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You've Come a Long Way Since Harriet Nelson, Baby
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12723 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1987 |
5,417 Words |
| Author
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Ben Stein
Ben Stein is a writer, lawyer, economist, and actor living in
Malibu, California. |
About ten years ago, a sea change came over American prime-time television. The once monolithic audience representing every stratum of American life began, slowly but surely, to disintegrate. Though network prime-time shows once commanded audiences of almost 90 percent of all viewers, the onset of cable, more independent stations, VCRs, and general revulsion with programming created a new environment. The better educated, more well-to-do had cable and watched movies. The more cinematic still rented cassettes and showed themselves films at home.
Escape Artists
Other segments of viewers turned to game shows and sports on independent stations. Younger viewers turned themselves into addicts of MTV ("Money for nothing, and the chicks for free," as some said.)
By the late 1970s, the prime-time audience comprised about 70 percent of the viewers, and they were largely a new kind of viewer.
Middle-class moms and dads had tended to leave the audience. Welfare mothers stayed. Men generally began to leave, especially if they were well off. Black preschoolers stayed. Well-to-do teenagers vanished. Latchkey children of single mothers tuned in. Well-heeled older Americans turned to books or cable. Less well-off widows stayed loyal to the networks.
All of these changes were trends and tendencies only, but they were distinctly visible to the people who sold time, the people who bought time, and the people who made and bought programming. The task of the networks was complex by the late 1970s. They had to keep the viewers they had, by then predominantly female, not wealthy, and less educated. But they also had to fight back to try to lure the male audience, especially high-status males, and most of all, they had to show the advertisers that they could lure back to the fold the big spending, detergent-buying, middle-class women who kept networks solvent.
For several years after the problems appeared, the networks had only a vague idea of how to resolve them. The same old sitcoms did not work and neither did the usual television staple of squealing car tires and bloodless shootouts.
The in 1978, a former advertising man named Lee Rich came to CBS with a new idea. It would be a prime-time soap opera, set among the rich of Texas, and it would be called Dallas.
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