Gilligan's Island" was written by the show's creator Sherwood Schwartz because CBS thought viewers would not understand what seven people were doing on an "uncharted desert isle" each week. Despite numerous visitors stumbling on the island, the castaways were marooned for three seasons and not rescued until a 1978 made for television movie on NBC. In 1965, what could be considered the peak year for the Idiot Sit-Com era, the following situation comedies debut, with varying degrees of success: -Hogan's Heroes (CBS) proved that life in a Nazi Prisoner of War camp during World War II could be fun. Colonel Robert Hogan (Bob Crane) and his men refuse to escape Stalag 13 and its inept commander Colonel Wilhelm Klink (Werner Klemperer) because they are too busy running commando raids and helping fugitives escape. -I Dream of Jeannie (NBC). Air Force astronaut Tony Nelson (Larry Hagman) crash lands on a deserted island, uncorks a bottle, and unleashes a genie named Jeannie (Barbara Eden), who declares him her "master." -Get Smart (NBC). Inept secret Agent 86 for CONTROL, Maxwell Smart (Don Adams) teams up with Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon), to battle the evil operations of KAOS and launch the catch phrases, "Missed it by that much" and "Sorry about that, Chief." -F-Troop (ABC). Captain Wilton Parmenter (Ken Berry) commands a crew of bumbling cavalrymen at Fort Courage, where scheming Sgt. Morgan O'Rourke (Forrest Tucker) and Corporal Randolph Agarn (Larry Storch) engage in money making schemes with the inept Hekawi Indians. -My Mother the Car (NBC). Lawyer David Crabtree (Jerry Van Dyke), hears the voice of his late mother (Ann Sothern) coming from a 1928 Porter. This show about reincarnation by automobile has often been named by critics as the worst television show of all time. This period also included The Addams Family, The Munsters, My Favorite Martian, Bewitched, and fans who watched the first weekly episode of Batman were reminded to: "Tune in tomorrow. Same Bat-time. Same Bat-Channel." Other television historians have referred to this period as the "Rural Reign," because during the 1960s The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C, and Mayberry, R.F.D., all made it into the Top 10. These situation comedies were clearly targeted at younger audiences, offering a basic gimmick to attract attention. The Beverly Hillbillies put hayseeds in high society and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. had its country bumpkin turning the Marine Corps upside down. Green Acres reversed the premise, with a couple from New York City trying life out on the farm. Petticoat Junction was a spinoff from The Beverly Hillbillies, and Mayberry, R.F.D. was basically The Andy Griffith Show without Andy Griffith, as Hollywood found ways. Defining Show: The Beverly Hillbillies (1962-1971, CBS). All together now: "Come 'n listen to my story 'bout a man named Jed." The Beverly Hillbillies made it faster to #1 than any other show in history, finishing a top the ratings its first two seasons. The Clampett family struck oil back home in the Ozarks and decided to move to "Californy" and live the rich life. The clan's patriarch, Jed Clampett (Buddy Ebsen) had more common sense that the rest of his scatterbrained family put together. Granny (Irene Ryan) spent most of her time concocting potions, Jed's daughter Elly May (Donna Douglas) was a gorgeous young thing who loved "critters," and Cousin Jethro Bodine (Max Baer, Jr.) was as stupid as he was strong. Meanwhile, back at the Commerce Bank, Mr. Drysdale (Raymond Bailey) tried to keep an eye on the hillbillies living in the mansion next door. While this sitcom was wining the ratings war, it was The Dick Van Dyke Show (CBS) that was winning Emmys for Best Comedy four years in a row. Essentially, this era began in the wake of the assassination of President Kennedy and the four days of coverage that followed, ending with the enduring images of the funeral procession. Following the success of the James Bond movies, there were several shows about super agents: The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Secret Agent, I Spy, and Mission: Impossible. For kids there were the first prime-time cartoons, The Flintstones and The Jetsons, as well as spaced age science fiction with Star Trek and Lost in Space. There were several notable events during this period that produced enormous audiences. The Beatles made several appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, beginning the British Invasion of rock music, and the final episode of The Fugitive, where Dr. Richard Kimble finally found the one-armed man who had murdered his wife, an episode seen by a new record 78 million people, more than any single episode of a regular series until that time. Additionally, what was happening in the nation by the end of the 1960s made it hard to enjoy idiotic sit-coms. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were both assassinated in 1968, the Vietnam War was showing dead American soldiers on the nightly news, and there were riots in the street with protestors marching for Civil Rights and against the war.

Sweeps

"Who Done It," the episode of Dallas where the answer was finally revealed to the summer's burning question of "Who shot J.R.?," was the fourth episode of the fourth season of Dallas and aired on November 21, 1980. All four of those episodes aired in November, the second at a special time on Sunday night instead of the show's regular time slot on Friday, even though the series premiers for the previous two seasons had been in late September. Why? Because November is a sweeps month, while September and October are not. The only reason Dallas did the special Sunday night broadcast was because otherwise the big reveal would have aired one week later on the Friday after Thanksgiving, when people are presumably too busy with family and leftover turkey to watch television. Today, a half-hour of television consists of 22 minutes of programming, with 8 minutes of advertising, broken down into 6 minutes for national ads and 2 minutes for local. The advertising rates for those 6 minutes of national advertising are based on Nielsen ratings, while the rates for the 2 minutes of local advertising time are based on what are called sweeps months. Sweeps run for four weeks, four times a year, in February, May, July, and November, at which times Nielsen surveys 210 local television markets, ranging from 15,670 households in North Platte, Nebraska to the over 7 million television households making up the greater New York City area. The reason sweeps only happen four times a year is because a half-century ago when the AC Nielsen Company came to dominate the television ratings business, they mailed out diaries to selected households across the country so residents could record their television viewing habits (there would be one diary for each television in the household). The name "sweeps" comes from Nielsen collecting the diaries by region, beginning in the Northeast, and then "sweeping" across the country. Recording and analyzing the data from all of those handwritten diaries was both expensive and labor-intensive, so Nielsen only did it four times a year, extrapolating the data from surveys to other months. Meanwhile, networks realized that the amount of money they would be able to charge advertisers was based on what happened during those sixteen weeks covered by those diaries. Consequently, they began loading sweeps weeks with everything from specials and "very special episodes" to celebrity guest stars, cliffhangers, and blockbuster movies. The end result is that sweeps weeks are totally unrepresentative of yearly viewing habits, because local advertisers pay based on the audience size for the 40th anniversary 3-hour Saturday Night Live special, which NBC aired on February 15, 2015 (78 rating, 23.1 million viewers), but they get the audiences for Dateline NBC, A.D.: The Bible Continues, and American Odyssey, which averaged less than one-fourth of what SNL provided during sweeps. Super Bowl XXXVI was the first Super Bowl played in February because the National Football League postponed a week of regular season games following the September 11 attacks in 2001. Two years later, the Super Bowl was permanently established as taking place on the first Sunday in February, which happens to be a sweeps month. Similarly, the "Fall Finale" for television series like the Walking Dead usually come in November, another sweeps month, while most network series have their final episodes of the season scheduled for May sweeps.

ABC "Fantasy" Era (1975-1980)

The ABC network had never finished first in the ratings until the concept of Family Viewing Time opened the door. Head programmer Fred Silverman examined the Nielsen ratings and discovered that whichever network won the opening 8:00-9:00 p.m. EST time slot tended to win the ratings battle for the entire night. The theory was that most viewers would only change the channel if they objected to what they were watching. With the mandate that the first hour of prime-time programming be devoted to "family viewing," Silverman created a Tuesday night lineup that started with the simple humor of Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, followed by the progressively sexier Three's Company and Soap, and ending with the first domestic drama, Family. Those first three shows ended up being the three highest rated shows for 1977-1978. Then ABC made the same thing work on Wednesday nights with another domestic drama, Eight is Enough, followed by the sexy Charlie's Angels and the gritty Baretta. Thursday night began with the kid-oriented sitcoms Welcome Back, Kotter and What's Happening!, Friday with the Donny & Marie musical variety shows, and Sunday night with The Six Million Dollar Man. Defining Show: Happy Days (1974-1984, ABC). An America that had been torn apart by the twin punches of Vietnam and Watergate found refuge in television shows that recalled an earlier time when family values were fully embraced. CBS has The Waltons, set in rural Virginia during the Great Depression, NBC has Little House on the Prairie, set in rural Minnesota during the late nineteenth century, but ABC had the hit show of the era in Happy Days, set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the 1950s. Happy Days revolved around Richie Cunningham (Ron Howard), his family and friends, all of whom were soon eclipsed by high school dropout, leather-jacketed biker, ladies' man extraordinaire Arthur "Fonzie/The Fonz" Fonzarelli (Henry Winkler), who eventually became Richie's best friend and the Cunningham's upstairs tenant. The series premiered during a time when Americans were nostalgic for the simpler times of the 1950s, before the turmoil of the 1960s. Starting in its fourth season, the show finished #1, #2, and #3 in the Nielsen ratings. It also resulted in seven different spin-off series, of which Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy (which introduced the nation to Robin Williams as the alien Mork from Ork) were the most successful. The most viewed program of the period was the ABC miniseries Roots, which aired at the end of January in 1977, before February sweeps, because the network thought it would not draw an audience. To their surprise, the story of the slave experience of an African American family resulted in the highest rated week in the history of television. The final part of Roots became the first episode to draw an audience of 100 million viewers and the miniseries received 37 Emmy Awards nominations, winning nine. ABC had great success with several "Novels for Television," such as Rich Man, Poor Man while NBC offered Holocaust (with a young Meryl Streep) and Jesus of Nazareth. During this era made for television movies flourished as well, mainly on ABC, which aired the three most successful: Duel, directed by a young Steven Spielberg, Brian's Song, about the Chicago Bears halfback and cancer victim Brian Piccolo, and The Night Stalker, about a hard-boiled reporter tracking down a modern day vampire in Las Vegas.

Present Day Reruns

Today, in contrast to the major broadcast networks, both basic and premium cable networks are able to maximize profits by rebroadcasting episodes soon after they first air. Shows like Games of Thrones (HBO), Better Call Saul (AMC), and Major Crimes (TNT) air again later that same night, as well as later in the week, and often offer last week's episode before the broadcast of a new one the following week. Most PBS stations will rebroadcast their prime-time programming later than same night, and some of the major networks have taken to repeating shows from the week on Saturday night. All of these reflect the drive for television companies to maximize the profits they make off of their products. Let us consider how that works for one of those shows. Rizzoli & Isles follows Boston police detective Jane Rizzoli (Angie Harmon) and medical examiner Maura Isles (Sasha Alexander), who are best friends despite being complete opposites and solve crimes. The fifth season of Rizzoli & Isles (2014-2015), saw the first of its 18 episodes earn a 1.0 18-49 rating, while the finale dropped to a 0.6 18-49 rating, representing a drop from 5.81 to 3.62 million viewers. However, in terms of cable shows, Rizzoli & Isles is usually in the Top 5. In contrast, during that season a rating of 9.0 was required to end up in the Top 10, where Criminal Minds (CBS), Madam Secretary (CBS), and Scandal (ABC) finished tied for 8th. So Rizzoli & Isles has less than one-tenth of the audience of those network shows, but whereas any one episode of Scandal might be rebroadcast one more time on ABC, each episode of Rizzoli & Isles will be rebroadcast multiple times on TNT that week. All that additional advertising goes into the mix. The audience might be smaller, but the costs for the show are also less than network television. For example, star Angie Harmon is paid $80,000 per episode to play Jane Rizzoli, whereas Kerry Washington reportedly earns $150,000 per episode as Olivia Pope on Scandal; additionally, Rizzoli & Isles has only five cast members who have been in every episode, while Scandal has eight who have been in every episode and currently has a dozen members making up the "main" cast. On top of all that, Rizzoli & Isles is currently syndicated in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, and Norway, providing additional revenue for the series. Although it is ironic to consider it last, a major development with television this century has been the new ways of building up an audience for a new series by making pilot episodes available both early and often. The pilot episode of Glee first aired on May 19, 2009, although the first season did not start until September of that year. The cast went on tour at several Hot Topic stores around the country and sang the national anthem at Game 3 of the 2009 World Series, to help build an audience when the show returned that fall. In August 2006, NBC made the pilot episodes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and Kidnapped available on DVD to Netflix subscribers. Both shows would be cancelled after their first season. Kidnapped was pulled after five episodes, and the remaining eight were shown online at the NBC website which allowed the story to be completed in anticipation of being released on DVD. In 2009, Modern Family was available on Amazon and Community on Facebook before they first aired on television. In 2012, NBC aired the pilots for Go On and Animal Practice during the Summer Olympics, and then put both pilots online. Then the network posted The New Normal pilot online, and then aired and re-aired Go On and The New Normal after the Season 3 premier of The Voice. FOX made The Mindy Project and Ben and Kate pilots available, and ABC did the same with Last Resort. Of the 21 new shows debuting on the broadcast networks that fall, a third of their pilots were online before the season started. But the only one of these shows that ever got to a second season was The Mindy Project.14 In recent years networks have often rebroadcast pilot episodes before the second episodes of a new series airs, another way of trying to build an audience for a new show so that the network will order more episodes and the show can be renewed for a second season (and ideally get to 100 episodes and be syndicated). More recently, networks have come up with new ways to build audiences for returning shows, as when the History channel does a marathon of Vikings episodes before the new season starts or when AMC airs "encore" presentations of Fear the Walking Dead after The Walking Dead and Talking Dead on Sunday nights so that when The Walking Dead finished its season Fear the Walking Dead would move right into its timeslot the next week. Although the Internet has caused a drop in viewership, television remains the most popular mass media. However we watch television today we find that increasingly we are moving away from watching "television" live to watch video on demand (VOD), DVDs, and television programming available on computers or mobile devices. In the beginning, audiences had just one opportunity to watch an episode of a television show, at a time of the network's choosing, but today in many cases we can exercise the same sort of control over television programming that we can over any other medium and essentially watch what we want, when we want, how we want.

"I now believe that television itself, the medium of sitting in front of a magic box that pulses images at us endlessly, the act of watching TV, per se, is mind crushing. It is soul deadening, dehumanizing, soporific in a poisonous way, ultimately brutalizing. It is, simply put so you cannot mistake my meaning, a bad thing."

Harlan Ellison, "Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don't Look So Terrific Yourself"

Adult Westerns Era (1957-Early 1960s)

The Cold War might have had something to do with why American television was dominated by westerns in the second prime-time era. In 1955-1956 there were only nine Westerns on television, and none were in the Top 10 of the Nielsen ratings. The next season Gunsmoke began a four year run as the #1 show on television and in 1958-1959 there were 31 Westerns on network television, with seven of them in the Top 10. When Gunsmoke ended its reign on top, it was replaced by Wagon Train (NBC), and in 1964-1965 and 1965-1966, Bonanza would be the last Western to finish #1. Defining Show: Gunsmoke (1955-1975, CBS). In 1952, Gunsmoke was a CBS radio show, starring William Conrad in the role of Marshall Matt Dillon. After nine years on the radio, CBS asked John Wayne to star in the video version. Wayne declined, but suggested a young friend, 6-foot-7 James Arness for the role. The casting proved perfect. Set in Dodge City, Kansas, circa 1880, the cast included crusty old Doc Adams (Milburn Stone), Kitty Russell (Amanda Blake), the owner and operator of the Long-branch Saloon, and deputy Chester Goode (Dennis Weaver). After being #1 for four consecutive seasons, the half-hour show was expanded to an hour and the ratings declined. However, when CBS moved the show to an early Monday time slot as a children's show, it returned to the Top 10 in a stunning comeback that lasted into the 1970s. When Gunsmoke ended its twenty-year run in 1975, it was the last western left on television. Because of its popularity and longevity, Brooks and Marsh ranked Gunsmoke as the number one series of all time, by a wide margin. The Adult Western era signaled a major transition in the source of prime-time television programming. Westerns were filmed, and most of them were produced by the major Hollywood movie studios, which previously had avoided involvement with television, which they initially considered competition. From this time on, most television series would be filmed products of Hollywood's dream factory rather than live, theater-influenced New York shows. During this era television aired the Baltimore Colts defeating the New York Giants 23-17 in a sudden-death NFL title game that marked the ascent of pro football to new heights, the first presidential debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, and John Glenn's orbital space flight. When he was not writing Emmy award winning teleplays for Playhouse 90, Rod Serling was hosting The Twilight Zone, and swinging detectives started showing up on action/adventure shows like 77 Sunset Strip, Peter Gunn, and Checkmate. By the early 1960s, the flood of Adult Westerns began to abate. Part of the reason is that there were so many of them that new Westerns had slim chances of attracting viewers. Another factor was concern over television violence, which had started off focused on crime shows such as The Untouchables, but which carried over into Westerns as well. In 1961, Congress held hearings on the subject, and network executives were under heavy pressure to tone things done. It also turned out that research into television audiences was getting more detailed, and it revealed that Westerns were attracting older audiences, while young adults and kids were tuning in to situation comedies.

Analog Television

The original television technology that uses analog signals to transmit video and audio.

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The percentage of homes in which televisions are turned on and tuned to a particular station at a particular time.

The Era of Choice (1990s)

The title alone should indicate to you that during this period of prime-time programming there were not one, or even two, genres that you could point to as defining the era. The growth of cable television was giving consumers dozens of more options than the three networks that had dominated television for decades. If there was any specific element that could be pointed to as defining this period other than by the explosion of choices, it would be that network programming was being dominated by shows about women. Roseanne, Murphy Brown, The Golden Girls, Designing Women, Grace Under Fire, and Murder, She Wrote, were all in the Nielsen Top 10 during this period, while Home Improvement and Coach offered ironic portraits of the traditional macho male. Defining Show: The Cosby Show (1984-1992, NBC), was based on comedian Bill Cosby's stand-up comedy routines, which were based on his family life. Cliff Huxtable (Cosby) and his wife Claire (Phylicia Rashad) raised five children with love, humor, and discipline, because Cosby wanted the program to be educational, reflecting his own background in education (the end credits listing him as a producer was for "William H. Cosby, Jr. Ed. D."). Media critics pointed out that "real" African American families did not live like the Huxtables, with a father that was a doctor and a mother that was a lawyer, but besides functioning as role models, the Huxtables had money because having money or not having money was never part of the equation for Cliff and Claire brining up their children. Today, the scandal involving Bill Cosby over highly publicized sexual assault allegations has certainly changed how people remember The Cosby Show (the show was pulled from TV Land's lineup in 2014, despite the exceptionally healthy life the show has enjoyed in syndication), but that does not take away from the fact that when it aired it was the series that defined its era. It was the biggest show on television, finishing #1 in the Nielsen ratings five seasons in a row (It is also the last show to average a rating over 30.0). In addition to its spin-off A Different World, The Cosby Show is also credited with paving the way for other shows with predominantly African American casts, from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to In Living Color. The final episode of Cheers (NBC) was the highest rated broadcast during this era, which also saw the Berlin wall open as German reunification signaled the end of the Cold War and CNN's Bernard Shaw cover the start of the air war against Iraq live from his hotel room in Baghdad. Meanwhile, Ken Burns' documentary on The Civil War became a surprise television event and the highest rated program in PBS history after Burns went on The Tonight Show

Domestic Comedy/Domestic Drama

To be clear, a show about a family is either a domestic comedy or a domestic drama, but not both (We will come back to this below). More importantly in looking at this second genre, recognize that the basic difference between a situation comedy and a domestic comedy is that the latter centers around a family. You will notice that the two comedy genres share a couple of elements with the same names, but with different meanings specific to each genre: Physical Elements. With the domestic comedy the emphasis is on place and setting. On Leave It To Beaver, the den was clearly the domain of Ward Cleaver, the father, while mother June Cleaver ruled over the kitchen, and their sons Wally and Beaver had their bedroom and its bunk beds upstairs. The decor usually reflects the individuals who live there, from the look of the furniture in the living room to who happens to be on the posters plastered on the bedroom walls. Plot. Here the plots of each episode focus on people, relationships, and interactions. Parents are trying to raise children and maintain being a married couple while children are trying to grow up, which means going to school, falling in love, and maybe even getting a job. Characters. At the beginning of television the primary character in the domestic comedy was the Father Figure, personified by Robert Young as Jim Anderson on Father Knows Best. While dad provides the discipline, the mother provides the love and support. The children are basically good kids, but being kids they are going to make mistakes. There could also be supporting characters who were technically not part of the family, such as Mr. French, the butler who was forced to act as a maternal presence to the children in Family Affair, or the Fonz renting a room over the Cunningham's garage on Happy Days. In a world where most marriages end in divorce, television has had its share of single dads (The Courtship of Eddie's Father), single moms (The Partridge Family), and mixed families (The Brady Bunch). Then you can have a show like Full House in which Danny, the father, fulfills the role of the kind and nurturing mother while Uncle Jesse becomes the father figure. Problem Resolution. A staple of the situation comedy is simply resolving the confused and complicated situation each week, while on the domestic comedy there is a problem to be solved. On Leave It To Beaver, Beaver has a crush on his teacher, Miss Canfield, or Wally has a big fight that ends his friendship with his best friend, Eddie Haskell. Newcomb emphasized that a lesson must be learned each week, not only for the characters on the show but presumably for the viewing audience as well. When Newcomb wrote his book there were no shows that could be considered Domestic Dramas, but today there are obviously family shows that are not comedies. What is the difference between a domestic comedy and a domestic drama? The short answer is actually: thirty minutes. Like situation comedies, domestic comedies like Full House and Modern Family are half-hour shows, while domestic dramas from Family to This is Us have been hour long programs. Serious issues can be found from time to time in domestic comedies and there are laughs to be found in domestic dramas, but the tone between the two types of programs are decidedly different. Still, the focus on family life, allows these elements to apply to both comedy and drama versions of this genre, although clearly there are way more domestic comedies than there are domestic dramas.

Adventure

Action is the hallmark of the adventure genre , which would explain why it is sometimes called the action adventure genre: Motion. The primary identifying characteristic of this genre has been the movement of the protagonist, because it is hard to have adventures in the same place each week (with rare exceptions). So the protagonist usually shows up at a new place each week for their next adventure, which links to the next defining element. Types of Wanderers. The motivation for the near constant motion of the protagonist usually takes one of these forms: 1. The Carefree Wanderer, where the protagonist is free to chose to move because they want to, as with the two heroes of Route 66, although sometimes the wandering is not exactly carefree, as with the Winchester brothers on Supernatural; 2. Forced to Wander, traced back to The Fugitive, where the protagonist wanders because they are fleeing from the law or some other outside force. They might stay in one place for a couple of episodes, but sooner or later will be moving on again; 3. Commanded to Wander, where wandering is a function of the protagonist's job, such as being the commander of the Starship Enterprise on Star Trek or Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Star Trek universe also offers some unique variations on this type of wanderer with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, where visitors wander to a space station to have adventures, and Star Trek: Voyager, where a Federation vessel ends up on the other side of the universe and has to travel decades to get back home. Flexibility of Plot. Because the protagonist is always on the move, this allows for adventure programs to have maximum flexibility in terms of plot. For example, Star Trek offered episodes that reflected each of other genres: situation comedy ("The Trouble with Tribbles"), mystery ("Wolf in the Fold"), professional for both doctor ("Miri") and lawyer ("Court Martial"), western ("Specter of the Gun"), and straight forward adventure ("Arena").

Video Recording Devices

Before World War II, people could buy an electronic factory set from Du Mont or RCA for a television that they could but together for $445-$600. After the war in the 1940s a 10-inch tabletop model from GE or RCA would cost $325, while Du Mont had a 20-inch model for $2495. The first color console models in the 1950s cost over $1000, while black & white televisions were now available for under $300. By the 1960s the price of color sets was cut in half and the average size of a television screen was 23 inches, while in the 1970s small black & white sets, which people were buying as second sets that could have in their kitchens, were under $100. After the actual invention of the television, the technological innovation that meant the most for viewers was the videocassette recorder (VCR), which was professionally introduced in 1956 and starting gaining mass market traction in 1975. The VCR allowed people to record analog audio and analog video from broadcast television (or other sources) on a removable, magnetic tape videocassette, and then play back the recording. This created the practice of time shifting, which became the first means that consumers had of controlling when they watched their television shows. It also meant that it was possible to watch one show while you taped another to play back and watch at a later time. In the early years of VCRs it was often necessary to use a splitter in order to watch Show A on your television set while simultaneously recording Show B. The cable would need to come out of the wall into a splitter: one branch would go to the VCR, while the second would go into a switch. Another cable coming out of the VCR would go into the other part of the switch, allowing you to control whether the video came from the VCR or through the TV. I had to set this system up for several colleagues, who were mystified by this particular process (Remember: Part of media literacy is being able to use the technology to get it to function properly). The second generation of VCRs had a button that would do the same thing without the need for splitters and switches, and my assistance was no longer required. Once consumers had video cassette recorders and could double the amount of prime-time programming they watched each night of the week (or triple it if they added another VCR to the equation), the television industry was able to take advantage of cable systems to import channels, whether "superstations" like TBS out of Atlanta or WGN in Chicago, or premium channels like HBO and Cinemax (which would air movies multiple times, giving customers ample opportunity to view it even without a VCR).

Arkansas Educational Television Commission v. Forbes, 523, U.S. 666 (1998)

During the 1992 race for Arkansas' Third Congressional District, the AETC (a state-owned television broadcaster) sponsored a debate between the major party candidates, excluding Ralph Forbes, an independent candidate with little popular support. The US Supreme Court ruled that a public television station's exclusion of a political candidate from its televised debate did not violate the First Amendment since the station-sponsored debate was a "nonpublic forum," which meant the exclusion of the candidate for reasonable and viewpoint-neutral reasons was allowed.

First-Run Syndication

First-run syndication is when a program is broadcast for the first time as a syndicated show. Such programs are usually created specifically to be sold directly into syndication. A few first-run syndicated series, most notably The Adventures of Superman and Mr. Ed, were picked up by networks in the 1950s and early 1960s. The success of Star Trek: The Next Generation as one of the most watched syndicated shows ever, saw an increase of such programs. Baywatch, cancelled after one season on NBC, became the most watched syndicated show on the planet.

Mystery

From police officers to private eyes to amateur sleuths, mystery shows have been an enduring television genre: Time. Most mystery shows take place in the present and are seen as being real as opposed to fantasy. There are exceptions in period pieces like The Untouchables or City of Angels, but they are relatively rare. The emphasis on the "real" is exemplified by the emergence of reality programming like Cops. Relationship to the Protagonist. Newcomb thought a major part of the appeal of mystery shows was that as audience members we see ourselves as being roughly similar to the protagonist. This allows us to try and solve the case along with the detective, which many mystery shows encourage viewers to do while they watch. Basic Structure. The basic premise of a mystery is that a crime has been committed (or is being proposed), which requires it to be solved (or stopped). Like the western, there are is a clear division between two traditions that come from the world of detective literature and films: 1. The Sherlock Holmes Tradition, where an orderly world is sent into chaos by a crime and it is up to the detective to restore order by using investigation, reason, and logic to solve the crime and make England safe once again; 2. The Sam Spade Tradition, where murders always seem to happen in either the world of the very rich or the dregs of society. A hard-boiled detective stands between their client and the ineffective police, and he is as likely to solve a problem with his fists or a gun as he is with his brain. The Hero. Very similar to the hero of the western, although usually lacking the official authority of being a member of the police department. Sometimes the hero functions as a father figure, and can also judge events because he sits as the moral center of the universe. Of course, today, it is entirely possible the hero is a heroine. Developing and Developed Strains. When Newcomb wrote he saw a specific set of four strains within the mystery genre, reflecting how other genres were having an impact in expanding the variety of mystery shows: 1. The Polite Mystery, evolved directly from the Sherlock Holmes Tradition and its emphasis on intellectual problem solving (The Mentalist, Elementary); 2. Violent Slapstick, evolved from the Sam Spade Tradition, where the emphasis was more on action (Hawaii-50, Lethal Weapon); 3. Police Documentary, a.k.a. "Copodoc," originally developed by Jack Webb with Dragnet and Adam One, that focused on the nuts and bolts of police procedure (Law & Order, Blue Bloods); 4. Mysteryture, where the protagonist is not a traditional detective, and helps the good guys by solving cases that manage to turn into some sort of adventure (Castle, MacGuyver). The Formula: Mysteries have a fairly straight-forward formula: (1) The discovery or observation of the crime; (2) the definition of the crime; (3) the protagonist is brought into the case; and (4) the protagonist searches for clues, pieces together the information, and solves the case. Most of the time that last step takes up virtually the entire episode, with the first three steps often taking place before the opening credits on a show like Law & Order.

Frist TV show to Rerun an Episode

I Love Lucy When television began most shows were performed live and in many cases were never recorded until networks needed to be able to rebroadcast their shows in the same time slot for audiences in the western half of the country. One of the first television series to record the original live performance for rebroadcasting at a later time was I Love Lucy. Although the network wanted the show to be produced in New York, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz insisted on staying in Hollywood and producing the show on film. After filming 39 episodes per season, the producers would repeat popular episodes for thirteen weeks in the summer time, which they were able to do only because they had filmed those episodes in the first place.

Extra Notes on Genre Section

If All in the Family is the most important television show in history with regards to contemporary programming because it was the one that allowed programming to become more mature, then it can be argued "Sometimes You Hear the Bullet" is the most important episode of television because it bridges the gaps between comedy and drama, allowing shows to be both. We can trace the television shows that are considered to be the best of all time—Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The Wire, Seinfeld, Hill Street Blues—back to All in the Family and "Sometimes You Hear the Bullet." There had been a time when it was easy to tell the difference between a comedy and a drama on television, because situation comedies and domestic comedies were a half-hour long, while dramas were hour long programs. But then shows like Moonlighting and Eight is Enough, as well as the current program Orange is the New Black, were hour long programs that were nominated for Emmy Awards as comedies. Moonlighting was clearly a Dramedy, combining a Mystery about private investigators with a Situation Comedy about a famous ex-model who ends up working with a wacky detective, both of whom speak a mile a minute. The proliferation of dramedies in television programming, as well as the way in which shows representing traditional genres have started incorporating elements from other genres, show how many we have come from the strictures of form Newcomb laid out over forty years ago.

Argument 2: The Colonization of Experience

If Mander's first argument talks about how human beings are being primed for the emergence of autocratic control, his second argument concerns the emergence of the controllers: "It is no accident that television has been dominated by a handful of corporate powers. Neither is it accidental that television has been used to re-create human beings into a new form that matches the artificial, commercial environment."23 For Mander, it was inevitable (and predictable) that television would be used and expanded by these corporate powers, pointing out that the technology permits no other controllers. A recent study Turner Broadcasting and Horizon Media partnered on with marketing-analytic company MarketShare meta-analyzed thousands of marketing optimizations used by major advertisers from 2009-2014. Isaac Weber, vice president of strategy at MarketShare declared the study found: "TV is the giant megaphone. When you want to get a message out, that's still really the most powerful means to do it. The way that people view and consume television has changed." Even though there has been a shift in ad dollars migrating from television to the Internet, advertisers still get more of an impact on television.24 Of the $187 billion spent on advertising in the United States in 2015, television advertising had the biggest slice of the pie at 42 percent (nearly $79 billion), which put it nearly $30 billion ahead of digital (28 percent, or $52.8 billion), with print in third place (15 percent, or $28 billion).25 Mander sees a symbiotic relationship between advertising and television: advertising financed television growth while television provided advertising with the greatest delivery system ever invented. Adding insult to injury, Mander emphasizes that advertising exists only to convince people to buy what they do not need (Mander argues that "Whatever people do need they will find without advertising if it is available").

Newcomb TV Genres Intro

In 1974, Horace Newcomb authored TV: The Most Popular Art, in which he established the dominant genres of television programming: Situation Comedy, Domestic Comedy, Westerns, Mysteries, Professional Shows (Medical and Law), Adventure Shows, Soap Opera, News/Sports Documentary, and the News Show. This list should look a bit dated to your eyes, mainly because Westerns are extremely rare on contemporary television. But you should not only be able to recognize examples of each of these genres today, you should also have a sense for how shows like The Amazing Race have expanded the Adventure genre to include many reality competition shows. For each of these genres Newcomb came up with a set of defining elements. Domestic comedies would have sets that provided a sense of place for the family and try to resolve problems as kids grow up. Westerns are set in the past on the frontier, in a world where good has to defeat evil. Audiences want to feel that they are like the protagonists solving crimes in a Mystery. Adventure shows are predicated on motion and enjoy a flexibility of plot that allows them to be a Mystery one week and a Situation Comedy the next, while Soap Operas have a complicated type of action where any incident launches a chain-effect of complications for a whole bunch of characters. One of Newcomb's premises was that these genres undergo gradual evolution, and in the history of television programming since he wrote his book we can clearly see how elements from one genre have started to show up in other genres. We also have shows that combine dramas, an idea we will explore more when we look at the concept of Dramedy, but next we are going to look at the dramatic genres Newcomb established in more depth.

Jerry Mander

Jerry Mander worked in advertising for fifteen years where at first he was amused, dazzled, and fascinated by the possibility of speaking through media directly into the heads of people and leaving images that could cause them to do something that might otherwise never have thought to do. However, in the end Mander was horrified by what television, advertising, and most mass media were doing to the world. So in 1977 he wrote a book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Now, clearly the medium of television is not going to disappear from the face of the earth. But in keeping with McLuhan's dictum to know the consequences of using a particular media, Mander's arguments are certainly worth considering even after several decades. Mander found that television was not only replacing experience, but also providing the unification of experience as "80 million viewers were sitting separately in dark rooms engaged in exactly the same activity at the same time: watching television."18 Ultimately, Mander stands in opposition to Marshall McLuhan's embrace of technology. While McLuhan celebrated how television had everybody vibrating to the same electronic drumbeat, Mander charged McLuhan with failing to help us become conscious of three critical facts: "1) it was only one drumbeat, 2) this drum could be played only by a handful of players, 3) the identity of the players was determined by the technology itself." Instead of studying the effects of the "new phenomena which was capable of unifying everyone within a new, reconstructed experience," Mander observed that everyone with a message to deliver began a war to control television and it use. Dismissing the idea of television as neutral technology as an illusion, Mander laid out four arguments for why television should be eliminated.

Syndication

Licensing broadcast rights for television/radio programs to multiple television/radio stations directly rather than through a broadcast network. In broadcasting, syndication refers to the licensing of broadcast rights for television and radio programs by multiple television and radio stations, without going through a broadcast network. This reflects both the ability to bypass the major networks to produce television programming and a key way in which those networks can make more money off the shows they have already produced. Is more common in the United States than the rest of the world, although shows can be syndicated internationally. There are three specific types of syndication: first-run, off-network, and public broadcasting

Argument 3: The Effects of Television on Human Beings

Mander also addressed what is the primary concern of critics of television with regards to both the psychological and physiological effects it has on viewers, concerns that go beyond simply turning people into couch potatoes. Mander's perspective, in line with the rest of his book, focuses on how television's effects reinforce its ability to deliver viewers to advertisers: Television technology produces neuro-physiological responses in the people who watch it. It may create illness, it certainly produces confusion and submission to external imagery. Taken together, the effects of this technology amount to conditioning for autocratic control. The effects television has on human beings fits perfectly with the purposes of those in control of the medium. While Mander's book related anecdotal reports of people who described feeling sick, crazy, or mesmerized when they watched television, there are numerous contemporary studies that lend credence to the idea that watching television is harmful to your health. A 2010 study of 1,300 Canadian children found that increased viewing time at two years was associated with lower levels of classroom engagement, poor achievement in mathematics, reduced physical activity, and an increase in body mass index.27 Another study, begun in the 1980s, looked at 2,600 children ages 1-3 and found the more television children watch the more likely they are to suffer from attention-span deficit by the age of 7: every hour of television they watched increased the risk of attention problems by nearly 10 percent. Watching television stimulates only the visual and auditory areas of a baby's brain. The regions corresponding to essential functions such as understanding language, learning, thinking, memory, and social behavior remain inactive. Research indicates that prolonged exposure to rapidly changing pictures, especially during the critical period of brain development, preconditions the mind to expect and demand high levels of stimulation. In other words, television conditions the brain to expect a reality that does not exist.29 A young child's brain is designed to engage with the physical world, and even with an imaginary one, and not with technology that provides a passive view of the world requiring neither brain activity nor imagination. Rather than watching television, toddlers should be reading and singing, engaging in role-play and fantasy play, all of which require cognitive skills and which help their brains develop the way nature intended, stimulating all areas of their brains. MOST RELEVANT ONE

Off-Network Syndication

Off-network syndication refers to the licensing of a program originally run on network television (or in some cases first-run syndication) to be rerun. The rule of thumb is that once a series has 100 episodes (a mark usually reached in a show's fifth season given the standard run of 20-22 episodes per season), it is viable for syndication. For example, Nick at Night paid $500,000 per episode to run episode of Friends after 6 p.m. EST for six years through the Fall of 2017, while TBS was paying $275,00 per episode during the same period but restricted to airings before 6 p.m. ET after the first year. Today, the cash license fees for Friends have earned over $1 billion.13 But even if a show was not profitable during its first run, success in syndication can cover production costs and help it earn a profit.

Professional

Originally this genre was called Doctor/Lawyer by Newcomb, but while those remain the dominant examples of what I am now calling the Professional genre, it has expanded to look at other occupations, such as journalism (Lou Grant, The Newsroom) and politics (The West Wing, Madame Secretary): "Real" Protagonists. Whether we are watching doctors, lawyers, reporters, or Presidents of the United States, the protagonists on these programs are seen as being real representative of their professions. It is not unusual for the stars of successful television series who play doctors or lawyers to address conventions of actual doctors or lawyers to talk about their "shared" profession. "Real" Problems. Likewise, the plot lines on these shows usually reflect realistic issues that people in these professions deal with on a regular basis. It is not surprising to see plots based on real world events that many viewers will recognize as such, despite the disclaimers to the contrary such episodes invariably carry. "Real" Relationships. Newcomb used this element to focus on how people in these professions have realistic interactions that run the gamut from anger and rejection to joy and acceptance. The new surgical interns on Grey's Anatomy, learning their profession from their mentors, competing with each other, and dealing with patients are all presented as being just like what "real" doctors have to do with other doctors, nurses, and patients. The focus is on purely professional relationships, so Meredith Grey's personal relationships--romantic with Derek Shepherd, friendship with her "person" Christina Yang, or family with her mother Ellis Grey--would all be covered under domestic drama or soap opera. This element is just for professional issues, not personal ones. The Mentor Mentality. A variation on the well-known father figure, there is often an older colleague who trains and guides the younger professional through the ins and outs of the job. On long running medical shows like E.R. and Grey's Anatomy, young interns like John Carter and Meredith Grey eventually become residents with their own interns to train.

Combining Genres

Over time the elements associated with one particular television genre started to show up in programs representing other genres. This practice probably began with Adventure shows, where the flexibility of the plot allowed virtually any type of plot from situation comedy to murder-mystery to be employed. All in the Family was clearly a situation comedy, but it also dealt with issues such as miscarriage and rape, that were decidedly not being played for laughs. One of the biggest developments was when Hill Street Blues incorporated the open-ended format of the soap opera, where storylines were not resolved at the end of the episode but could carry over week after week. For a particular program to represent a specific genre it needs to meet most, but not necessarily all, of the elements that define it. Contemporary westerns like Longmire and Yellowstone clearly do not take place in the distant past at a time that meets that particular element in Newcomb's Western genre. But they meet all of the other elements of that genre. When a particular program contains elements from another genre the initial question is whether it meets most of the elements from that second genre. Lots of shows use the visual transition element from situation comedies, without meeting the definition for any other sit com element. Similarly, many series have the open-ended plots of the soap opera without using any of the other elements from that genre. In terms of contemporary television programming, there are four ways of combining multiple genres: 1. Genre with Variation(s) 2. Comedy Hybrid 3. Dramatic Hybrid 4. Dramedy

Public Broadcasting Syndication

Public broadcasting syndication applies to the parallel service provided to member stations of the PBS and a handful of independent public broadcasting stations. Whereas network television sets up a nightly schedule of programming for its affiliates, local PBS stations can determine their own schedules and rebroadcast each other's programs in more of a smorgasbord approach. When presumably every PBS station in the colonies was airing Downton Abbey, those stations also had the opportunity to air Manor of Speaking, a talk show devoted to Downton Abbey produced by Houston Public Media that was broadcast immediately afterwards (in the same way that Talking Dead follows The Walking Dead on AMC). Manor of Speaking aired on Duluth's PBS station WDSE during the penultimate season of Downton Abbey, but not during the final season, when the station aired a new series, Mercy Street instead.

Final Point About Television Genres

Shows can evolve over the course of their history Ex: When the television version of M*A*S*H debuted in 1972 it was very much a traditional situation comedy, following a team of doctors and support staff at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War. Developed by Larry Gelbart, and adapted from the 1970 feature film, which was based on the 1968 novel by Richard Hooker, the show's original writing staff included Laurence Marks, who wrote 28 episodes of M*A*S*H after having penned 68 episodes for Hogan's Heroes, another CBS sitcom that was actually set in a German prisoner of war camp during World War II, that had ended a six-year run in 1971. At the start, M*A*S*H was clearly cut from the same sort of cloth (one critic labeled it "Hawkeye's Heroes"). That changed with the airing of the show's 17th episode.

Comedy Hybrid

Since there are only two comedy genres, a comedy is a combination of a situation comedy and a domestic comedy. A prime example of this would be Home Improvement, which was a situation comedy when Tim Taylor was at work on Tool Time, but a domestic comedy when he was at home with his family. Any show that takes place in both the workplace and the home is likely to be a comedy hybrid, but there are not a lot of shows that do that which is why the comedy hybrid is the combination for which there are the least number of examples in contemporary programming.

Motives for Using VCRs

Studied by Alan M. Rubin and Charles Bantz in 1989 1. Library storage of movies and shows 2. Watching music videos 3. Using exercise tapes 4. Renting movies 5. Letting children view 6. Time shifting 7. Socializing by viewing with others 8. Critical viewing including TV watching and studying tapes The study revealed that time shifting activities actually enhanced interpersonal communication when the purpose of timing viewing schedules allowed more family members to watch a program together. You could decide whether you wanted to buy your favorite movies or record them yourself or just rent them from a local video store. A whole market of exercise video tapes by Jane Fonda opened up a market for customers who wanted to find a work out they liked that they could watch and use on their own schedule. So the advent of the videocassette recorder meant more than just time-shifting for people watching television.

Post-Script Babble

The 1976 black comedy Network told the story of Howard Beale, a television news anchor for the fictional UBS network. The film's opening narration, written by Paddy Chayefsky, tells us: "In his time, Howard Beale had been a mandarin of television, the grand old man of news, with a HUT (Homes Using Television) rating of 16 and a 28 audience share. In 1969, however, he fell to a 22 share, and by 1972, he was down to a 15 share. In 1973, his wife died, and he was left a childless widower with an 8 rating and a 12 share." When UBS decides to fire Beale, he announces on the evening news that his work was really the only thing going for him and he will blow his brains out on the air in a week, which should give the network plenty of time to promote the show (he predicts they will get a 40 share). The frantic network fires Beale, but the following night he walks in out of a rain storm, is put on the air, and begins a massive rant about the meaningless of life, climaxing when he orders his viewers to stick their heads out of their windows and yell, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" When people around the country start doing exactly that, the UBS Evening News is transformed into The Howard Beale Show, where every night Beale plays the role of "an angry prophet denouncing the hypocrisies of our time."

Radio Corporation of America v. United States, 341 U.S. 412 (1951)

The Federal Communications Commission only gave its approval to broadcast in color to CBS, the only one of the companies racing to develop color television deemed qualified (the other two companies were RCA and Color Television, Inc.). The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of FCC and CBS finding the question of the technological qualifications had been carefully considered. The ability of the FCC to determine the standards for broadcasting technology was affirmed.

Nielsen Ratings

The Nielsen company began measuring radio tune-ins in 1936 and in 1950 developed a rating system based on the methods developed for measuring radio audiences. Today, the company uses "audio measurement," a combination of listener panels and electronic measurement technology to measure listeners, however they tune in." Nielsen measures book sales, retail sales, social television, online, mobile, and music sales, as well as global consumer confidence.8 Nielsen ratings are most identified with measuring television audiences, a point of pride with the company: And there's a big reason why Nielsen is synonymous with television audience measurement. We invented it. Since day one, we've offered the media industry the expertise it needs to make the best marketing decisions possible. Today, our expansive and representative television measurement services capture video viewing across all screens: television, computers, and mobile devices. National and local TV ratings help media companies and brands decide how to spend the over $800 billion on TV advertising in the United States alone. Ratings are only one of the audience measurement services we provide.9 The two most commonly cited Nielsen results are ratings points and share (often reported in the press as "ratings points/share." Ratings Point—the percentage of television sets in the country that are turned to a particular program. Share—the percentage of television sets in use that are turned to a particular program. If there are 200 million households in the United States with televisions (whether they are turned on or not), and 50 million are watching Thursday Night Football, then the program has a 25 rating (50 million divided by 200 million). If only 150 million of those households are actually watching television at that time, then the program would earn a 33 share (50 million divided by 150 million). This means the share will always be higher than the ratings, because there will always be television sets that are turned off. In 2017 it was estimated there were 118.4 million television households in the United States, including televisions that receive content over the Internet. A single national ratings point represents 1 percent of that total number of households in the 2016-17 season.

Quiz Show Scandal of the late 1950s

The quiz show scandal of the late 1950s showed that laws and regulations could not keep up with the rapid growth of television as a new technology. The Federal Communications Act of 1934 had dealt with the advertising, fair competition, and labeling of broadcast stations, and there were no specific laws that made it illegal for producers to fix their quiz shows. In the wake of the scandal and Congressional investigation, a law was passed prohibiting the fixing of game shows, but no one ever went to prison for rigging the shows. The few individuals who were prosecuted were charged with obstruction of justice or perjury for having attempted to cover up their actions. What was established was a pattern of laws and regulations reacting to problems rather than anticipating them with regards to television broadcasting.

Shift from Analog to Digital Television

The shift away from analog television is the other major technological development in the history of television since the invention and proliferation of the VCR. The problem with analog television was that electronic noise and interference with the transmission signal were reproduced by the receiver, with weak signals showing up as "snowy" (random flickers of dots or "snow"). The development of digital television represented the first significant evolution in television technology itself since color television emerged in the 1950s. The key to this development was the availability of inexpensive, high-performance computers, which made digital television a real possibility in the 1990s. The involvement of the FCC became crucial, because the commission declared that there had to be a genuine HDTV signal with at least twice the resolution of existing television images, and also insisted that viewers who did not wish to buy new digital television sets would still be able to receive conventional television broadcasts. The Digital Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005 mandated full-power broadcasting of analog television would cease after February 17, 2009. To help with the conversion, the Act also established a federally sponsored DTV Converter Box Coupon Program that would allow consumers to purchase converter boxes to provide over-the-air television viewers with an affordable way to continue receiving free digital over-the-air television services after the transition to digital transmission. When the FCC did not require a single standard for scanning formats, aspect ratios, or lines of resolution, the consumer electronics industry and the computer industry were able to debate which of the two scanning processes (interlaced or progression) was superior. A key aspect of digital television is that it can support more than one program in the same channel bandwidth because digital channels take up less bandwidth. This is why your DVR can record two shows at the same time while you watch a different program that you had recorded previously. It is also why you can also access electronic program guides and additional languages (spoken and/or subtitled) while you watch a program. Bruce Springsteen sang about "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)" back in 1992. Today when I check my cable television schedule there are 660 channels available in my area. That number includes both HD and SD/HD version of all of the local broadcast stations along with SD and HD versions of most of hundreds of imported stations from A&E to Willow TV. But, still, that is hundreds of stations available on digital television as compared to when I was your age and on analog television there was ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and if you lived in a big enough town an independent station or two. Has this affected how much television we watch each day? According to Nielsen, the average American watched more than 5 hours of live television every day, plus another 32 minutes a day on time-shifted television. However, people 65 or older watch an average of more than 7 hours a day, at which point radio listening, which also increases through most of our lives, drops off significantly at age 65 (probably because radio stations do not program—or advertise—for seniors). Add to that television viewing an hour using the Internet on a computer, an hour and 7 minutes on a Smartphone, and 2 hours and 46 minutes listening to the radio. Nielsen also reports that African Americans watch an average of 218 hours of television a month, whites watch 155.3 hours, Hispanics an average of 123.2 hours, and Asian Americans an average of 92.3 hours a month.

Situation Comedy

The situation comedy is one of the simplistic of the television genre forms and one of the first to become a staple of prime television, due in no small part to the success of I Love Lucy. For each television genre, Newcomb defined a number of characteristics that serve to define it. Physical elements. During the Vaudeo Era the often slap-stick nature of situation comedy demanded an open, sweeping set which allowed for fast movement by the actors. Think of Monica and Rachel's apartment on Friends, which matches perfectly the "livingroom-kitchen-door-leading-elsewhere" arrangement that Newcomb identified in 1974. I Love Lucy had the large living room of Lucy and Ricky's apartment, with their bedroom through the door to the left, the door to the hallway in the middle, and the kitchen thorough the door to the right (which also had a door that Fred and Ethel could walk through if the action was in the kitchen instead of in the living room). Visual transitions. Newcomb noticed that in sitcoms the visual transitions were done in such a way as to ignore the existence of the outside world. This meant that if a character left one place they would arrive in the other in the next scene. In between there might be an establishing shot of the second location (think of the shot of Jerry and Kramer's apartment building with the bass guitar riff playing on Seinfeld). Today we would not think of this as being a significant element, mainly because we take it for granted that most of the time on a television show when characters travel from one place to another we are not usually going to watch them make the journey (unless that becomes part of the story, as when the Ricardos and Mertzes decide to drive across the country so Ricky can make a movie in Hollywood). Economic elements. The protagonists in situation comedies have traditionally been middle to upper middle class. Newcomb recognized that the time in which he was writing was one in which a number of social and political movements had combined to challenge that tradition, so that Archie Bunker on All in the Family worked on a loading dock, Laverne & Shirley worked capping bottles in a brewery, and Alice was a waitress. But regardless of this shift, what remained important was that a lack of money was only used as the premise for establish a humorous situation, and not as some sort of social commentary. Characters. The leading characters in a sitcom are usually clean, young, pretty and healthy. If not, then there is some comic reason for a particular character to violate the norm. Traditionally, the characters are never under profound stress, dealing with any potentially traumatic situation with a smile and a laugh, although All in the Family and other shows have changed this (as we shall see in the Dramedy section). Newcomb identified two major types of supporting characters on sitcoms. First, there are primary foils, with Fred and Ethel Mertz on I Love Lucy being classic examples as characters whose primary function is to play straight man to the leads. Second, there are texture types, so that when Lucy and Ethel go work at a chocolate factory there has to be a factory foreman to assign them a task and a candy dipper to show Lucy how the job is supposed to be done. It is important to recognize that interpersonal relationships have to remain pretty constant in the world of the situation comedy. Lucy cannot suddenly because suave and coordinated anymore than Ricky can lose his accent or that Ethel can be even more hapless than Lucy or Fred can stop being a cheap skinflint. Even if the fundamental situation changes, such as with the on again, on a "break" again, romantic relationship between Ross and Rachel on Friends, what is important is that the characters remain the same. Again, when characters actually do evolve over time, such as was the case on M*A*S*H where the comic relief characters of "Hot Lips" Houlihan and Major Winchester were turned into real people capable of having touching moments of pathos, we have moved beyond the situation comedy into Dramedy. Improbability. In the world of the situation comedy the impossible always happens. If an episode is entitled "Lucy and the Loving Cup" and Ricky has a giant trophy that he is supposed to present to a jockey, then of course Lucy will get it stuck on her head (Why? Because Ricky had disapproved of her new hat, so of course she stuck the trophy on her head instead). Furthermore, as an extension of this idea, the natural or logical method of resolving the situation is never employed. Plot or Action Structure. Newcomb was leery of using the word "plot" to describe a situation comedy, saying that plot was probably most conspicuous by its absence. Instead he found that the story was always dependent on the situation, and that what happened this week was never affected by what happened previously (Lucy would always try to break into show business with disastrous results). The action structure (or plot) of a situation comedy can be broken down into four predictable steps: 1. The establishment of the situation. 2. The complication of the situation. 3. The confusion of the situation. 4. The alleviation of both the complication and the confusion. In the end, the resolution takes all of the characters back to the beginning again, essentially resetting the situation so that the same formula can be employed in next week's episode. Underlying Premises. Finally, Newcomb found that the situation comedy usually affirmed three premises. First, no out acts out of malice, because that would take the fun out of the situation. Second, no matter how bad things get, everything come out alright in the end. Third, everything ends with a joke.

Dramedy

The term "Dramedy" was first coined to describe the wave of late 1980s shows such as Frank's Place, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, Hooperman, and Doogie Howser, M.D.. But in retrospect television critics also applied the term to show like All in the Family and M*A*S*H that combined laughter (comedy) and tears (drama). However, for our purposes a dramedy is a genre hybrid that represents a combination of a specific comedy genre (situation or domestic) and a specific dramatic genre. Doogie Howser, M.D., with its teenage doctor, was a combination of a domestic comedy and a professional (medical) show.

Vaudeo Era (1948-1957)

The term "Vaudeo" is a combination of "vaudeville" and "video." Actually, where most early television shows came from was not vaudeville, but the radio, which had been providing weekly episodic comedies, dramas, and musical variety shows for decades. Dozens of radio programs were turned into television shows. There were also shows that exploited the new medium's visual possibilities such as I'd Like to See It and You Asked for It, as well as Pantomime Quiz. Many of the genres we would recognize today were developed during these early years. There were Comedy Variety shows, such as Texaco Star Theater on NBC with Milton Berle and Your Show of Shows starring Sid Caesar, and Musical Variety shows, such as Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts and The Original Amateur Hour. Early Situation Comedies emphasized broadly played physical comedy, represented by Jackie Gleason's Honeymooners and television's first smash hit situation comedy, I Love Lucy. Defining Show: I Love Lucy (1951-1957, CBS). In its first season, I Love Lucy finished #1 with a 67.3 rating, the highest in history. During its six seasons the show ranked first for four years, second once, and third once, average a 52.7 rating over its run. The show was so important that stores changed their hours on Monday night to avoid competing with the zany redhead. The premise was not exactly new: wacky wife Lucy MacGillicuddy Ricardo (Lucille Ball, the Queen of Television to Milton Berle's King) makes life difficult for her loving but perpetually irritated husband and minor celebrity Cuban bandleader Ricky Ricardo (Ball's real-life husband, Desi Arnaz). Friends and landlords Fred and Ethel Mertz (William Frawley and Vivian Vance) provide partisan support in this battle of the sexes. Ricky wants Lucy to be a simple housewife, but she dreams of being in show business. The show has been aired continuously ever since it debuted where Lucy continues to be knee-deep in grapes at an Italian vineyard, having William Holden light her fake nose on fire, stuffing chocolates down her blouse as they stream down a conveyer belt, and becoming drunker and drunker as she flubs take after take of a commercial for that infamous 23 percent alcohol elixir "Vitameatavegamin." It is not surprising that I Love Lucy was the first show elected to the Television Academy of Arts and Science's Hall of Fame. During this same period there were Family Shows full of warm, homey values, that became some of the longest running series: The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet (14 seasons), The Danny Thomas Show (Make Room for Daddy) (13), and Father Knows Best (9). Disneyland was responsible for the coonskin cap craze sweeping the nation because of its episodes of "The Adventures of Davy Crockett." Then there was "serious" television represented by dramatic anthology series, which offered a different televised play with a new cast each week. Playhouse 90 had several dramas that went on to become theatrical films, including Requiem for a Heavyweight, The Miracle Worker, The Days of Wine and Roses, and Judgment at Nuremberg. The most watched series episode of the era was the guest appearance of Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, which drew 60 million viewers and earned a record 82.6 household share.But shows like I Love Lucy and Dragnet, that were being filmed in Hollywood rather than being televised live from New York, caused a shift in production from the east coast to the west, where Hollywood studios took advantage of being able to film outside.

Westerns

The western genre arrived on television in the fullest form, having been clearly established by hundreds of movies with John Wayne and Gary Cooper, and Saturday morning serials with Tom Mix and Hopalong Cassidy: Time. The western is usually set in the past, most often after the Civil War, in the latter half of the 19th century. However, there have been examples of this genre that take place before the American Revolution (Daniel Boone), where the "west" is the eastern territory of Kentucky, and in the 20th century (Hec Ramsey, McCloud). Place. The setting for the western is the frontier, the cutting edge of civilization where gunslingers, rustlers, bandits, and Indians are all threats to the good folks of Dodge City. Geographically this usually means states west of the Mississippi River, with Texas, Arizona and Kansas as particularly popular states to serve as the location for a western television series, while some, like Wagon Train and Rawhide, moved across several states. Attitude. In the classic western there is a clear distinction between good and evil, where wearing a white hat versus a black hat is a clear clue. This is a world where there is right and there is wrong (both carry a gun, but right usually wears a badge), and situational ethics have no place Character. The hero is the central character in the western genre, personified by Sheriff Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke. This is a man who fights savagery and brings order, although Newcomb claimed he was tainted by the very savagery he fought against because he wears and uses a gun. Program Formats. The movies provided two distinct formats for television westerns: 1. The Traditional Western where the good guy defeats the bad guy, represented by The Lone Ranger; and 2. The Adult Western where the notion of moral doubt is introduced, represented by High Noon and Shane. The hero is still the moral leader of the community, but is flawed and capable of making mistakes. If the traditional western is a black and white world, then the adult western is shades of grey. The western genre, which was the dominant programming genre for the late 1950s, has faced extinction several times in recent decades. Today, westerns are more likely to be sent in the present (Justified, Longmire), where an old style hero butts heads with the modern world. An argument could be made that it has been replaced by science fiction shows that trade the past for the future and the old west for outer space (or combined in Westworld). The question would then be if there are defining attitudes and characters that would define such a genre as well.

Genre with Variation(s)

Three of these four categories are shows that clearly combine two of Newcomb's genres. But, if a show meets most of the elements from one genre but includes one or two other elements from other genres without meeting all of the elements from those genres, then it would be a genre with variation. Grey's Anatomy is a professional show about doctors, but those doctors have romantic and relationship issues that are usually found in the problem resolution element of the domestic drama but none of the other elements of that genre, making it a professional show with a domestic drama variation. Obviously, if a show can have elements from two different genres it can have elements from more than two genres. An adventure show can have situation comedy visual transitions, open-ended soap opera plots, and a hero with a "real" protagonist who represents a specific profession. But as long as the show does not meet most of the elements for any of those other genres it remains a genre with variation.

Soap Opera

When Newcomb wrote his book, soap operas were almost exclusively the province of daytime programming, with prime time shows like Peyton Place the rare exception. Then, in the early 1980s with Dallas and Dynasty the soap opera genre exploded in prime-time. Today, the biggest legacy of this particular genre might be that the vast majority of contemporary programming offers an open, rather than episodic format where everything is wrapped up at the end of the hour: Real Time. The day time soap opera takes place in the closest thing that television dramas have to "real time" (24 being the obvious exception). A single "day" on a soap opera can take up several weeks worth of episodes. Situations are never going to be resolved at the end of the hour, so faithful viewers have to come back the next day, and the day after that, and however long it takes to resolve a particular plot point. Character Mosaic. Different actors and actresses are often used to play the same character over the history of a show. A new face can replace a character literally overnight without most viewers batting an eye because what is important is the story. Additionally, as characters grow old, an aging ingénue will move on to be a working woman or a new mom and a new ingénue will take her place. The mosaic of characters stays intact. Physical Sets: Newcomb describes soap opera sets are being scant enough to be considered symbolic. A wood panel room can be a den in someone's home or the office of a doctor or lawyer, just by adding a few choice decor items. As such shows became more successful and started becoming part of the prime time lineup, the dressing of these sets became more complex, making this an element that fallen into relative insignificance today. Action. Soap operas rarely have any physical action, Instead the emphasis is on conversation. However, Newcomb included in this notion of action the interactions that occur between plot and subplot, wherein a character being hit in the head could have myriad repercussions for other story lines because that character ends up with amnesia, so they do not remember if they killed the dead body there were found with in self-defense or cold blood, or that they have forgotten their wife and family when they fall in love with the nurse who is taking care of them at the hospital. This is where the idea of a continuing story line that carries over from episode to episode, week after week, comes into play.

Top-Rated Television Programs of All Time

#1: M*A*S*H (last episode), CBS

Time Spent Watching TV (Age)

1. 65+: 50 hours and 34 min. 2. 50-64 3. 35-49 4. 25-34 5. 2-11 6. 18-24 7. 12-17: 20 hours and 41 min.

Newcomb Genres

1. Situation Comedy 2. Domestic Comedy/Domestic Drama 3. Westerns 4. Mystery 5. Adventure 6. Professional 7. Soap Opera 8. Combining Genres

Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

1. The Mediation of Experience 2. The Colonization of Experience 3. The Effects of Television on Human Beings 4. The Inherent Biases of Television

Chapter 10 Timeline

1. 1884 PRECURSOR: In Germany, Paul Nipkow patents the Nipkow disk, which he calls an "electrical telescope." Also known as a scanning disk, this mechanical, rotating, image scanning device would be a fundamental component in television sets through the 1920s and 1930s 2. 1927 INVENTION: Television is invented by Philo T. Farnsworth, who sends the image of a dollar sign across his apartment in San Francisco in the first electronic wireless transmission of an image. Farnsworth applies for a patent for what he calls the Image Dissector (which would have made for a lousy acronym). 3. 1939 DEVELOPMENT: Commercial television is introduced at the New York World's Fair by RCA. The opening ceremony with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and events at the fair were televised. Visitors could see themselves on television and were given a card documenting the event and could send an RCA Radiogram to friends back home as well. 4. 1948 MATURITY: Milton Berle, the host of NBC's Texaco Star Theater, becomes the first major American television star, known to millions as "Uncle Miltie" and "Mr. Television" during TV's Golden Age. Berle is said to have sold more television sets than any advertising campaign ever could have. 5. 1951 CBS launches I Love Lucy, a situation comedy that would prove to be one of TV's most durable types of entertainment programs. Stars Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz have 100 percent ownership of their show and pioneer the rights to residuals. 6. 1958 Charles Van Doren wins $129,000 over fifteen weeks on the quiz show Twenty One (NBC). It is then revealed that not only had Van Doren been given the answers, but he had been coached on how to appear as if he was straining to think of them. Other quiz shows turn out to also be rigged and President Dwight D. Eisenhower calls the entire matter "a terrible thing to do to the American people." In the wake of the scandal, quiz shows virtually disappeared from prime-time television or were replaced by game shows, and networks became exhibiting stronger control over programming and production. 7. 1963 Network television provides nonstop coverage of the assassination and funeral of President Kennedy. Don Hewitt, executive producer of the CBS Evening News, later said: "Americans went to church in front of their television sets. That weekend we got the assignment we never asked for—ministering to the country in times of national trauma. JFK. Martin Luther King. Bobby Kennedy. The shuttle disaster. From that day on, if . . . a plane is taken hostage or there's a baby in a well, the country goes to their television. And it started that day in Dallas." 8. 1966 The major networks start broadcasting all of their prime-time programming in color. 9. 1969 The largest television audience of all time (at that time) tunes in for the first Moon landing. American astronaut Neil Armstrong stars in the first international television event. 10. 1972 Time Inc. launches Home Box Office (HBO), the first premium cable channel, airing the 1971 movie, Sometimes a Great Notion, starring Paul Newman and Henry Fonda, transmitted to 325 subscribers in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. 11. 1985 FOX becomes the first national television network to be launched since the beginning of the industry. 12. 2006 Amazon Video, an internet video on demand (VOD) service, offering television shows and films for rental or purchase, begins operating in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Austria, and Germany. Selected titles are offered for free to customers with an Amazon Prime subscription.

Extra Nielsen Rating Info

In the early 1980s Dallas was beating Dynasty ever year in the Nielsen ratings, finishing #1 overall in three of four seasons, and then in the summer of 1985 ABC figured out a way to give its show a boost: they stopped airing summer reruns of Dynasty. The ratings numbers for reruns were always significantly lower than the numbers for first-run episodes, especially for a prime-time soap opera. So when Dallas aired summer reruns and Dynasty did not, the #1 show's average rating for the entire season took a dip and Dynasty claimed the top spot. Of course, Dallas followed suit the next season. Today, the ratings pie is no longer divided into three parts by the three major networks. In 2016 there was a record 455 scripted series on television, up from 409 in 2015 and 376 in 2014 and more than double the number of such series in 2009.10 This is a staggering number of television shows when you take into account that 455 number does not include news, sports, reality, made-for-TV movies, or specials, let along daytime or children's programming. Those 455 scripted series break down into 93 from online services, 145 from broadcast networks, 36 from pay cable, and 181 from basic cable. The more networks there are the more television series there are to watch, or should we say not to watch, as the competition fragments the television viewing audience more and more. I Love Lucy had the all-time Nielsen rating high at 67.3 in 1952-53, and the next year was the last series to earn a rating above 50 at 58.8. In 1959-60 Gunsmoke was the last series to break 40 at 40.3, The Cosby Show was the last to break 30 at 33.7 in 1986-87, and Seinfeld was the last to break 20 at 21.7. Sunday Night Football might be the last series to make double digits finishing on top with a 10.9 rating for the 2018-19 season (the final season of The Big Bang Theory was at 10.6). Here is another statistic that indicates the degree to which the television audience today is fragmented. In 1999, 21 of the year's 100 most-watched shows were sports. In 2009 that number jumped to 44. In 2019, that number was 93. All eleven NFL playoff game, both the college football and basketball championship games. and the final two games of the NBA Finals made it to double-digits compared to only two regular programs that year (one of which was Sunday Night Football). The line between failure and success for new television series is razor thin these days. Longmire was the most successful program on A&E, so it was a surprise when the series was cancelled after its third season in 2014. Speculation was that A&E executives were looking to produce their own programming, which would give them a larger profit margin than if someone else was producing the show. Another explanation was that Longmire's audience was too old and advertisers wanted a show with younger viewers. Either way, clearly some low ratings are better than other low ratings.11 Longmire continued on Netflix, where what matters in the battle to be the dominant online platform for delivering movies and television programming is the number of subscribers, since there are no advertisers to be concerned about audience demographics. In the fall of 2015, ABC's new series Blood & Oil premiered with a 1.4 rating, which translated to 6.36 million viewers. Add to that 2.63 digital video recorder (DVR) viewers and you get a grand total of 8.99 million viewers. But by December the show's rating was down to 0.8, representing less than 5 million viewers. Blood & Oil was cut from 13 to 10 episodes, and then cancelled. Meanwhile, another ABC series, Quantico was quickly renewed for a second season.

Argument 1: The Mediation of Experience

In the early days of television, there was an emphasis on showing people sitting in the comforts of their homes, eating those new-fangled television dinners in their living rooms off of TV trays, things they had never seen before. The celebrated moment on the first episode of the aptly-named CBS show See It Now when Edward R. Murrow showed America live shots of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans on a pair of monitors in the control room of Studio 41, made it clear that television allowed viewers to experience the world in a new way. For Mander, the key was paying attention to how human beings had moved from experiencing nature directly, living out in the wild, to living in the constructed artificial environment of the modern city: As humans have moved into totally artificial environments, our direct contact with and knowledge of the planet has been snapped. Disconnected, like astronauts floating in space, we cannot know up from down or truth from fiction. Conditions are appropriate for the implantation of arbitrary realities. Television is one recent example of this, a serious one, since it greatly accelerates the problem. Mander's argument is not really about television itself, but about an evolutionary process wherein human beings have moved from living and experiencing the natural world to constructing an artificial environment. Mander warns: "We have all been moved into such a narrow and deprived channel of experience that a dangerous instrument like television can come along and seem useful, interesting, sane and worthwhile at the same time it further boxes people into the physical and mental condition appropriate for the emergence of autocratic control." We understand that talking on the telephone is mediated communication. Fifty years ago all you could do was hear the voice of the person at the other end of the "line" (telephones were literally connected by telephone lines). But today you can use "FaceTime" and see the person you can talk to, just like the comic strip character Dick Tracy was able to do when the detective's two-way wrist radio became a two-way wrist TV. But even then, you are limited to what the camera on your cell phone can see. Your conversation is mediated. Television provides a similar type of mediation of experience, one that is indirect rather than direct, and subject to the control of others as to what we see and how we see it. One of the striking characteristics of the television is that it gives the illusion of face-to-face relationships with performers. Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl suggest that the mass media have created a new form of social interaction, a relationship of "intimacy at a distance" in which audiences experience the illusion of face-to-face primary relations with actually remote mass media communicators. Horton and Wohl called this parasocial interaction.22 Audience members react to mass media performers or the characters they portray as if the communicators or characters were part of the audience's peer group. However, wanting to make such interactions "real," does not make them so.

"This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. "

Edward R. Murrow

Eras in TV Programming

1. VAUDEO ERA (1948-1957) 2. ADULT WESTERNS ERA (1957-EARLY 1960s) 3. IDIOT SIT-COM ERA (EARLY TO LATE 1960s) 4. RELEVANCE ERA (LATE 1960s-1975) 5. ABC "FANTASY" ERA (1975-1980) 6. SOAP OPERA AND REAL PEOPLE ERA (1980s) 7. THE ERA OF CHOICE (1990s) 8. THE REALITY ERA (2000s)

American Broadcasting Companies v. Aereo, 573 U.S., _____ (2014)

Aereo, a television streaming service, was accused by the ABC television network of violating copyright laws by capturing broadcast signals on miniature antennas and delivering them to subscribers for free. The US Supreme Court ruled it was unlawful for the Internet start-up to capture and stream broadcast television signals to subscribers. Given the limited nature of the holding, the Court did not believe its decision would discourage the emergence or use of different kinds of technologies.

Dramatic Hybrid

Any two of Newcomb's dramatic genres can be combined to create a dramatic hybrid. The Law and Order shows combine the police detectives of a mystery show with the lawyers of the professional genre. Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman was about a frontier doctor which is a combination of the western and professional genres.

"The problem with television is that the people must sit and keep their eyes glued on the screen; the average American family hasn't time for it. Therefore, the showmen are convinced that for this reason, if for no other, television will never be a serious competitor of broadcasting."

New York Times, March 19, 1939.

The Reality Era (2000s)

Reality programming is less expensive to produce than dramatic programming. In 2002, the six cast members of Friends (NBC) were able to negotiate salaries of $1 million per episode. That meant every episode of Friends cost $6 million just to pay the cast. In contrast, Jeff Probst, the host of Survivor (CBS), earns $4 million per year, which breaks down to $200,000 per episode. There are two editions of Survivor in a calendar year, which means even when you toss in the pair of $1 million checks that go to the winners, that equals the $6 million being paid out to Friends for a half-hour of programming (versus the hour-long Survivor for an entire season). Obviously Friends is more profitable in the long run, when you add syndication rights and DVD sales, but in the short run over the course of a season, Survivor is clearly going to be the more profitable series. Especially at a time when the television audience has been fragmented. The final episode of Friends was the most viewed episode of the era, with an audience of 52.5 million viewers that was less than half what the M*A*S*H finale had earned twenty-one years earlier. Defining Show: American Idol (2002-2016, FOX). Survivor and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire introduced the Reality Era, but it was American Idol that ended up defining the era. It is also the show that holds the record for most consecutive seasons as the highest rated program on television (although it changed from season to season whether it was the performance show or the result show that took the top spot). American Idol benefitted from having its first winner, Kelly Clarkson, go on to have hits singles and albums and win Grammy Awards, and also from the success of second season runner-up Clay Aiken, who established that a singer did not have to win the show to have a successful career. While there were other winners who went on to enjoy greatest success, such as Carrie Underwood and David Cook, some of the most notable successes were achieved by those who fell short, including Jennifer Hudson, Katharine McPhee, Chris Daughtry, and Adam Lambert. American Idol also established the ability of musical shows to generate even more money by selling recordings of songs. Glee, The Voice, SMASH, and Nashville all sell songs from their shows on iTunes. But Idol also set the stage for other competition shows, such as Dancing with the Stars, X-Factor, and The Voice. Where Survivor had its biggest impact was on summer programming, because the reality series started out as a summer replacement program, when it became a water cooler hit as everybody was discussion who they would "vote off the island" in their office. CBS quickly shifted Survivor away from the summer schedule to the regular television season, where it would air what would have been called complete "seasons" in both the fall and the spring (instead CBS offers another reality competition show, Big Brother, every summer). But as happened in Hollywood when the movie studios saw the success of Jaws, the television networks began producing new programming for the summer. The final consideration with contemporary television is how non broadcast network programming have dominated winning Emmy Awards. In 2000, The Sopranos (HBO) became the first series to be nominated for Outstanding Drama Series from outside the four major networks. Three years later, The Sopranos won the Emmy. In 2008, half of the nominees consisted of Mad Men (AMC), Damages (FX), and Dexter (Showtime). While Mad Men was winning four years in a row, cable networks came to dominate the nominees, until in 20012 none of the nominees were from broadcast television: the winner Homeland (Showtime), Boardwalk Empire (HBO), Breaking Bad (AMC), Downton Abbey (PBS), Game of Thrones (HBO), and Mad Men (AMC). House of Cards (Netflix) became the first Internet show to be nominated, and while Downton Abbey continued to represented broadcast television, the only nominee the four networks have had since The Good Wife in 2011 has been This is Us--and this has happened with the number of nominees increasing from five to eight. Cable and Internet programming dominate the nominees for Outstanding Comedy Series, although Modern Family (ABC) won five Emmys in a row. Since then the awards have gone to HBO's Veep four seasons in a row, and then Amazon's The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Fleabag. In 2016 when Sherlock: The Abominable Bride on PBS won the Emmy for Best Television Movie, it was the first time since 2000 the award went to a broadcast network, breaking HBO's streak of having won the category nine years in a row, and 11 of the last 12. Since then the award has been won by Netflix'sBlack Mirror, while the only network nominee this decade has beenDolly Parton's Christmas of Many Colors: Circle of Lovein 2017.

Relevance Era (Late 1960s-1975)

Shows like East Side/West Side and That Was the Week That Was had been ahead of their times, dealing with social issues and social satire at a time when most Americans were watching idiot sitcoms. When The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour offered direct political commentary with an entertainment format, it caused the network censors to have fits and the show was canceled when CBS decided it was not worth the trouble. The Brothers Smothers were replaced by Hee-Haw, but the rural reign was over and on January 12, 1971 the course of American television programming was irrevocably changed when TV Guide introduced All in the Family as "A Lighthearted Look at Prejudice," warning viewers, "Situation comedy takes a giant step with this adult social satire." Defining Show: All in the Family (1971-1979, CBS). Arguably the most influential television series of all time, All in the Family was set in the Queens borough of New York City. Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor) was a working-class veteran of World War II, short-tempered and outspoken, prejudiced against anyone who was a US born White Anglo-Saxon Protestant male conservative heterosexual. His sweet but rather naive wife, Edith, is often called "dingbat" by Archie and told to "stifle" herself. Their daughter, Gloria (Sally Struthers), something of a feminist, is married to college student Michael Stivic (Rob Reiner), called "Meathead" by Archie. The show represented the real-life clash between the Greatest Generation of World War II and the baby boomers of the 60s. All in the Family was based on a British show, Till Death Us Do Part, and was the first major American television series to be videotaped in front of a live studio audience. It became the first television series to finish #1 in the Nielsen ratings for five consecutive seasons, winning the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series those first three season, as well as the first sitcom in which all of the lead actors won Emmy Awards. The show also spawned five spinoff series, including Maude and The Jeffersons. One of the most acclaimed and groundbreaking programs in the history of U.S. television, Archie and Edith Bunker's chairs are on display in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. During this period the biggest television event of all-time took place when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon and an estimated 125 million in the United States and 700 million people around the world watched parts of the 31-hour coverage of the first moon landing mission. This was also the period in which cigarette ads were taken off the air and there were a whole bunch of highly contemporary, youth-oriented shows such as The Mod Squad, The Storehouse Lawyers, The Young Lawyers, and The Young Rebels. Meanwhile, domestic comedies started to feature "fractured" families, with a widowed mother (The Partridge Family), a widower father (The Courtship of Eddie's Father), a widower father and a nanny (Nanny and the Professor), an uncle and his butler raising three orphans (Family Affair), or a widow and widower who remarry (The Brady Bunch). Once again, complaints about television violence and the increasing frankness of shows like All in the Family, especially during time periods when children were watching television, forced the networks to sanitize their early evening lineups with Family Viewing Time, which would exist at the start of the evening prime-time programming (8:00-9:00 p.m. EST). Of course, children hardly view television only during that time of the evening, but from 1975 on the networks would have to provide programming suitable for "family viewing" during that first hour of programming.

cathode-ray tube (CRT)

The key component in the development of television was the cathode-ray tube (CRT), first theorized by German physicist Julius Plücker in 1859, but not built by British chemist William Crookes until 1878. It was this invention that would lead to not only television sets but also computer displays.

CBS Corporation v. Federal Communications Commission, No. 06-3575 (2011)

A federal appears count threw out a $550,000 fine against CBS by the FCC for Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show. The court ruled that while the FCC had the authority to police fleeting images, the commission had acted arbitrarily and capriciously because the stiffening of its guidelines for "fleeting material" was not announced until a month after the Super Bowl broadcast.

Digital Television

A television broadcasting technology in which signals are transmitted as a sequence of binary numbers. Also, a television set that can receive these digital signals

"I thank cable. I think cable has raised the bar. I think, you know, shows like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, who have the advantage of dialogue, adult dialogue in situations have a big advantage, but they've brought the whole bar up, so network has to compete with intelligence and good writing."

Actor John Spencer, The West Wing

The three metaphors generally used to describe television and the function it has in society

1. The Vast Wasteland. Taken from Newton Minnow's infamous 1961 speech in which the Chair of the FCC under President Kennedy declared: "When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe a vast wasteland."1 This metaphor specifically attacks the messages, which is to say the content, of television programming, with Minnow arguing there was nothing of value on television for viewers to watch, especially in contrast to the advantages and joys of reading books or going to cultural events. 2. The Boob Tube (aka The Idiot Box). This metaphor has been in such general usage it is impossible to assign the credit to it for any one individual. Part of the attractiveness of this metaphor is its ambiguity: Does it mean that the content of television programming is populated by boobs and idiots, or does it meant that watching television produces boobs and idiots? For the sake of metaphorical distinctness, we will say it reflects both possibility and therefore is concerned with both the medium and the messages. 3. The Glass Teat. Harlan Ellison, media gadfly and award-winning writer of speculative fiction and television scripts, used this as the title for a media criticism column in the Los Angeles Free Press. The metaphor is something of a rejoinder to "the boob tube" metaphor. Ellison argues that rather than saying "television sucks," it would be more accurate to say "television is sucked." Ellison's metaphor focuses on the narcotizing effects of television, pointing out that the medium insists you sit there passively and stare into the artificial light it generates. Consequently, Ellison sees the medium itself, rather than the content of its messages, as what is mind-numbing.

Soap Opera and Real People Era (1980s)

This was an era filled with television events. The burning question the summer of 1980 was "Who Shot J.R.?" A year later the nation tuned in early in the morning to watch the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen," the final episode of M*A*S*H garnered the largest television audience for a television program, with 125 million viewers. Then the nation held its collective breath as baby Jessica McClure is rescued from an oil shaft in Midland, Texas. During this period there were a number of cult classic shows that enjoyed brief periods of intense popularity, such as Moonlighting, Beauty and the Beast and Twin Peaks, as well as slapstick action/adventure shows such as The A-Team, The Dukes of Hazzard, and Magnum, P.I. But the dominant genre was clear the prime-time soap opera. Defining Show: Dallas (1978-1991, CBS). Soap operas had been a staple of day time programming since the advent of television, but not since Peyton Place aired twice a week in the early 1960s was there a prime-time soap opera. Dallas started off with the Romeo & Juliet set up, when Bobby Ewing (Patrick Duffy) and Pamela Barnes (Victoria Principal) got married their families being sworn enemies. But the focus soon became on Bobby's older brother, J. R. Ewing (Larry Hagman), the greedy, scheming oil business tycoon trying to turn Ewing Oil in a major oil company, as much as it did on the romantic up and downs of the characters. Dallas spawned the spin-off series Knots Landing, both of which lasted 14 seasons, and even came back decades later for another three seasons (2012-14). The lasting legacy of the prime-time soap operas was that the open-ended format, wherein plotlines were not resolved in a single episode, moved from this genre to other dramatic genres. Suddenly police shows like Hill Street Blues and medical shows like St. Elsewhere were not totally episodic in nature and it took more than one episode to catch the criminal or find a donor for a heart transplant. The other key component of this era was Reality Shows. Shows like Real People, That's Incredible, and Ripley's Believe It Or Not set out to reflect the real world, but focusing on its lighter, more entertaining aspects (in other words, without trying to change it the way relevance shows tend to do). 20/20 was a cross between 60 Minutes and a celebrity magazine, while TV's Blooper and Practical Jokes was reminiscent of the classic show Candid Camera. For that matter, you could argue that Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere were bringing "reality" to police and doctor shows respectively, at the same time they were working soap opera elements into their narratives. But the lesson of the reality shows, that a show could be more profitable with less viewers if you were paying less for the on-air talent, may have been the most important thing to come out of this era.

"The Mysterious Ray From Another Dimension!"

Written in 1950, story takes place in 1970 The story, set twenty years in the future—in the year 1970—tells us of a time when: "television is now everywhere! Every country in the world, every home, every person, watches television! Every person except Norman Network, President of the Radio Broadcasting System." In his final offensive against television, Norman hires a professor—Dr. Litmus—to explain all unexplainable popular diseases as being tied to television. After scouring the world for a sickness that could be remotely connected with television, Dr. Litmus returns from Brooklyn with Sheldon Frebish, a man who has been a constant television watcher for twenty years. As a result of viewing all that television, Frebish has become transparent as glass, and now disappears completely before the astounded Norman Network. As Dr. Litmus explains: "It seems a mysterious ray is emanating from the television screen and is slowly carrying the people away to heaven know where!" At first the popular heeds the dire warning about the "deathly ray," and Norman Network's Radio Broadcasting System again prospers. But then it appears that the people are no longer afraid of the mysterious ray and television sales soar higher than ever. Dr. Litmus reports: "It seems to affect the people like a drug. They seem to want to disappear! I have a feeling they are going into a wonderful new world!" The consummate researcher, Dr. Litmus fades away to the mysterious dimension, returning briefly to Norman—who is now the proverbial last man on earth—to tell him: "The life in the other dimension! It is beautiful! You are a fool to stay in this troubled world." Alas, no one is left to broadcast any television programs to Norman, not even: "a teensy, weensy commercial. Leaving the man who fought off television to the last, prostrate in supplication in front of a T.V. set! Which all goes to show, you can't fight T.V."