The perspective here involves looking ahead, not to predict, but to prepare for a new era of television experience and criticism. The precise forms that the technologies and uses of television will take are not definite, but substantial industrial ruptures are already apparent, and the need for practical information and conceptual models to rethink the medium is evident. The following pages may consequently both serve as a eulogy to the television we have experienced to this point and prepare our understanding of the medium yet to come.
1
Understanding Television at the Beginning of the Post-Network Era
Before continuing further, we must develop the distinctions between the U.S. network era, the multi-channel transition, and the post-network era in greater detail. This chapter opens with a concise recounting of the major developments of sixty-five years of U.S. television that explains the norms that produced a particular experience of television in each era. The second half of the chapter steps back from the details of industrial operation that otherwise motivate the story told in these pages to reflect on how television has been thought of and the role it has been perceived to play in society. The adjustments in industrial norms have produced corresponding changes in television content and in viewers’ experience of television. The second half of the chapter discusses past consequences and conjectures about future developments in television’s transition from a medium designed first for a mass audience and then for niche audiences.
The Network Era
The series of fits and starts through which U.S. television developed complicates the determination of a clear beginning of the network era. Early television unquestionably evolved from the network organization of radio. This provides a compelling argument for dating the network era to the first television broadcasts of the late 1940s, if not to the days of radio. Alternatively, the industrial conditions of early television enabled substantial local production and innovation, which made these early years uncharacteristic of what developed in the early through mid-1950s and became the network-era norm. Dating the network era as beginning in 1952 takes into account the passage of the channel allocation freeze, the period from 1948 to 1952 during which national television licensing was halted as the FCC organized its practice of frequency distribution, color television standard adoption, and other institutional aspects that regularized the network experience for much of the country.1
Television certainly began as a network-organized medium, but many of the industrial practices and modes of organization that eventually defined the network era were not established immediately. By the early 1960s, network-era conventions were more fully in operation: the television set (and for some, an antenna) provided the extent of necessary technology; competition was primarily limited to programming supplied to local affiliates by three national networks that dictated production terms with studios; the networks offered the only outlets for high-budget original programming; thirty-second advertisements—the majority of which were sold in packages before the beginning of the season—supplied the dominant form of economic support and were premised upon rudimentary information about audience size.
The network era of U.S. television was the provenance of three substantial networks—NBC, CBS, and ABC—which were operated by relatively non-conglomerated corporations based in the business center of New York. These networks were organized hierarchically with many layers of managers, and each was administered by a figurehead with whom the identity and vision of the network could be associated.2 Established first in radio, the networks spoke to the country en masse and played a significant role in articulating postwar American identity.3 Networking was economically necessary because of the cost of production and the need to amortize costs across national audiences. Networking used economies of scale to recoup the tremendous costs of creating television programming by producing one show, distributing it to audiences nationwide, and selling advertising that would reach that massive national audience. Gathering mass audiences through a system of national network affiliates enabled networks to afford “network-quality” programming with which independent and educational stations could not compete.
The financial relationships between networks and the production companies that supplied most television programming have changed throughout the history of television, but the dominant practices of the network era were established by the mid-1960s. Film studios and independent television producers had only three potential buyers of their content and were thus compelled to abide by practices established by the networks. In many cases the networks forced producers to shoulder significant risk while offering limited reward through a system in which the producers financed the complete cost of production and received license fees (payments from the networks) that were often 20 percent less than costs. Studios also sold the programs to international buyers or in syndication to affiliates after the program had aired on a network, but the networks typically demanded a percentage of these revenues, as detailed in chapter 3.
The conventions of advertising and program creation were multifaceted in television’s early years. As was the case in radio, much early television featured a single sponsor for each program—as in the Texaco Star Theater—rather than the purchase of commercials by multiple corporations, a practice that later became standard. Only in the late 1950s and early 1960s did the networks eliminate the single-sponsorship format, thereby wresting substantial control of their schedule away from advertising agencies and sponsors. The earlier norm eroded precipitously in part as a result of the quiz show scandals, which revealed advertisers’ willingness to mislead audiences, but as explored in chapter 5, this erosion also had much to do with adjustments in how the networks sought to operate, as well as differences in the demands of television relative to radio. After the elimination of the single-sponsorship format, networks earned revenue from various advertisers who paid for thirty-second commercials embedded at regular intervals within programs in the manner that is still common today. Advertisers made their purchases based on network guarantees of reaching a certain audience, although many of the methods used to determine the size and composition of the audience were very limited.
Viewers had few ways to use their televisions during the network era in comparison with the television we know in the twenty-first century. Most viewers selected from fewer than a handful of options and primarily chose from three nationally distributed networks, inconsistently dispersed independent stations, and the isolated and underfunded educational television stations that became a slow-growing and still underfunded public broadcasting system. As the name implies, in the network era, U.S. “television” meant the networks ABC, CBS, and NBC.
In addition to lacking choice, network-era viewers possessed little control over the medium. Channel surfing via remote control—an activity taken for granted by contemporary viewers—did not become an option for most until the beginning of the multi-channel transition—although, as established, there were few options to surf among. Viewers possessed no recourse against network schedules, and time shifting remained beyond the realm of possibility. If the PTA bake sale was scheduled for Thursday night, that week’s visit with The Waltons could not be rescheduled or delayed.
In the network era, television was predominantly a nonportable, domestic medium, with most homes owning just one set. Even by 1970, only 32.2 percent of homes had more than one television.4 The communication scholar James Webster describes television in this era as an “old medium,” in which programming was uniform,