Inside Prime Time

Todd Gitlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134886586
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Prime time: those precious few hours every night when the three major television networks garner millions of dollars while tens of millions of Americans tune in. Inside Prime Time is a classic study of the workings of the Hollywood television industry, newly available with an updated introduction. Inside Prime Time takes us behind the scenes to reveal how prime-time shows get on the air, stay on the air, and are shaped by the political and cultural climate of their times. It provides an ethnography of the world of American commercial television, an analysis of that world's unwritten rules, and the most extensive study of the industry ever made.

1

NOTHING SUCCEEDS LIKE SUCCESS

CHAPTER 1

The Problem of Knowing

Everywhere we see signs of perplexity about why television has become what it is. Popular culture even treats us to devil theories to explain network decisions that seem otherwise unfathomable. A TV Guide cover story proclaims that Hollywood producers bribe network executives with cocaine to get shows on the air. Then the media chortle about ABC’s brief employment of a psychic as a programming consultant. The desire to find a method in network madness runs strong, even if the answers are often simplistic and farfetched. Part of the fascination is that Hollywood radiates a cultural power eerily beyond human scale or comprehension. It is the fountainhead of what immortality our culture affords. The very look of the place—spectacular picture palaces, little clumps of corporate towers rising out of nowhere—was shaped to suit the myth; so is the look of so many industry people, with their face-lifts and their shirts unbuttoned to the navel. It is not for nothing that Hollywood’s prize adjective is “fabulous.” Even the very word “Hollywood” once evoked a fantasy of Nature. In this collective second nature of ours, the seedbed of national myth still sprawls in sundrenched opulence, unpolluted by real-world smog. No wonder the religious metaphors come rushing in. The blacklisted writer Alvah Bessie entitled his memoir Inquisition in Eden. The spectacle of innocence corrupted is necessarily a large theme in a culture founded with a title to divine Providence despite much evidence to the contrary.

But the underside of the myth is corruption, failure, treachery. L.A.’s look seems prefabricated to suit that side of the myth, too: the otherworldly brilliant blue jacaranda trees blooming in lush spring light, under a canopy of suffocating smog the color of cardboard; the verdant expanse of the hills dotted with tacky mansions in styles—one mansion, one style—chosen by major and minor moguls whose very style was stylelessness. Hollywood’s glamor has always been tainted by a popular suspicion that the cultural powers-that-be are men of low appetites and malignant influence. If intellectuals and know-nothings can share nothing else, they can share the belief that the Garden is run by serpents, that Eden is a suburb of Sodom and Gomorrah. (In the Bible Belt, the emphasis is on the fact that Hollywood, like Eden and Sodom and Gomorrah, is controlled by Jews.) Hollywood folklore, enshrined in best-selling memoirs, thrives on tales of the great and the innocent—from F.Scott Fitzgerald to Marilyn Monroe and Ingrid Bergman—who poured out of the provinces only to lose their virtue. Good men break like reeds; good girls go bad; the wise, like Faulkner and Garbo, get out while the getting is good. Where innocence and money meet, there is the stuff not only of dreams but of betrayals—even self-betrayals. Every Jesus his own Judas. In popular imagination, Hollywood is not only part Eden and part Sodom, but part Golgotha.

In this lush landscape of myth, scandal, and rumor, the workings of prime-time TV remain mysterious. In a way, popular confusion mirrors the networks’ own uncertainty about what might actually succeed. Inside the industry as well as outside, theories abound, most as farfetched as any about cocaine or psychics. If they are so farfetched, though, it’s because the workings of the system are so opaque, even to insiders, the decisions apparently so arbitrary, the errors so abundant and visible, the products seemingly so inexplicable.

If knowledgeable people have to resort to voodoo predictions and improbable conspiracy theories to make sense of the enterprise, then how does a prime-time show actually get on the air? As I repeated this naïve question, I sometimes heard a cut-and-dried answer. Each network contains an entertainment division, within which there are development departments for drama, comedy, and movies for television. They plant ideas for shows with producers, or with the major suppliers—studios and production companies—who hire the right producers and writers for the project; and they take ideas—“pitches”—directly from writers and producers. If they think the characters, the relationships, the premises will resonate with a mass audience, they underwrite a script. If they like the script, the heads of the network entertainment division give the go-ahead to shoot a pilot. Of some three thousand ideas floated each year, about a hundred will go to script, of which perhaps twenty-five will go to pilot. These are cast, shot, and tested, and then, each spring, the entertainment-division executives, with other top network executives, meet in marathon session to look at the pilots and put together the new schedule. At each network, five or ten new shows will get on the air; in the fall of 1981, for example, the three networks placed a total of twenty new series on their schedules. At each network, one or two shows will stay on long enough to be renewed for a second season. Each filtration step, in other words, screens by a factor of five, or ten, or thirty. My task, then, was to try to understand the principles, the unwritten rules and values that govern the filters.

This is, of course, a very schematic way of describing any organization’s selection process. As I began to brood over the patterns, if indeed there were any, I was struck by a different response I kept getting in interviews with network executives, producers, writers, and others in and around the industry. Often I began an interview by saying that I was trying to understand how decisions got made about what to put on the air. There was one initial response that I heard so frequently it amused me at first, and later I came to expect it. It was usually said with a smile. “If you figure it out, please let me know”; or “I’ve been in this business X years, and I don’t understand it.” Grant Tinker said it: He had been an advertising-agency executive, then an executive at NBC, the husband of a star, the head of a major production company, and subsequently chairman of the board of NBC, and here he was telling me he didn’t know how the business worked. Brandon Stoddard, who was in charge of ABC’s movies for TV, said it. David Rintels, who wrote Fear on Trial, Gideon’s Trumpet, and many other shows, said, “I hope you can explain it to me.”

Now, lower-level managers tended toward schematic answers about orderly processes: This, this, and this happens; then So-and-so decides such-and-such, taking into account factors X, Y, and Z. Possibly these less experienced people believed that the network organization chart was an accurate description of reality; possibly, too, they were at pains to make sure that what an interloping writer heard was the party line. Younger, brasher executives were belligerent and defensive. “If I didn’t know what I was doing,” one told me, “they wouldn’t be paying me all the money they’re paying me.” But the more powerful the executives, the more prestigious or experienced the television writers, the more likely it was that they would tell me there was no pattern to television planning.

It was not the first time I had heard such answers. When I was interviewing reporters and TV news producers for an earlier book, I heard similar affirmations of innocence and puzzlement. But at least at the higher command levels of news I often heard language that laid claim to clarity, firm-sounding phrases referring to “objective coverage” of “newsworthy events,” “news judgments” about events that were “interesting” and “important.” In the world of television entertainment, by contrast, the higher I got, the more likely I was to hear important people half-joke that they couldn’t explain how their business operated.

The joke, if it was a joke, was disarming, and this was possibly one of its functions, a gesture of concealment, a way of protecting power from prying eyes. Yet it is also the characteristic defense of professionals to deny that there is method in their decision-making. This might seem to violate the conventional wisdom that a professional is a person whose training imparts knowledge that the professional systematically applies to the solution of problems; but the apparent violation dissolves when we realize that the professional’s deeper claim to privileged status—deeper than any general knowledge—is prowess, or wisdom, or “feel,” a personal quality gained from experience and grafted onto the principles and practices of the profession, a mystery that permits him or her to make right judgments under difficult practical circumstances.

Still, there is an important difference between the doctor’s or lawyer’s claim that artistry overlays the science of his or her work, and the network executive’s profession of ignorance; for real doubt exists about what it is a TV executive knows. This uncertainty is linked with a more general uncertainty about how to proceed in a business that offers so little firm grounding in ethics, aesthetics, or rationality. It’s as if every day the executive contemplates his smooth secretaries, his tasteful sofas, his telephone extensions scattered about the room, the plants that bloom in his office of perpetual spring. He absorbs the imposing view from his corner window; “takes a meeting” with subordinates; watches the phone messages pile up, pleased that he is more called upon than he needs to call; sees the scripts and cassettes arrive; knows that shows are being produced, getting on the air, getting numbers if not praise or praise if not numbers—and then tells himself that he must know something, even if he is not quite sure what it is he knows.

Scott Siegler, who when I interviewed him was CBS vice-president for drama development (later head of comedy there, and later still a development executive at Warner Brothers), speaks of an executive pragmatism that interweaves precedent and intuition: “Because it’s a mass audience—it’s an unimaginably large audience—the audience tastes are so diffused and so general that you’ve got to be guessing. You can work off precedents about what’s worked on television before. You can work off whatever smattering of sociological information you gleaned from whatever sources. You can let your personal judgments enter into it to some extent…. [You can ask whether] this is something that people in Georgia or Nebraska will appreciate because they’ll be able to translate it into their understanding. But you never really know. And there are so many variables in programming that even when you’ve reached a pretty general consensus about a genre not working or a kind of attitude not working, you can never quite be sure that that rule applies.” So many factors bear, imponderably, on a show’s prospects: casting, “look,” “feel,” time slot, lead-in, competition, the network’s demographics. These complications, Siegler says, are “what makes the whole thing very precise and very empirical, and at the same time totally absurd and unpredictable.”

To manage the flux of possibilities, the networks breed notions about live or dead genres, doomed formats, cycles that come and go. For instance, one axiom network executives now hear, says Scott Siegler, is that “single-woman leads don’t work on hour-long dramatic television. Or science fiction doesn’t work on television. Or black leading men don’t work on television, in the hour form. Or the variety genre is dead. There are countless axioms that you hear in programming, and I think the one thing that you begin to learn is that all those axioms really represent are precedents that have been set, but not necessarily rules that work.”

Network lore is momentary. Sooner or later exceptions are the rule. For all the talk about trends, says CBS old hand Herman Keld, “I’ve never met anyone who knew what was going to happen two seconds from now.” The axioms, in short, are flimsy, flexible, ad hoc. This is exactly what makes them useful as a common currency of network talk. Network executives distrust them and rely on them at the same time. They are, among other things, polite ways of telling a writer, “No thanks.” Writers and producers watch their ideas get rejected in the name of axioms, but never know when the old ones might get exploded by exceptions and new ones dropped into their place. The writer David Rintels is reminded of the lore at the boarding school he went to: “There are no rules until they’re broken.”

In the end, TV executives are left with themselves, with their irreducible power over the airwaves. The audience’s time, the commodity executives sell to advertisers, is also their enemy. The hours tick off; the schedule has to be filled. Sooner or later they have to decide what no precise formulas can decide for them. There is no articulated agreement about standards. Conventions there are aplenty, but they are matters of habit more than belief. They do not rest on firm values; they are not deeply rooted in a cultural tradition. The conventions persist, in short, by being applied, and the executive’s job is precisely to keep them alive by calling up precedents. To do this, executives learn to heed the institutional voice. If they pos sess any distinct taste, aside from a relish for show-business glitter, they have to dispel or subdue it. To keep taste and market judgment separate is “professional.”

“When your taste matters, you’re finished in television,” says Paul Klein, the flamboyant former programming chief at NBC. Gerald Jaffe, NBC’s vice-president for research projects, stresses that television is after all only another business. “Most people do not put on television what they personally like any more than executives in Detroit make cars that they personally like, any more than movie moguls make movies they personally like.” Stu Sheslow, the wisecracking vice-president for dramatic development at NBC, a former toy-company executive, delighted in a Bruce Springsteen cassette he clicked on at the end of our interview. “Rock’s what’s happening,” he chortled, “but put it on television and it’d get an eight share.” Jonathan Axelrod, vice-president at ABC before he moved through the industry revolving door to Columbia Pictures’ television division, said he sometimes developed shows he had no personal interest in seeing, but anytime he liked a show he also thought it would draw a mass audience. In effect he saw himself as an instrument of the popular will, or had transformed himself into that. This fusion is accomplished with more or less ease by different executives, but accomplish it they all must.

A taste for the slick, the sentimental, and the melodramatic is normal in America; what is illuminating is the transition to it. Stu Sheslow’s friend and CBS counterpart Scott Siegler represented an outer limit of taste in television’s small world. In his early thirties and looking younger, he studded his conversation with quotations from Wordsworth and other luminaries. He once won a poetry award, started on a doctorate with Marshall McLuhan, worked on antiwar and prisoners’-rights documentaries, won an Emmy for a documentary on Appalachian snake-handlers. He went to L.A. to learn about movies and make some money, won a fellowship for directing at the American Film Institute, and worked in low-budget features like many would-be filmmakers looking for the main chance—until he needed more money and landed a job at NBC’s Current Drama department, where future executives are groomed. “I was approving stories, looking at dailies, working on publicity and promotion,” he recalls. “I feel my personal tastes are different from the public’s. The first couple of shows I was assigned to, I read scripts and I said, ‘I can’t believe this.’ It was all abysmal. I went to Brandon Tartikoff, who was head of West Coast programming. He said, ‘You’re not doing feature films anymore, you’re doing TV.’ I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to be a highbrow anymore.’”

Network executives often say that their problem is simple. Their tradition, in a sense, is the search for steady profits. They want, above all, to put on the air shows best calculated to accumulate maximum reliable audiences. Maximum audiences attract maximum dollars for advertisers, and advertiser dollars are, after all, the network’s objective. (Network executives recite the point so predictably, so confidently, they sound like vulgar Marxists.) Quality and explicit ideology count for very little. But to desire profits is one thing, to procure them something else. The networks’ problem is how to keep accumulating those profitable audiences, to keep people coming back, to ensure that they will be a receptive audience rather than a self-determining public. In a word, the network’s problem is how to get people to rely on the networks. And the solution is not obvious. All sales organizations face a certain risk, for their targets may not want the commodities being offered. As biological creatures, no one needs toothpaste, let alone Crest; automobiles, let alone Pontiacs; movies, let alone Star Wars; television, let alone Dallas. That is why all modern corporations must develop strategies to shape and mobilize effective demand. To put it this way is to realize that the networks’ task is not accomplished simply by avowing the goal of profit. They are still thrown back on a problem of knowledge.

How to know which shows will work? This necessary and elusive knowledge wells up in a context: In an economy devoted to selling, programs must be aids to selling; they must be compatible with the main contours of American popular culture; and they must suit the television set, a home appliance. Nature does not decree the future tastes of the American people. Information does not arrive naked and unambiguous; the facts, the numbers, never speak for themselves. Network knowledge is learned, debated, interpreted within a world view, a more or less systematic style of thought. The networks are like other large enterprises. There is a common ethos and a defining spirit, a command structure that systematically rewards and punishes for mastering the system’s rules, that imposes its own style of thought on its recruits. In the television networks, as in the other centers of what Hans Magnus Enzensberger has called “the consciousness industry,” part of this style of thought is the denial of it: the insistence that each executive asserts individual taste, judgment, and sense. In journalism, in academia, in advertising, the implication is always: If there is no uniform system, then I, this unique human, am central. My power, my perks, my income, the deference talented and glamorous people pay me, are all justified. This stance is especially strong in a go-go cultural industry like TV that depends on irregular, unreliable commercial assessments of what the traffic will bear.

Over and over again, when I asked executives which factors weighed most heavily in putting shows on the air, keeping them there, shaping their content, I heard a standardized list. At the top, the appeal of actors and characters. The reliability of producers, the track records of writers. Then the mysteries: whether a concept was “special,” “different,” “unique,” even (wonder of wonders) “very unique”; whether a show had “chemistry”; whether it “clicked”; whether “it all came together.” Such terms cannot be pinned down, and that is precisely their utility. They preserve the sense that executives, with their unique talents and experience, are necessary...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to The Routledge Edition
• Frontmatter
• Prologue
• 1 Nothing Succeeds Like Success
• Chapter 1 The Problem of Knowing
• Chapter 2 Predicting the Unpredictable
• Chapter 3 By the Numbers
• Chapter 4 Making Schedules
• Chapter 5 The Triumph of the Synthetic Spinoffs, Copies, Recombinant Culture
• Chapter 6 "Another American Dream Gone Astray"
• 2 The Television-Industrial Complex
• Chapter 7 Inside Tracks in a Small World
• Chapter 8 The Deal Is the Art Form
• Chapter 9 Movies of the Week
• 3 The Politics of Prime Time
• Chapter 10 The Turn Toward "Relevance"
• Chapter 11 Shifting Right Yesterday's Vietnam, Today's FBI
• Chapter 12 The "Far Righteous" Shake the Temple of Commerce
• Chapter 13 The Temple Stands
• Chapter 14 Hill Street Blues "Make It Look Messy"
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index