How Politics Imitates Television
This month, FrumForum is celebrating the 40th and 10th anniversaries of two TV events that were, in their wide-ranging effect, as big a "game change" in what we watch as Obama vs. Palin was in politics. Forty years ago, CBS redefined the TV landscape with its notorious 1971 "Rural Purge." Thirty years later in 2001, they "de-seniorized" their again geriatric lineup in favor of gory crime procedurals and "naughty" sitcoms like Two and a Half Men and How I Met Your Mother.
For most of the 1960s, CBS had centered its strength on rural, small-town comedies like The Beverly Hillbillies, The Andy Griffith Show, Green Acres, and Gomer Pyle. Its one main exception in this era, the hot and controversial Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, was swiftly canceled after LBJ and Nixon fumed about the Brothers' outspoken anti-Vietnam war antics to CBS's hierarchy, provoking a fierce and public backlash from TV and film critics and intellectuals. Meanwhile, arch-rival NBC had hip and happening programs like Laugh-In, Dean Martin, and Flip Wilson and urban crime shows like Ironside, and rubbed it in the face of the "Country" Broadcasting System.
Once a few hot new sitcoms with urban themes and stories (All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show) established themselves, along with edgy (for their day) crime shows like Mannix and Hawaii Five-0, CBS finally felt comfortable enough to take the plunge. In September of 1971, CBS "killed everything with a tree in it", according to Green Acres star and B-western legend Pat Buttram.
But it wasn't just the country cousins who were sent to the slag heap. So drastic was the 1971 purge (which ran across all 3 networks) that almost all of what remained of TV's first generation was tossed out, too. Red Skelton, Jackie Gleason, Andy Williams, even Lawrence Welk and Ed Sullivan. (Lucille Ball and Gunsmoke held on for a few more years, and Welk made new shows for syndication until 1982.) Still, as Variety and New York Times critic Les Brown noted, "for many viewers of the hinterlands, it just wouldn't seem like television anymore without Lawrence Welk on Saturday, Ed Sullivan on Sunday, and Mayberry RFD on Monday."
Veteran screenwriter and Police Woman showrunner Larry Brody recalled his hard and fast lesson in the New Economics of Hollywood in his book, Turning Points in Television. Brody, a native of Iowa City, made the mistake of wondering aloud to his bosses, producer David Gerber and Columbia Pictures head Ray Stark, how their shows were doing in his old hometown. "I don't give a f*** about how this show does in Iowa City!" Gerber snarled back at him. "I don't make this show for g*ddamn Iowa City!" He made it, he went on, for "New York, San Francisco, Hollywood, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, and Toronto -- the places that have the money to buy our sponsors' products!" Gerber would only care about Iowa City is if he were sponsored by a tractor company.
The TV audience of the '70s and '80s were still largely made up of families, middle-aged people, and retired stay-at-home seniors. Youthful demographics could help juice the ad price of a show, but it was still the general numbers that counted. And "counter-programming" a hot young show with a show designed to appeal to a totally different audience was a winning strategy.
That would soon change. In 1992, NBC chieftain Warren Littlefield shocked Hollywood when he announced the cancellations of three highly popular and successful NBC shows -- Matlock, In the Heat of the Night and The Golden Girls -- all three of which would move to ABC or CBS for another year (or two or three.) Why would he do this? He was already losing NBC's '80s decade-definer, The Cosby Show. Alex P. Keaton and Family Ties were already gone, and Cheers was only going to go another year. Why take off even more shows when you're losing more than enough?
Even a deaf person could hear the dog whistle. Anybody on the shady side of 55 was now persona non grata at the new NBC. And that was just for starters. When Rupert Murdoch started to build a "fourth network" in 1985, the Big Three couldn't stop laughing at him. But after Married with Children, The Tracey Ullman Show (and its spinoff, a little number called The Simpsons), Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, The X-Files, and Party of Five, the only person left laughing was Murdoch -- all the way to the bank. The other networks were too busy weeping, over their abysmal-by-comparison youth numbers. And it only got worse when The WB launched the white-hot teen starmakers Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dawson's Creek.
By the mid-to-late 1990s, CBS was the only network that wasn't actively tearing its hair out to seek younger, hipper, faster -- to the exclusion of all else. Unfortunately, Madison Avenue "just said no." Old-skewing CBS hits like Murder She Wrote, Touched by an Angel, Dr. Quinn, and Walker Texas Ranger often got considerably higher ratings than their competition -- in general audiences. But the opposing shows usually commanded higher ad rates, based on who was watching them, not how many. And who wasn't.
CBS did score one big victory during that time, though it was soon filed under "pyrrhic." Who was really more likely to lease that Mercedes, Lexus, or Cadillac, to take a Carnival Cruise, or wave their credit card? A 55 or 60-year-old at the top of his salary scale, with six-figure home equity, a dot-com 401K, and the kids out of college -- or some 25- or 30-year old just starting out? Isn't someone at the upper end of middle age (or a Palm Beach or Laguna Niguel retiree) the most valuable viewer of all?
True, Wall Street and Madison Avenue agreed -- IF you're dealing with generic 20-somethings versus generic 50- and 60-somethings. But a 28-year-old Silicon Valleyite or hotshot Wall Streeter, and a 33-year-old junior surgeon or lawyer, would be a lot more likely to head to the Bentley or Porsche showroom than a 58-year-old teacher, policeman, factory worker, nurse, or secretary.
The reaction was even more immediate and intense. Instead of the networks widening their nets, they brutally narrowed them even further, saying a swift goodbye to working-class and minority shows, whether popular (or even young-skewing) or not. Goodbye Roseanne, Al Bundy, Brett Butler, The Wayans Brothers, and Martin Lawrence. Hello The West Wing, Sex and the City, Will & Grace, and the high-techies of CSI (with Desperate Housewives just a few years away). All shows specifically designed to reflect and deliver a disproportionately $100,000-plus, professional profile, as much as for the city-dwelling, 18 to 49 and 25-54 "key demos".
By the end of the '90s, CBS was barely hanging on to its all-but-capsized ship, its ad revenues and big-tent strategy more an object of ridicule than ever. "Totally outmoded" and "antediluvian", sneered Bill Carter in his bestseller Desperate Networks. "A Nielsen survey indicated that the average viewer of Diagnosis Murder died 4 years ago", cracked Conan O'Brien. Then in May of 2000, two low-budget, shot-on-videotape game shows premiered as summer snooze-cruise fare. They were called Survivor and Big Brother. And when CSI instantly became the highest-rated new show of the year after its October 6, 2000 debut -- with the best youth demos CBS had (except for the mega-hit Everybody Loves Raymond) -- the Eye Network finally "pulled the plug on Grandma." By September 2001, Nash Bridges, Walker Texas Ranger, and Diagnosis Murder had flatlined -- and old-fashioned shows like Family Law, That's Life, and Touched by an Angel didn't have much time left.
In the few years following CBS's 2001 "de-seniorization", virtually every major remaining network underwent a floor-to-ceiling "rebrand", too. AMC forfeited it's old black-and-white classics to TCM, and started showing hot new action movies (and later, even hotter series like Mad Men and Breaking Bad). Bravo dumped its high-culture vultures for campy gay reality shows, while it's sister USA rebooted the superficial, slick glory of Charlie's Angels-era ABC with White Collar, Burn Notice, Royal Pains, and In Plain Sight. TVLand and GSN sent their dated 1970s variety and game shows to the "departing contestants" line. A&E ditched highbrow Arts in favor of lurid Entertainment, with all-night marathons of Criminal Minds and CSI Miami and edgy street and addiction documentaries. Even MTV stopped the music in favor of Snooki and True Life.
So, what's the political significance of all of this, you ask? It's huge. The CBS "rural purge" was going on at the precise moment that Democratic strategists like Gary Hart and the late Fred Dutton were dumping thick-necked proletarian "bosses" like Richard Daley, George Meany, and columnist Mike Royko in favor of Gloria Steinem, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Harvey Milk. Their Republican counterparts, Kevin Phillips, Lee Atwater, and a young college activist named Karl Rove, were inventing the notorious "Southern Strategy", when they weren't chasing the Archie Bunkers being dumped by the Dems.
If you think that all that political "re-branding" and purging was mere coincidence -- or took no inspiration from what was going on in movies, TV, and Madison Avenue at the exact same time -- then I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell ya. (One of the biggest bestsellers of 1969-70 was called The Selling of the President.) And in the years since CBS's 2001 "De-Seniorization", the battle lines between old and young, rural and urban, diverse and white, "educated elite" and "real America", and the need to "stay on message", repeat "talking points", and "maintain the BRAND" at all costs, have reached metastatic proportions.
So for better or worse, Happy Anniversary, 1971 "Rural Purge" and 2001 "De-Seniorization". To the twin events that epitomized the moments when the Advertising Age officially took over all dialogue from politics to primetime, from arts to entertainment. To when one stopped defining oneself by what one was, and started defining oneself by what one wasn't. And to an all-encompassing, on-message, target-audience, market-skewed, branding strategy that continues to (mis)shape every aspect of our discourse, in ways that not even that high-demographic hero Don Draper of Mad Men could've dreamt of.
