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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, uncorrelated with channels, and universally available.⁵ Such basic characteristics of technological use and accessibility contributed to the programming strategies of the era in important ways. Network programmers knew that the whole family commonly viewed television together, and they consequently selected programs and designed a schedule likely to be acceptable to, although perhaps not most favored by, the widest range of viewers—a strategy the CBS vice president of programming Paul Klein described as “least objectionable programming.”⁶ This was the era of broadcasting, in which networks selected programs that would reach a heterogeneous mass culture, but still directed their address to the white middle class. This mandate was integral to the business design of the networks and led to a competitive strategy in which they did not attempt to significantly differentiate their programming or clearly brand themselves with distinctive identities, as is common today.

The network era featured very specific terms of engagement for the audience regardless of the broader distinctions in how the industry created that programming or how the business of television operated. Viewers grew accustomed to arbitrary norms of practice—many of which were established in radio—such as a limited range of genres, certain types of programming scheduled at particular times of day, the television “season,” and reruns. These unexceptional network-era conventions appeared “natural” and “just how television is” to such a degree that altering these norms seemed unimaginable. However, adjustments in the television industry during the multi-channel transition revealed the arbitrary quality of these practices and enabled critics, industry workers, and entrepreneurs to envision radically different possibilities for television.

As the arrival of technologies that provided television viewers with unprecedented choice and control initiated an end to the network era, the multi-channel transition profoundly altered the television experience. To be sure, many network-era practices remained dominant throughout the multi-channel transition, but during the twenty-year period that began in the mid-1980s and extended through the early years of the twenty-first century, these practices were challenged to such a degree that their preeminent status eroded.

The Multi-Channel Transition

Beginning in the 1980s, the television industry experienced two decades of gradual change. New technologies, including the remote control, videocassette recorder, and analog cable systems, expanded viewers’ choice and control; producers adjusted to government regulations that forced the networks to relinquish some of their control over the terms of program creation;⁷ nascent cable channels and new broadcast networks added to viewers’ content choices and eroded the dominance of ABC, CBS, and NBC; subscription channels launched and introduced an advertising-free form of television programming; and methods for measuring audiences grew increasingly sophisticated with the deployment of Nielsen’s People Meter. As in the network era, this constellation of industrial norms led to a particular viewer experience of television and enabled a certain range of programming. Many of these industrial practices are explored in greater depth in chapters 2 through 6, which focus on new norms emerging in production processes, including technology, program creation, distribution, financing, and audience measurement, and how these norms adjusted the type of programming the industry creates. In introducing this distinction between the multi-channel transition and the post-network era here, we must first establish the difference in viewers’ experience of television. The subsequent chapters then detail the modifications in industrial practices that introduced these changes for viewers.

The common television experience was altered primarily as a result of expanded choice and control introduced during the multi-channel transition. As competition arising from the creation of new broadcast networks, such as FOX (1986), the WB (1995), and UPN (1995), expanded broadcast viewing options, a rapidly growing array of cable channels also drew viewers away from broadcast networks. The combined broadcast share—the percentage of those watching television who watched broadcast networks—declined from 90 to 64 during the 1980s, and that percentage was shared by six broadcast competitors instead of three.⁸ Broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, the WB, and UPN) collected an average of only 58 percent of those watching television at the conclusion of the 1999–2000 season, and only 46 percent by the end of the 2004–2005 season.⁹ Alternative distribution systems such as cable and satellite enabled a new abundance of viewing options, and 56 percent of television households subscribed to them by 1990—a figure that grew to 85 percent of households by 2004.¹⁰

The development of new technology that increased consumer control also facilitated viewers’ break from the network-era television experience. Audiences first found this control in the form of the remote control devices (RCDs) that became standard in the 1980s. The dissemination of VCR technology further enabled them to select when to view content and to build personal libraries. For many, the availability of cable, remote control devices, and VCRs resulted in significant change all at once. The diffusion of these technologies was complexly interrelated. Viewers did not need to purchase a new remote-equipped set to gain use of an RCD. Many who acquired cable boxes and VCRs first accessed RCDs with these devices, while the new range of channels offered by cable and the control capabilities of VCRs expanded viewers’ need for remotes.¹¹

Substantial changes within the walls of the home also altered how audiences used television during the multi-channel transition. Because of the limited options of the network era, programs were widely viewed throughout the culture, but the explosion of content providers throughout the multi-channel transition enabled viewers to increasingly isolate themselves in enclaves of specific interests. As Webster explains, “new media” provide programming that is diverse and is correlated with channels, and they make content differentially available.¹² For example, although many cable channels can be acquired nationwide, the varying carriage agreements and packaging of the channels by locally organized cable systems create different availability based on geography and subscription tier.

Webster argues that this programming multiplicity results in audience fragmentation and polarization.¹³ While much of the concern within the industry about audience fragmentation focuses on the consequences of smaller audiences for the commercial financing system that supports U.S. television, cultural critics are now considering how the polarization of media audiences contributes to cultural fissures such as those that emerged around social issues in the 2000 and 2004 elections as well as the continued sense that different sites of television news perpetuated divergent realities of national issues. Here, polarization refers to the ability of different groups of viewers to consume substantially different programming and ideas, rather than simply to the dispersal of audiences. New technologies contribute to this polarization in various ways; for example, control technologies, which enable audiences to view the same programs at different times, decrease the likelihood of viewers sharing content during a given period, while the new surplus of channels spreads the audience across an expansive range of programming.¹⁴ Moreover, viewers’ ability to use recording technologies to develop self-determined programming schedules also diminished the already languishing notion of television as an initiator of watercooler conversation—a notion once enforced through the mandate of simultaneous viewing.

The emergence of so many new networks and channels changed the competitive dynamics of the industry and the type of programming likely to be produced. Instead of needing to design programming likely to be least objectionable to the entire family, broadcast networks—and particularly cable channels—increasingly developed programming that might be most satisfying to specific audience members. At first, this niche targeting remained fairly general, with channels such as CNN seeking out those interested in news, ESPN attending to the sports audience, and MTV aiming at youth culture. As the number of cable channels grew, however, this targeting became more and more narrow. For example, by the early 2000s, three different cable channels specifically pursued women (Lifetime, Oxygen, and WE), yet developed clearly differentiated programming that might be “most satisfying” to women with divergent interests. These more narrowly targeted cable channels increased the range of stories that could be supported by an advertising-based medium. By the mid- to late 1990s, some cable channels built enough revenue to support the production of “broadcast-quality” original series such as La Femme Nikita (USA) and Any Day Now (Lifetime), and their particular economic arrangements allowed them to schedule series with themes and content unlikely to be found on broadcast networks.¹⁵ Their niche audience strategy and the supplementary income they gained from the fees paid by cable providers led cable channels to develop shows that have much more specific target audiences than those of broadcast series. The ability of cable channels to succeed with smaller audiences has made broadcasters’ mission difficult; once given an option, viewers have found the more precisely targeted content offered by many cable channels more satisfying than broadcasters’ least objectionable fare. Yet the expanse of cable channels has spread audiences thinly, and most cable channels remain constrained by their much smaller audiences and related lower advertising prices.

Indications of a Post-Network Era

The choice and control that viewers gained during the multi-channel transition only continued to expand as evidence of a post-network era emerged. Others (myself included) have previously used “post-network” to indicate the era in which cable channels created additional options for viewers—similar to the way I use the phrase “multi-channel transition” here. The term “post-network” is best reserved, however, as an indicator of more comprehensive changes in the medium’s use, one I suspect will ultimately take a nonlinear form. Here, “post-network” acknowledges the break from a dominant network-era experience, in which viewers lacked much control over when and where to view and chose among a limited selection of externally determined linear viewing options—in other words, programs available at a certain time on a certain channel. Such constraints are not part of the post-network television experience in which viewers now increasingly select what, when, and where to view from abundant options. Though I once intended the post-network distinction to simply indicate the erosion of network and channel control over how and when viewers watch particular programs, it has grown more feasible to imagine a post-network era devoid of networks or channels as the distinctive industrial entities they’ve served as thus far. In the early years of the post-network era, networks and channels have remained important sites of program aggregation, operating with distinctive identities that help viewers find content of interest. The gradual transition away from previous norms of mass audiences, new ways of accessing and paying for content, and the economic crises to which they contribute have decreased the profit margins of some sectors of the industry. Though multi-channel video programming distributors (MVPDs) such as Comcast, Charter, or DirecTV have passed costs for the ever-growing array of content to their subscribers, evidence of a breaking point for incremental cost increases has presented itself and reveals the inefficiency of bundling collections of unwanted channels into cable packages, and even of bundling unwanted programs into channels. Though this inefficiency could be tolerated in an era in which the license fees for channels were more modest, the fast growth in program costs—described by a cable industry financial analyst in 2013 as “multiples of the rate of inflation”—may yield a more radical departure from existing norms of packaging content, especially for those who predominantly view prized content and live sports and contests.¹⁶

Chapters 2 through 6 provide detailed considerations of the new industrial conditions that suggest the gradual establishment of a post-network era. These conditions include emerging technologies that enable far greater control over when and where viewers watch programming; multiple options for financing television production that develop and expand the range of commercially viable programming; greater opportunities for amateur production that have arisen with and been augmented by a revolution in distribution that exponentially increases the ease of sharing video; various advertising strategies including product placement and integration that have come to coexist with the decreasingly dominant thirty-second ad, as well as new economic models built on subscription and transaction payment; and advances in digital technologies that further expand knowledge about audience viewing behaviors, allow for pay-per-click advertisement pricing, and create opportunities to supplement sampling methods with census data about use. Once again, adjustments in the production process change the use of television as viewers gain additional control capabilities and access to content variation. Additionally, other new technologies have expanded portable and mobile television use and have removed television from its domestic confines.

Unlike the fairly uniform experience of watching television in the network era, by the end of the multi-channel transition, there was no singular behavior or mode of viewing, and this variability only continues to increase as the post-network era develops. For example, research on early DVR adopters found that they sometimes engaged television through the previously dominant model of watching television live. However, at other times and with other types of programming they also exhibited an emergent behavior of using the device not only to seek out and record certain content but also to pause, skip, or otherwise self-determine how to view it. Control technologies have effectively added to viewers’ choice in experiencing television, as they have enabled far more differentiated and individualized uses of the medium.

Two key non–television-related factors also figure significantly in creating the changes in audience behaviors that characterize the post-network era: computing and generational shifts. The diffusion of personal computers relates to changing uses of television in notable ways. During the multi-channel transition, when viewers began to experience television as one of many “screen” technologies in the home, the initial contrast between the experience of using computers and watching television led users to differentiate between screen media according to whether they required us to push or pull content, lean back or lean forward, and pursue leisure or work. Subsequently, however, digital technologies have come to dismantle these early differentiations and tendencies of use and have allowed for the previously unimagined integration of television and computers—of all types—in the post-network era. This integration occurred concomitantly first with the growth in home computer ownership, which rose from 11 percent in 1985 to 30 percent in 1995, 67 percent by 2005, and 80 percent by 2013.¹⁷ Second, the rapid diffusion of smartphones—devices in 65 percent of homes owning televisions by 2013—further disrupted expectations of devices and the capabilities of screens even since preliminary suggestions of the post-network era emerged. Mobile devices, however, are not necessarily used for mobile viewing: 2013 research revealed that 64 percent of smartphone TV/video use occurs in the home, suggesting that most use is simply for the convenience of viewing more places within the home.¹⁸ Smartphones have quickly accustomed their users to expect to be able to engage in any “computer” need from any location, which has encouraged expectations of convenient access to television content.

The technological experience of personal computing and smartphone use is important beyond the growing convergence of media in the latter part of the multi-channel transition period because of the new technological aptitudes and expectations embodied in their use. The presumption that technologies “do” something useful and that we “do” something with them has played a significant role in adjusting network-era behavior with regard to television. The media theorist Dan Harries refers to the blending of old media viewing and new media using as “viewsing.”¹⁹ Thinking about such activities as being merged, rather than as being distinct, takes important steps beyond the binaries between computer and television technologies commonly assumed in the past and addresses the multiple modes of viewing and using that audiences began to exhibit by the end of the multi-channel transition. The distinction of “computing” has also become as unstable as “television,” as computing has moved beyond the PC and become integrated into a wide range of mobile devices used constantly and in an array of contexts in a manner that makes the notion of computing as an activity done at a desk increasingly residual.

Related generational differences have also played a key role in changing uses of television.²⁰ Many of the distinctions such as broadcast versus cable—let alone between television and computer—that have structured understandings of television are meaningless to those born after 1980. Most members of this generation (dubbed “Millennials” or “digital natives”) never knew a world without cable, were introduced to the Internet before graduating from high school, and carried mobile phones with them from the time they were first allowed out in the world on their own.²¹ The older edge of this generation provoked a new economic model in the recording industry through rampant illegal downloading, while their younger peers may own elaborate music collections that lack any physical form such as CDs.

Acculturated with a range of communication technologies from birth, this generation moves fluidly and fluently among technologies. Anne Sweeney, then cochair of Disney media networks and president of the Disney-ABC television group, cited research in 2006 indicating that 40 percent of Millennials went home each evening and used five to eight technologies (many simultaneously), while 40 percent of their Boomer parents returned home and only watched television.²² Similarly, a 2006 report by IBM Business Consulting Services emphasized the “bimodality” of television consumers in coming years. It predicted a “generational chasm” between the “massive passives” (mainly Boomers who retained network-era television behaviors), “gadgetiers” (members of the middling Generation X who were not acculturated with new technologies from birth but were more willing to experiment with them), and “kool kids” (the Millennials).²³ Younger generations, who have approached television and technology in general with very different expectations than their predecessors, have also introduced new norms of use. For example, the television scholar Jason Mittell reflects on the significance of the arrival of a DVR in his home at the same time as his first child, and notes that when she came to ask, “What is on television?” the question referred to what shows might be stored on the hard drive, as she had no sense of the limited access to scheduled programming assumed by most others.²⁴ The widespread availability of control technologies provides a different experience for younger generations, who may never associate networks with television viewing in the same manner as their predecessors. As the generation that came of age using television to watch videos and DVDs and to play video games becomes employed in the industry, it will enable even greater reimagining of television content and use.

At a summit entitled “The Future of Television” sponsored by the trade publication Television Week in September 2004, all but one of the panelists used evidence drawn from observations of their children’s approach to television as justification for their arguments about the new directions of the medium. In addition to their children not operating with a model of television organized by networks and linear schedules, the executives noted, with awe, the mediated multitasking that defined their children’s television use. Research that continues to show growth in all media use supports these anecdotes. For example, as of 2007, time spent viewing television had not diminished despite continued expansion in time spent using the Internet; instead, multiple media have come to be simultaneously used. By 2012, the industry had termed this “second screen” use and found that 85 percent of tablet or smartphone users use these devices while watching television at least once a day, mostly to check e-mail or social media or send text messages.²⁵ Generations who are growing up with smartphones and tablets are accustomed to using multiple technologies to achieve a desired end, whether to access information, find entertainment, or communicate with friends. Such comfort in moving across technologies—or what those in the industry refer to as “media agnosticism”—has been crucial to the adoption of devices for watching television and ways of doing so that further facilitate the shift to the post-network era.

In sum, while features of a post-network era have come to be more apparent, such an era will be fully in place only when choice is no longer limited to program schedules and the majority of viewers use the opportunities offered by new technologies and industrial practices. Post-network television is primarily nonlinear rather than linear, and it could not be established until dominant network-era practices became so outmoded that the industry developed new practices in their place. The gradual adjustment in how viewers use television, and corresponding gradual shifts in production practices, have taken more than two decades to transpire, which is why I distinguish this intermediate period as the multi-channel transition. During this time, viewers experienced a marked increase in choice and achieved limited control over the viewing experience. But the post-network era allows them to choose among programs produced in any decade, by amateurs and professionals, and to watch this programming on demand on main “living room” sets, computer screens, or portable devices.

Implications of a Post-Network Era

I used to start each semester by surveying my classes in search of a show we all shared in common to draw examples from throughout the term. This was a pretty easy feat in my first few years of teaching in the early 2000s. Usually I found a show on my first (Friends) or second (ER) try. By 2007, I gave up on such unanimity. Instead I now gather a sense of what different factions of students might be watching, as it has been a while since I taught a class in which we had all seen the same show at least once (yes, even American Idol, Jersey Shore, or Real Housewives). This development illustrates an important consequence of the choice in viewing provided by the post-network era. The hundreds of channels offering programming by the end of the multi-channel transition significantly fragmented the audience. Then, by the end of 2010, viewers could readily access hundreds of television shows from any era on DVD or online, and an amateur video clip could reach as large an audience as a network show. Although only early adopters may have been viewing television in these new ways by this time, these developments suggest additional coming fragmentation.

One of the first amateur videos to reach a mass audience appeared in April 2006. By the time “The Evolution of Dance,” a humorous six-minute amateur performance of the progression of popular dance styles from the 1950s through the present, had been on YouTube for four months, it had been played at least thirty million times. That figure grew to over 210 million seven years later.²⁶ Site users re-posted the video multiple times, and in at least three different languages, taking advantage of one of YouTube’s technological strengths—the ease with which videos can be linked to other sites—but making it difficult to sum up how many times it had been viewed across these multiple postings and on other sites. As a point of comparison, the most-watched television show of the preceding 2005–2006 television season—American Idol’s Tuesday-night performance episodes—averaged 31.2 million viewers each week. FOX’s blockbuster hit included judges paid roughly $30 million a year, and the network earned $700,000 for a thirty-second advertisement, in addition to the at least $25 million per season paid by each of the three series sponsors.²⁷ In contrast, “The Evolution of Dance” featured the negligible production values of a video camera set up in the audience of a comedy club and was originally posted by the video’s creator and dancer, Judson Laipply. Laipply did not profit directly from the millions of viewers (this was before YouTube enabled profit participation in its advertisements), although stories about the video’s popularity appeared on the Today Show, Good Morning America, and Inside Edition and drew attention to his work as a public speaker and “inspirational comedian.” YouTube benefited from the high traffic to the site that may have initially clicked through some of the banner advertisements and later from pre-roll advertisements—the video advertisements that play before selected clips—and the video’s 2006 debut aided growing cultural awareness of the site. When I queried my classes in the fall of 2006 about their familiarity with the video, some had seen it—although fewer than I had expected and by no means as many as had seen various television shows. When I asked coworkers (faculty and staff over the age of thirty), most responded by asking what YouTube was—until a few months later, when Google’s $1.65 billion purchase of the site drew much attention.

By the end of the decade, video sharing and YouTube use had grown considerably: By 2013, YouTube reported one billion unique visitors to the site each month.²⁸ Laipply posted “Evolution of Dance 2” in January 2009, but lacking novelty, drew only twenty million viewers in four years. There have been other so-called viral or spreadable hits such as “David after Dentist” and “Charlie Bit My Finger,” though neither has been viewed nearly as many times as the YouTube topper as of 2013, Psy’s “Gangnam Style” video, which had been streamed 1.8 billion times. Most web video circulates through distinct taste communities, and though nearly 2 billion views seems broad, with the possibility of an international audience of 2.5 billion Internet users on computers and 1 billion worldwide smartphone-enabled users, and that these are not unique viewers, even “Gangnam Style” can be seen as a niche phenomenon.²⁹

The changes in how we view, experience, and use television made evident by these anecdotes have massive implications for how we think about television and its role in culture. The increased fractionalization of the audience among shows, channels, and distribution devices has diminished the ability of an individual television network or television show to reinforce a certain set of beliefs to a broad audience in the manner we long believed to occur. Although television can still function as a mass medium, in most cases it does so by aggregating a collection of niche audiences. The narrowcasting that became common to television during the multi-channel transition has thus required adjustments in theories about the mass nature of the medium, while the exponential expansion in viewers’ choice and control since the network era has necessitated an even more substantive reassessment of television. Taking up these issues, this chapter provides an overview of some of the central ideas that have governed the study of television and culture as well as some preliminary tools for making sense of television in the post-network era.

Defining Television

The industrial changes that developed during the multi-channel transition made uncertain the object called “television” as new forms and ways of using the device required us to reconsider how we determine “what is television?” The term “television” has been broadly used to refer to a singular technology—a box with a screen—though it has enabled a range of experiences since the network era. But television is more than just a technology—more than a composite of wires, metal, and glass. It possesses an essence that is bound up in its context, in how the screen is most commonly used, in where it is located, in what streams through it, and in how most use it, despite the possibility for broad variation in all the factors. It is primarily this essence—derived from existing use—that distinguishes a television from a computer monitor, particularly in the context of contemporary technological convergence and the manufacturing of digital “televisions” that have no tuning capability—that is, the ability to receive signals over the air.

Lisa Gitelman argues for a definition of media as “socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols.”³⁰ Protocols include “normative rules and default conditions,” such as the greeting “Hello,” monthly billing cycles, and a system of wires and cable for the U.S. phone service. Understanding that the protocols of television contribute to distinguishing the medium helps us rectify some of the inadequacy of defining the medium only in terms of the piece of equipment and to address how the technology becomes a television when it receives signals via broadcast, cable, or satellite transmission. A television is not just a machine, but also the set of behaviors and practices associated with its use. The media scholar James Bennett has helped in the retheorization of television’s scope through his distinction of “digital television”:

Television as digital media must be understood as a non–site-specific, hybrid cultural and technological form that spreads across multiple platforms as diverse as mobile phones, games consoles, iPods, and on-line video services such as YouTube, Hulu, Joost, and the BBC’s iPlayer, as well as computer-based mediaplayers such as Microsoft’s Windows Media Player and Apple TV.³¹

Like Bennett, I find it useful to allow “television” to expand the narrow confines of its network-era operation. This new stage—what Bennett terms digital television and I distinguish as post-network television—doesn’t mark an end of television, but the beginning of a new era.

I approach television with the presumption that our cultural understanding of this medium does indeed conceive of it as more than a monitor, piece of hardware, or gateway to programming, and that television is less defined by how the content gets to us and what we view it on than by the set of experiences and practices we’ve long associated with the activity of viewing. All of these technical attributes unquestionably contribute to how a culture uses and understands television, yet inherited meanings, expectations, and habits also circumscribe it in particular ways. New technologies and industrial practices have introduced radical changes in technological aspects of television, its use, and its consequent cultural significance, but various aspects of sociocultural experience still define television in our minds in specific and meaningful ways, particularly for those generations who knew television in the network era.

Television may not be dying, but changes in its content and how and where we view have complicated how we think about and understand its role in the culture. The transition of radio in the 1940s provides an illustrative parallel. As television first entered homes, radio had to fundamentally redefine itself—both in its programming and in the ways and places that listeners used it. Before television, radio was primarily a domestic-bound technology that played particular programs on a known schedule; after television usurped the captive home audience, radio became a portable medium and shifted to emphasize ongoing music or talk formats. Nonetheless, after television, the technology remained commonly understood as “radio” despite the substantial difference in the medium and adjustments to its role as a cultural institution. In truth, “video” provides the more accurate term for the cross-platform circulation of “television” content, but as the television experience has encompassed new capabilities and spread to additional screens in recent years, established cultural understandings have shifted accordingly so that we still continue to comprehend different experiences as watching “television.”

In introducing a collection of essays that consider various aspects of the wide-ranging transitions that occurred by the beginning of the twenty-first century, Lynn Spigel reflects on the title of the anthology—Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition. “Indeed,” she notes, “if TV refers to the technologies, industrial formations, government policies, and practices of looking that were associated with the medium in its classical public service and three-network age, it appears we are now entering a new phase of television—the phase that comes after ‘TV.’”³² Although the title of the collection is eye-catching and provocative, it suggests a far more absolute rupture than that which occurred; it is also arbitrary in affording the norms of the network era such eminence as determinant of the medium. Still, attention to transition and uncertainty about the present status and likely future of television evident in the anthology and its title were not uncommon by late in the multi-channel transition. The title of another important article queries, “What is the ‘television’ of television studies?”—a question that similarly asserts concern about ambiguity regarding the fundamental attributes of television.³³ Those who write about television have never adequately addressed which of the “technologies, industrial formations, government policies, and practices of looking,” to borrow from Spigel, might particularly establish the ontological boundaries of the medium—the things that make television “television.” We err in allowing those norms established first to “determine” the medium; they are as arbitrary as any subsequent formation.³⁴

Thinking about Network-Era Television

Scholars in fields as diverse as literature, film studies, political science, sociology, psychology, and communication developed different ways of thinking about television and its role in culture. Those in the area of “media studies” have attended most closely to the ways programs, audiences, industries, and sociocultural contexts intertwine in the creation and circulation of television, and their ideas are most relevant here. Scholars of media studies—and critical television studies in particular—have developed detailed theories and empirical studies that examine the multifaceted nature of cultural production common to television. But in the network era, there was no need for esoteric discussions of what television is, as it was assumed to be a simple technology whose variation spanned little more than screen size and color or black and white.³⁵ Much television theory continues to presume network-era norms in explaining the cultural and institutional functions of television, and draws from distinctive national experiences with the medium. This book and the conditions of the post-network era call many of these assumptions into question.

Foundational understandings of television view it as a—if not the—central communicative and cultural force in society. Its centrality derived from its availability and ubiquity; as early as 1960 more than 87 percent of U.S. households had televisions, and the technology increasingly was available in spaces outside the home, such as taverns and hospitals.³⁶ The accessibility of television was in many ways enabled by the low cost of acquiring its programming. Either as a result of advertising support in the United States or public funding in most other countries, viewing television programs did not require the same type of per-use fee associated with most other entertainment and informational media such as films, newspapers, and magazines. To be sure, commercial media “cost” societies in ways obscured by simple presumptions that proclaimed that network-era television was “free”; nonetheless, it was reasonable to assert that television’s low barriers to access greatly contributed to its cultural importance in the network era.

During that time, the medium gained its status as a primary cultural institution precisely because network-era programming could and did reach such vast audiences. Television derived its significance from its capacity to broadly share information and ideas and facilitate an “electronic public sphere” of sorts.³⁷ Its stories and ideas reached a mass audience that some have argued enabled television programs to negotiate contradictory and contested social ideas, while others have proposed that this reach allowed television to enforce a dominant way of thinking.³⁸ Significantly, both perspectives ascribed importance to television because of its pervasiveness.³⁹ Viewers’ lack of control over the medium and the limited choice at this time aided its ability to function as both forum and ideological enforcer. Network-era norms imposed the synchronousness of linear viewing, and television earned its status as an instigator of “watercooler conversation” by providing shared content for discussion. Coworkers and neighbors chose from the same limited range of programs each night, and thus were likely to have viewed the same program.

Assessments of television that consider how it contributes to the sharing and negotiation of ideas understand it to operate as a “cultural institution”—that is, as a social conduit that participates in communicating values and ideas within a culture by telling stories and conveying information that reflects, challenges, and responds to shared debates and concerns. Educational systems, clubs and societal orders, and religious organizations are also cultural institutions, although we may more readily identify and accept the influence of these sites on how we know and understand the world around us.⁴⁰ At the same time television functions as a cultural institution, however, it is also a “cultural industry.” That is, in a context such as the United States, the television industry operates as a commercial enterprise that primarily seeks to maximize profits, while nonetheless producing programs that are important creative and cultural forms that communicate social values and beliefs. Industry workers may primarily make decisions based on what types of programming they perceive to be most profitable, yet these decisions still have important cultural implications for what stories are told, by whom, and how society comes to understand the worlds that television presents. Remembering the commercial mandate of television—again, particularly in the United States—is imperative: in the cultural industry of television, business and culture operate concurrently and are inextricable in every aspect.

Studies that explain the economic and industrial norms of television in the network era are particularly relevant to the focus here upon television as a cultural industry. Until recently, few attempted to bridge the chasm between humanities-inflected theories about the operation of media in culture and political economy research that emphasizes economics and industrial operations.⁴¹ This history of avoidance, and at times hostility, between approaches is increasingly being corrected by theories and methods that deliberately merge aspects of culture and economics or explore quotidian industrial processes to better understand the agents, organizations, and processes involved in cultural production—as I attempt here.⁴²

As is the case of dominant cultural theories about television, most political economy work assumes television to be a mass medium and attributes much of its importance to this characteristic. The notion of mass media and the scale of such businesses are important to political economy approaches examining the assemblage and distribution of labor and capital, while the mass audience was crucial to cultural approaches because of the necessity for programs to be widely shared within the culture. In both cases, the breadth of the audience reached by network-era programming allowed television to circulate ideas in a way that asserted and reinforced existing power structures and dominant ways of thinking within a society.

In many cases, the changed industrial context has not negated the value of theoretical tools provided by these perspectives, but some require reconsideration and adjustment. For example, Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch’s argument that television programs provide a cultural forum to negotiate ideas within society makes sense insofar as television continued to facilitate this cultural role after the network era on certain occasions; however, broad and heterogeneous audiences now rarely share individual programs in the manner that could be assumed in the network era. Television might continue to provide a cultural forum for those who tune in to a particular show, but it has become increasingly unlikely that television functions as a space for the negotiation of contested beliefs among diverse groups simply because audiences are now more narrow and specialized.⁴³

Other theories, such as Raymond Williams’s network-era theory of “flow,” require more significant revision.⁴⁴ Williams used the idea of flow to comment on the nature of the steady stream of programming through the set and the manner in which narrative, advertisements, and promotions all intermixed. The continuous infiltration of control devices into television use has greatly disrupted flow as a fundamental characteristic of the medium, at least in terms of television flow being determined by someone other than the individual viewer.

Television’s transition from its network-era norm as a mass medium toward its post-network-era function as an aggregator of a broad range of niche and on-demand viewing audiences has required significant adjustments to industrial assumptions about the medium. For example, in his 1989 book The Capitalization of Cultural Production, Bernard Miège located television among media industries that operate under a “flow” model (this use of the term differs substantially from that of Williams) and rely on “home and family listening,” “an undifferentiated, indirect mass market,” the “instant” obsolescence of content, and the use of a programming grid that creates daily interaction and cultivates viewer loyalty, all of which eroded during the multi-channel transition. By the mid-2000s, the market characteristics of U.S. television had come instead to resemble those of his “publishing” model, which features a “segmented mass market” and the “dialectic of the ‘hit and catalogue,’” along with the purchase of individualized objects—in this case, particular episodes of television shows.⁴⁵

Noting that “‘television’ now functions as a bookstore, a news stand, or a library,” Newcomb has departed from the “cultural forum” concept he and Hirsch offered in 1983 and conceived of the medium similarly to Miège’s publishing model.⁴⁶ Television has adopted multiple possible revenue streams in ways that mirror the bookstore (DVD sell-through, iTunes downloading), magazine subscription (premium cable networks such as HBO), and the subscription library (MVPD on demand, Netflix). Each of these possible transactions of capital for content created new and distinct relationships between the economic model, programming, and how these forms of television might function as a cultural institution. And, as Newcomb notes, these alternative transaction or publishing models thrive on specialty, distinction, and niche taste, all of which unmistakably distinguish the practices of the multi-channel transition and post-network era from network-era norms that privileged the opposite characteristics.

Post-network-era practices have led the television audience not only to fracture among different channels and devices, but also to splinter temporally. The control over the television experience that various technologies offer has ruptured the norm of simultaneity in television experience and enabled audiences to capture television on their own terms. Moreover, as the New York Observer columnist Tom Scocca notes, the ephemerality once characteristic of the medium has also come to be less prominent; for example, the video experiences offered by YouTube allow for archiving images so they may be called up at will.⁴⁷ New devices have provided tools to capture television and consequently have produced a norm of asynchronous viewing that has altered the interaction of the culture with the medium in crucial ways. Television devices remain ubiquitous and accessible in the post-network era, but the ubiquity of specific content has been eliminated as broad audiences have come to share little programming in common and less frequently view it simultaneously.

The nature of post-network television will likely be profoundly different than that of the network era, but the contradictory affordances of these changes make assessing the relative quality of either era difficult. The uncertain future often instigates a nostalgia for past norms that imagines the past differently than it was experienced. As Time’s James Poniewozik opines,

The irony of the nostalgia for TV’s “golden age” is that it romanticizes the very things people used to condemn. Mass media were once homogenizing; now we miss how they unified us. Cultural critics once said TV appealed to the lowest common denominator; now cable’s ambitious niche shows cater to elitists. Some even romanticize commercials—commercials!—as making TV for the masses possible.⁴⁸

And it is not only the experience of viewers and insights of scholars that are changed, the adjustments to the U.S. television industry chronicled here provided as extraordinary a shift for those who work in it. The diversification in economic models, changing industrial relationships, and challenges to regulatory practices posed by new technologies all required revisiting many of the foundational industrial assumptions of television and how it operated.

Theorizing Niche Media: Identifying Phenomenal Television

Regardless of whether we have truly reached the post-network era, the U.S. television industry and its norms of operation have changed significantly. The most noteworthy adjustment, already evident by 2005, was the erosion of television’s regular operation as a mass medium. Although it has continued to play this role in isolated moments, television is no longer organized in this way and has not been since the mid-1990s. By then, it was already apparent that we needed to reassess television and see it as a medium that primarily reaches niche audiences. Continued transition in television’s core economic models would only further adjust the type of programming that could be profitably produced and television’s operation as a cultural institution.

No mass medium arose to supplant television in the wake of its industrial change, and it might be that mass media as they existed in the twentieth century were remnants of a particular set of industrial and economic relations from another era.⁴⁹ Niche-focused media long have played an important role in society by communicating cultural beliefs, albeit to narrower groups than mass media. Women’s magazines provide an illustrative example, as ample critical scholarship has explored how this media form that targets a specific audience consistently reproduced certain discourses of beauty, identity, and female behavior.⁵⁰ Niche media are identified as important voices to specific communities, but have received less critical attention than mechanisms of mass messaging.

Theorizing the cultural significance of niche media might begin by exploring those industries that have operated in this organization for some time, and the magazine industry—with its era of mass distribution earlier in the century—may provide the most relevant point of comparison. In considering the process through which this industry transitioned from mass market publications with titles such as Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post to more narrowly targeted magazines, Joseph Turow argues that demand from advertisers to reach ever more specific audiences fueled the fragmentation.⁵¹ While acknowledging the economic value and efficiency targeting provides to advertisers, he raises a cautionary flag about such fragmentation and rightly notes the dangers for ideals of democracy and community that result from what develop into “gated informational communities.”⁵² The redefinition of television in the course of the multi-channel transition as a medium that supports fragmented audiences and polarized content consequently has exacerbated the cultural trends and outcomes that Turow identified in the magazine industry.

Television’s new abundant offerings make it difficult to determine a proper frame through which to examine programming and assess its significance. We are accustomed to moral panics and activism that develop from concern about the vast reach of mediated messages. Thinking about television in the age of narrowcasting requires that we take into account the substantial variation now encompassed by its programming. “Successful” television programs might now gather audiences that range from tens of thousands to tens of millions, while channels might be accessible in anywhere from three million to one hundred million homes. Some programs stream into the home without any viewer payment, others require a subscription for a channel of programming (HBO), and viewers now can buy particular programs on DVD or as single-show downloads. With such ample variation in the availability and ubiquity of television programming, we need more specific models for understanding television’s operation in the culture, ones that will enable us to differentially assess its significance.

Toward this end, I propose “phenomenal television” as a particular category of programming that retains the social importance attributed to television’s earlier operation as a cultural forum despite the changes of the post-network era. In the network era, television content derived its relevance simply from being on the air, which necessarily meant that it was widely viewed because of the vast and substantive audiences programs had to draw to survive. Often popular shows were particularly important sites of analysis because broad viewership on a mass medium denoted a certain scope of influence. In a narrowcast environment, content must do more than appear “on television” to distinguish itself as having cultural relevance, since now much that appears on television might be seen by just a few viewers. For example, the particular economic model of advertiser-supported cable networks allows them to produce shows viewed by 1 percent of the available audience and for these shows to still be considered hits. Network-era theories might still apply to some programming produced in this narrowcast environment, and phenomenal television denotes such programming. Although the task of determining relevance and distinction is more difficult in the post-network era, phenomenal television does have identifiable attributes, as specified below.

Themes, topics, and discourses that appear in multiple and varied outlets indicate a form of phenomenal television. The criterion here is not purely quantitative—that is, a topic that appears in seven shows is not necessarily “more” phenomenal than one appearing in six. Rather, multiplicity might indicate a society-wide negotiation of an issue or a crisis in existing understandings in the same manner it did in the network era. Trans-show or trans-network themes derive importance in a narrowcast environment because such scope indicates content that has achieved or is likely to achieve uncommon audience breadth despite fragmentation and polarization. Ideas appearing in multiple shows—particularly different types of shows—might indicate concerns relevant to the broader society rather than distinct subcultures.⁵³ For example, in the year after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, DC, multiple narratives exploring fictional renditions of the aftermath appeared across at least twelve shows on seven networks.⁵⁴ Cultural critics could not look to just one of these shows as indicative of cultural sentiment on the subject, or even just that of television; instead, the niche media environment required a more holistic evaluation of the multiplicity of stories that likely reached varied audiences. This attribute responds to the way that individual programs and episodes rarely have the cultural significance previously common because of the fragmentation of audiences, although when thematically similar content is viewed and considered in aggregate, television has the potential to operate much as it did in the network era.

Attention to institutional factors such as what network or type of network airs a show relative to the network’s common audience derives increased importance after the network era and plays a role in determining phenomenal television. Despite all being forms of television, broadcast, basic cable, and subscription cable have different regulatory and economic processes that contribute to their norms of operation and the possible programs they can create. These outlets also vary amply in audience size, and this too is a factor we must address in considering the reach and importance of a program or theme. Many programs—particularly those on premium and basic cable—reached narrow audiences throughout the multi-channel transition, but too often particular audience conditions were not addressed in framing analyses of or concerns about programs. Additionally, factors such as whether viewers watch content as part of linear schedules or on demand have come to further distinguish contemporary television programming as more viewers incorporate new control devices into their regular viewing habits. In the network era, we could assume a broad and heterogeneous audience who viewed linear schedules of network-planned programs. Now we cannot presume that the audience represents the culture at large; instead, it embodies only a distinct segment or component thereof. Assessing the type of network providing programming offers significant insight into the audience of a particular program.

Programs that achieve watercooler status earn a certain degree of importance due to their ability to break through the cluttered media space, but this alone does not indicate phenomenal television. We must also explore how and why a program achieves this prominence. A watercooler show that is supported by a particularly large promotion budget might be less meaningful than a show that captures the zeitgeist of the moment or gains its attention from the way that it resonates with a cultural sentiment or a struggle percolating below the surface of mainstream discourse. Phenomenal television can “go under the radar” and circulate out of sight or beyond the awareness of most of society, but examinations of such television must attend to how and why such shows are important. In the network era, watercooler shows were often those that were somehow boundary-defying, but few boundaries remain, and merely airing on television has become less indicative of social significance than was once the case.

Incongruity suggests another feature of phenomenal television, which has a tendency to break into unexpected gated communities. For example, incongruity might exist in cases where the ideology of a story conflicts with the dominant perspective anticipated to be shared by the audience of that network. The ability for like to speak only to like is one of the greatest consequences of narrowcast media because it decreases the probability of incongruity and disables the type of negotiation theorized to be central to the ability of network-era television to operate as a cultural forum. In many ways, the significance of a show such as All in the Family resulted from the heterogeneous audience that had their views alternatively challenged and reinforced by the differing perspectives articulated by Archie and Meathead. Similarly, a show such as The Cosby Show was particularly important because its depictions of upper-middle-class black life reached both black and white homes in a segregated society accustomed to representations of African Americans as being poverty-stricken or criminals. It remains significant to have a dramatic series focused on the lives and sexuality of a group of gay men (Looking) or lesbian women (The L Word), but these shows aired on a subscription channel that built an identity as the destination for gay and gay-friendly people, which made the content of these shows far more congruous than if they had aired elsewhere. Incongruous moments, such as the sophisticated negotiation and deconstruction of patriarchal masculinity provided by Playmakers and aired on ESPN or the critical exploration of the abuses of the Taliban against women on the WB family drama 7th Heaven—which notably aired before September 11, 2001—expose audiences to ideas they may not normally self-select. The incongruity of these shows relative to what the audiences of these channels and their programs might expect can defy the tendency of narrowcasting to perpetuate gated media communities.

Programming affirmed by hierarchies of artistic value and social importance—those programs imbued with what Pierre Bourdieu terms “cultural capital”—indicate another distinction of phenomenal television. I do not wish to suggest that what I term “phenomenal television” is categorically “better” than other television, in the manner that “quality” television has been inconsistently used. Rather, what I am proposing is that television programming of specific aspiration and accomplishment—whether this be an ambitious period drama, a rigorous piece of investigative journalism, or a pointed political satire—might also distinguish itself as phenomenal because of its particular effort to enrich or expand cultural dialogue or thinking and to maximize the creative potential of the medium.

This delineation of characteristics of phenomenal television is not intended to suggest that programs that do not meet any of these criteria are unimportant. Rather, it marks a preliminary effort to develop a richer vocabulary and to build multifaceted theory in response to the growing multiplicity of television and its operation as a niche medium. The conditions of the post-network era require reconsidering everything we once knew about television and more clearly differentiating among its many forms. Size of audience is a significant consideration, but there are also features that distinguish programs in terms of content and in ways that are important to assess. The idea of phenomenal television provides a way to adjust our assumptions about television while keeping its increasingly niche operation in mind.

In many cases, the presumptions of network-era theory remain relevant in thinking about the cultural role of niche media and require only slight modification. For example, in 1978 John Fiske and John Hartley described the “bardic” role of television, noting how programs could “articulate the main lines of the established cultural consensus about the nature of reality.”⁵⁵ Such a premise remains relevant in a narrowcast environment, but with the difference that television articulates the main lines of cultural consensus for the particular network and its typical audience member rather than for society in general. A so-called boundary-defying program such as The Shield, which explores the psyche and actions of a corrupt detective, may seem too far outside the accepted reality of the television audience on the whole, but the ambiguity of right and wrong it represents does appeal to a specific group of viewers who accept the complexity of human action and the arbitrariness of the justice system.

A category such as phenomenal television is just an initial tool for understanding the role of niche media in society; much more thinking in this area is certainly needed. Theories of niche media can in most cases reasonably assume certain characteristics of the audience—as niche media succeed because of their ability to tap into certain affinities that bring audience members together. But even though television programming of the multi-channel transition and post-network era increasingly targeted niche audiences, the breadth of content transmitted through the medium remained accessible to many beyond those targeted audiences. Those who watch niche content, but for whom it was not intended, might be viewed as “cultural interlopers”—as when teens’ parents watch MTV or liberals view Fox News; although not all niche programming is equally susceptible to such practices. Industrial and economic factors such as how media are paid for vary the likelihood of interlopers across different types of television and in comparison with other niche media such as magazines. For example, subscriptions that provide access to a package of cable channels readily allow cultural interloping; subscriptions to specific programs, as in the case of pay-per-view, do not. Television watching is also often a shared activity in households, which increases the probability of cohabitants exposing others to television content not geared toward them.

Such possibilities for cultural interloping may further change as post-network distinctions solidify. Television purchased on a transactional basis, such as the pay-per-episode model available on iTunes, may be less likely to reach interlopers because of the added fees required to access this content. By contrast, subscriptions to channels might better facilitate interloping—as in the case of a viewer who subscribes to HBO for the movies, but samples Looking because it has no added cost. Important similarities and differences might be identified with other media such as magazines that have a fee per use and tend to be consumed in solitude, but can often be picked up in places like waiting rooms and read for free. These discrepancies and variations suggest the degree to which a one-theory-fits-all-media—and even a one-theory-fits-one-medium—framework is inadequate for theorizing niche media and post-network-era television. Similarities among media might exist, but specific contexts remain crucial in assessing the particularities of varied media.

The Persistence of Television as a Cultural Institution

The ubiquity that earned television much of its perceived significance has also been changing as a result of post-network reconfigurations. As the possibilities for portable and mobile television explored in the next chapter indicate, television is everywhere it has ever been and in many more places. Paradoxically, though, individual “pieces” of television (shows, episodes) are shared by fewer and fewer viewers. Together, these developments further the need to consider specific contexts and factors that are far narrower than a simple construction “television” allows. For example, in March 2006, two University of Chicago professors released a study widely reported in newspapers across the country that found that children who watched television were not substantially harmed by the behavior.⁵⁶ Such reports—with varied findings—appear yearly (even monthly) from researchers in many different fields. With rare exception these studies talk about the effect of “television,” as though there were no differences in the experience of it, no differences in what is watched or how. Certainly, effects studies are not the only form of research to suffer from such unspecified generalizations concerning television, but the point is that variations in the medium that emerged throughout the multi-channel transition indicated how untenable these generalizations had become, if they were ever meaningful.

Instead of utilizing uniform assumptions and explanations of television, we might diversify our thinking by establishing “modes of television” that group similar functions of the medium. Indeed, for all the differences in viewing, every instance is not so distinctive as to be fundamentally unlike any other. Establishing some frequent modes of television use aids in distinguishing characteristics in a great many of television’s iterations. At least four distinctive modes of television function existed by 2005: television as an electronic public sphere; television as a subcultural forum; television as a window onto other worlds; and television as a self-determined gated community. These persisted as general norms relevant to thinking about television’s role in culture a decade later; but by 2014, the industrial distinctions among prized content, live sports and contests, and linear television seemed more indicative of how those in the television industry were distinguishing among television contexts.

Television as an electronic public sphere identifies the operation of television in the network era as it was explained by Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch’s cultural forum model, Todd Gitlin’s delineation of television’s ideological processes, or John Fiske and John Hartley’s notion of the medium’s bardic role.⁵⁷ Drawing primarily on Newcomb and Hirsch, we might say that television operates as an electronic public sphere when it reaches a vast and heterogeneous audience and offers a shared experience or content that derives its importance from the scope of its reach, its ability to provide a space for the negotiation of ideological positions, and as a process-based system of representation and discourse. Now, however, television decreasingly operates in this way. When it does, it usually does so on unplanned occasions, except for a few remaining events such as the Super Bowl. At the same time, though, it is helpful to see the electronic public sphere as existing on a continuum. For example, in comparison with the network-era reach of television—when top shows were watched by 40 to 50 percent of television households—popular contemporary shows such as American Idol have a narrower scope—only 19.8 million out of a universe of 114 million homes watched it most weeks when it was at its peak.⁵⁸ But even with only an average of 17 percent of U.S. television households watching the show, it was among the most widely viewed regular programs in a given year.

Television operates as subcultural forum when it reproduces a similar experience as the electronic public sphere, but among more narrow groups that share particular cultural affinities or tastes. MTV is likely to be the best example, in that the network provides the lingua franca for adolescents and operates as “must-see TV” in order for teens to achieve cultural competence. The key difference between the electronic public sphere and a subcultural forum (note the embedded “cultural forum” in the terminology) is that the latter is characteristic of television that reaches smaller and more like-minded audiences. For example, Fox News provides a version of daily news and events that serves viewers who choose to watch a news outlet with its particular sensibility. Importantly, when television operates as a subcultural forum, it is often integrated with the use of other media that similarly reflect subcultural tastes and sensibilities. Viewers incorporate a television network or set of programs into a broader set of media, reproducing particular silos of specific worldviews. Broadband distribution of television and aggregators such as YouTube channels now serve far more narrow subcultures than were possible with the television available throughout the multi-channel transition.

Post-network television also can function as a window onto other worlds. In some ways this is a corollary to its function as a subcultural forum, as the ubiquity and availability of television make it a convenient means for exposing oneself to programming targeted to a different audience—or to interlope. Television makes it easy to be a casual anthropologist and travel in worlds very different from one’s own, although by no means are all those worlds equally available. Viewers engage in television as a window onto other worlds when, as cultural interlopers, they view niche media not targeted to them. Parents trying to understand teen culture can gain glimpses into it on MTV—although understanding how teens receive the content or how any intended audience makes meaning of programming is another matter entirely. In leaving my own silo of information and taste culture, I have explored the excessive and regressive masculinity offered by Spike or the stories of masculinity in crisis aired on the FX shows Rescue Me and Nip/Tuck. Ever-expanding cable systems make available ever more worlds, including networks and content originating from outside the United States, although, again, all worlds and perspectives are far from equally available. Perhaps one of the most telling aspects of post-millennium U.S. culture emerges from the uncommon use of television as a window onto other worlds relative to television as a subcultural forum.

Finally, a fourth mode of television as a self-determined gated community has emerged particularly as a result of increasing flexibility in distribution and opportunities for viewers to access programming on demand. Here, television’s cultural role is even more specific than when it functions as a subcultural forum. This mode encompasses particular uses and personalized organizations of television, as well as individuals’ pursuit of specific content, including that which may be amateur-created. The operation of this more nascent mode can be observed in the videos submitted to aggregators such as YouTube or in those attached to social networking sites. Here self-created television becomes a forum of expression and a way for viewers to communicate—most likely with established peers—which they do by sharing their television. As television and web viewing become more integrated and convenient, viewers will also share recommendations, links, and viewing lineups that contribute to the personalization of television. Self-determined viewing behaviors include deliberately shifting among the variety of modes of use noted here and creating specialized viewing communities.

Certainly other modes may already exist that I have not included. The expanding fan cultures facilitated by social media perhaps suggest another distinct mode of television that might be labeled “television as cult conduit.” The point I wish to highlight is the variety and differences in just the few functions given here. Each mode features varied characteristics and leads to very different cultural outcomes—television “means” differently in each of these modes—and does so in ways that previous explorations of television have not considered. I do not intend these four modes to account for all of television viewing; rather, I hope that identifying them will encourage others to consider television in terms of specific contexts and uses, rather than thinking about television-related phenomena as characteristic of television at large.

Delimiting the different ways television functions leads us to foreground the multifaceted nature of television and the growing diversity of uses viewers may adopt. You use the television that you flip on in the background while making dinner differently from the way you use the set to record a show you reserve for a time when all other distractions can be avoided—and that content consequently has different meaning and importance. Likewise, the television you view on a portable device on a daily train commute or the videos you search out online also indicate still other relationships between content and use. Each of these examples illustrates fundamental distinctions among use, content, and audience. In each case, the viewer may be watching television, but to understand the behavior and its cultural function, we need to develop more precise frameworks to explain differentiation among types of television content—such as phenomenal television—and why viewers watch in particular ways.

Key Ideas for Thinking about Television’s Revolution

Finally, I turn to the key ideas and definitions particularly important for the reconsideration of television offered in the remaining pages. Most viewers remain unaware of the business of television, such as the intricate processes involved in deciding what shows to produce, selling them to networks, and finding advertisers, but understanding the business of television and how it is changing is crucial to comprehending why the industry produces certain shows and how to intervene in this system. Those who have sought changes in the cultural output of television—shifts in depictions of nondominant ethnic groups and women, for example—have been most successful when they have illustrated that their goal was a matter of “good business” for the industry, as has been the case for many social initiatives.⁵⁹ The production of expressive forms like television shows is a challenging business, and no matter the extent of market research, many of the tools other sectors of business use to understand what their consumers want and to predict success are ineffective in the creation of cultural forms.

I closely examine many components of production that figure centrally in the creation of U.S. television programming and focus exclusively on the commercial sector despite the existence of a small public broadcasting system. As I noted in the introduction, rather than thinking of production as just the making of a show, I define production as all of the activities involved in the creation and circulation of television programming. I organize this broad conception of production into five “production components”—technology, creation, distribution, financing, and audience research—and explore each in subsequent chapters. I do not intend any prioritization in the production components catalogued here. Sometimes technologies and distribution practices enhanced preceding developments intentionally, while other adjustments occurred independently.

Although I distinguish these five components as different activities, they must be understood as interrelated processes connected by multidirectional influences. Thus, for example, changes in advertising can introduce adjustments in how producers create programs, while changes in the creation of programs can likewise affect how advertisers are integrated in programming, as well as how much advertiser support networks or studios need. Moreover, the relations among the five components are constantly in flux. During the multi-channel transition, when adjustments in distribution capabilities affected economic models, the altered economic models then enabled certain creative norms—all of which affected the type and range of programming likely to be produced. Such an approach to production differs considerably from ideas about industry operation that assume power and influence operate in a one-way, top-down, hierarchical manner and that allow factors such as ownership structures a more deterministic role in the creation of expressive forms and day-to-day industry operations.

Just as production encompasses multiple components, production also exists as one “cultural process” in what some have termed the “circuit of culture” and others a “circuit of media study.”⁶⁰ These circuit-based models or frameworks for studying media such as television provide a sophisticated conceptualization of the relationship between the creation of culture and the imperatives of commercial industries. Processes and factors other than production, such as reception, sociohistorical context, and particular cultural artifacts, are interconnected, with each affecting and being affected by the others. The production of television involves the negotiation of many different interests and requires a complicated model to adequately address the intersections of varied commercial and regulatory interests that also mediate in the creation of cultural forms.

Because of my focus on production, other parts of the circuit of culture receive minimal attention despite their relevance to the changes that mark the emergence of the post-network era. Often, these other cultural processes serve as structuring forces that significantly affect the conditions of production. For example, regulatory actions dating to the 1920s continue to determine the fundamental characteristics of the competitive terrain upon which the television industry operates. However, I attend little to the details of many of these broad, structuring regulatory actions, except in the instances when they particularly affect specific production practices, because they remain consistent throughout the history of broadcasting.

Here, though, I must emphasize the significance of the deregulatory policy that allowed expansive consolidation and conglomeration throughout media industries that the government began implementing at the beginning of the multi-channel transition, even though it is not a topic examined extensively in the book. This policy produced considerable regulatory consequences despite the reduced regulatory influence that the term “de-regulation” might suggest. Most notably, deregulation significantly changed what type of owner predominated throughout the television industry. Ownership of the roughly 1,400 television stations nationwide was substantially consolidated by the networks and a few station groups, while conglomerates also gathered broadcast networks, cable channels, production facilities, and even distribution routes such as cable and satellite providers into common ownership. New media entities were often integrated into these vast media conglomerates—as in the case of the AOL/Time Warner merger—although in many cases the architects of the new media age (Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) and the consumer electronics industry (Sony, Samsung, Panasonic, Apple) remained separate from conglomerates dominating television content (News Corp, Viacom, Time Warner, and Disney) and many other legacy media.

Regulators had the perfect opportunity to intervene in broadcast norms during the digital transition mandated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The forced transition to digital transmission could have allowed Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to revisit the vaguely defined mandate that stations operate in the “public interest, convenience, and necessity” in exchange for the opportunity to use public airwaves to secure billions of dollars in profits, but regulators largely ignored this opportunity. Although regulatory rhetoric might have proclaimed that deregulation would lead to competition, most of the actions of the FCC since the end of the network era have been strongly influenced by the powerful industries the agency was created to regulate.⁶¹ For the most part, the changes in industry operation chronicled here did not result from the competition that deregulation was supposed to inspire; instead, they came largely from the actions of companies outside the FCC’s purview (consumer electronics and computing).

The degree to which the medium and the industry redefined themselves with remarkably little re-regulatory input introduced notable challenges by the late multi-channel transition. The interventions made by the regulatory sector—seen most distinctly in the fin-syn rules (explained in chapter 3), shifting cable policies, and deregulation of ownership—had massive implications for the industry’s operation and in structuring the norms of production. At the same time, the relative swiftness with which production components responded to changes in various production practices decreased the relevance of the lumbering regulatory sector in establishing the regulatory conditions appropriate to emerging post-network norms. Regulators could radically adjust the playing field for the industry at any time—as the intermittent threat of mandating à la carte cable service suggested throughout the mid-2000s—but they seemed unlikely to deviate from the “market-driven” logic underscoring their decisions for the previous two decades—that is, except in the case of content regulation. The developments of the multi-channel transition merited sweeping regulatory action that revisited broadcasting’s regulatory foundations; however, by 2013, regulators had established no clear principles that reflected the substantial industrial adjustments occurring.

Each of the following five chapters focuses on a different aspect of production in order to explain the broad changes that have taken place over the past twenty years, the new norms being established in the post-network era, and why these changes in how television is made affect both the types of programs that are produced and the role of these stories in the culture. The next chapter looks at the changing technologies viewers have used to watch television and how new devices have enabled viewers unprecedented control over how, where, and what they view—and increasingly, to even make their content.