6.1/The Lived Worlds/Television

The Inherited Medium

What the Networks Could Not Own

Into this arrangement, in September 1989, TV Guide put two faces on the same cover: Bill Cosby’s and Roseanne Barr’s, the stars of the country’s two highest-rated programs.³ The magazine had been the largest-circulation weekly in America for two decades running, though by the previous winter its own numbers had slid to 16.3 million, down from more than 18 million in the late 1970s.⁴ Cosby, on NBC Thursdays at eight, and Roseanne, on ABC, closed the 1989–90 season tied at the top of the Nielsen chart, each at a 23.1 rating — the same number, to the decimal, for two shows built for opposite audiences, and neither show’s own network stood to keep a cent of what its reruns would eventually earn.⁵

Fewer than three in five American households had cable television at all; wired-cable penetration stood at 59.7 percent nationally that November.⁶ The three networks that reached the rest of the country organized the week into fixed, named hours: Thursday belonged to Cosby, and, later that same evening, to Cheers; Sunday at nine was Murder, She Wrote. A magazine or newspaper’s fall-preview issue was itself a small industry, printed and read the way a school calendar is read, because the schedule genuinely was the calendar — there was no other way to encounter most of what it listed.

Critics covered this machine as craft, not as literature. Tom Shales at the Washington Post and Walter Goodman at the New York Times reviewed television with the vocabulary of production values and performance, not the vocabulary reserved for a serious book or a serious film; a television critic’s byline ran in the back of a paper, seldom the front of a magazine, and a general-interest magazine typically had no such byline at all — the beat, where it existed, belonged to whoever already covered movies. A new hour from the film director David Lynch, adapted for the same medium, was already being talked about ahead of its spring premiere as something that might not fit the old vocabulary at all.

Nielsen’s own numbers were the currency this whole arrangement traded in: a rating point translated into a dollar figure an advertiser paid for a thirty-second unit inside that hour, which was why the half-decimal difference between a 23.1 and whatever finished eleventh mattered enormously to people who had never watched either program. A magazine’s circulation audit ran on a slower cycle by comparison — subscribers counted twice a year, households counted overnight — but television and print were competing for the same advertisers’ budgets.

The Full School Year

Beneath the schedule sat an economics that had nothing to do with quality and everything to do with the calendar of a school year. A syndicated program sold to individual stations, rather than a network, needed sixty-five episodes to run one per weekday for thirteen weeks without a single repeat — one full academic quarter, four times over, before the same episode came around again.⁷ Studios built their production orders around that number for exactly this reason: fewer episodes meant reruns inside a single season, which weakened a station’s willingness to pay for the package at all.

The number governed a studio’s math from the start. A network licensed an episode for less than it cost to make, and the studio covered the gap itself, betting the loss back against a later payday: years of reruns, sold market by market once the network run ended, syndicated overseas, repeated on stations that had never paid a cent toward the original production. A show that reached its sixty-five, and then kept going, could turn that early deficit into the only real profit its owners ever saw from it. A show cancelled short of the number generally repaid nobody.

The math applied as much to a half-hour game show or a syndicated talk program as to an afterschool cartoon; the sixty-five-episode threshold was a rerun-syndication convention, not a genre rule, because the underlying arithmetic — a station’s willingness to pay for a package deep enough to run without repeats — did not care what filled the half-hour. What it required, in every genre, was that enough individual stations agree to clear the same time slot for the same show, market by market, before a syndicator could sell it as a single national package at all; a show cleared in the largest markets but not the mid-sized ones sold for a fraction of what a full clearance brought in.

The system began to erode not on a single day but across several years. Cable channels aimed at children — Nickelodeon, then Cartoon Network from 1992, then Fox Kids — offered advertisers a rival buy that did not depend on any station’s willingness to clear a syndicated half-hour at all, and by the back half of the 1990s the after-school and Saturday-morning hours that had supported the syndication model for two decades were worth less to buy and harder to fill.

The City’s Own Channels

The national schedule was only part of what a New York television set received. The city’s dial carried six commercial VHF stations plus a public one — more over-the-air choice than nearly any other American market — and three of the six were not network stations at all.⁸ WPIX, channel 11, and WWOR, channel 9, were independents, and they filled the hours a network would have filled with prime time by running movies, syndicated reruns, and baseball: WPIX had carried Yankees games since the earliest years of the franchise’s television history, and WWOR, broadcasting from studios in Secaucus, New Jersey, carried the Mets. An independent’s afternoon and evening were a local institution in a way a network affiliate’s could not be — the station itself chose what ran, and a generation of the city’s children learned the Honeymooners’ 39 episodes from channel 11’s rotations rather than from any network.

The local news those stations and their network siblings produced was a New York invention exported to the rest of the country. WABC, channel 7, had built the Eyewitness News format at the end of the 1960s under the news director Al Primo: the reporters who covered the stories appeared on camera to tell them, the anchors spoke to one another between items, and the whole broadcast moved at a pace the older single-anchor newscast never attempted.⁹ By 1989 the format’s descendants ran in every American city, but the original was still on at six and eleven on channel 7. WNYW, channel 5, held its news at ten instead, opening with a question the station had been posing to parents since the late 1960s — whether they knew where their children were — and owning the hour before the other stations’ late newscasts began.

The people who read that news held their chairs for decades, and the city treated them accordingly. Chuck Scarborough had anchored at WNBC, channel 4, since 1974; Sue Simmons sat beside him at eleven for most of two decades, and fronted the station’s Live at Five broadcast besides. Bill Beutel had anchored channel 7’s evening news since the format’s early years. Warner Wolf ran the sports desk with a catchphrase — “let’s go to the videotape” — that the city repeated back to him.¹⁰ A network anchor addressed the nation; a local anchor was a neighbor with better diction, encountered nightly for twenty years, and the eleven o’clock broadcast he or she closed — the fires, the mayor, the Yankees, the weather for the morning commute — was the last thing much of the city saw before sleep.

In the fall of 1992 the city acquired a channel that did nothing else. NY1 News, launched by Time Warner’s New York City cable operation, ran local news twenty-four hours a day to the city’s cable subscribers, and it ran on a staffing model the established stations did not use: the “video journalist,” one person who reported, shot, wrote, and edited the story alone, without a separate camera crew — which cost a fraction of a conventional crew and let the channel post reporters to individual boroughs as standing beats.¹¹ The channel gave the weather at fixed minutes past the hour and covered the city’s government with a patience the eleven o’clock broadcasts could not afford. It reached only the cable households of the five boroughs, and that was the point: it was the first channel in the city’s history whose entire editorial subject was the city.

Sports had its own cable arithmetic. The Madison Square Garden Network carried the Knicks and the Rangers from the building it was named for, and at the end of the 1980s the Yankees signed with MSG a cable contract reported near half a billion dollars over a dozen years — a sum that moved most of the team’s games off free television and onto a channel a household paid to receive.¹² SportsChannel carried the Mets’ cable package alongside the Islanders, the Devils, and the Nets. The broadcast independents kept a package of over-the-air games each season, so a Yankees or Mets game remained something a family without cable could watch — but fewer of them each year, and the shift of a city’s baseball from the free dial to the wire, decided team by team and contract by contract, went through the same arithmetic that governed everything else in the decade’s television: a devoted audience, counted precisely, was worth more sold directly than given away.

The Audience the Meters Missed

Two more stations sat higher on the dial, licensed across the Hudson and watched in the city. WXTV, channel 41, licensed to Paterson, New Jersey, was the New York station of Univision, the country’s largest Spanish-language network; WNJU, channel 47, licensed in New Jersey as well, belonged to Telemundo, the second network, which had been assembled in the mid-1980s with WNJU as a founding station.¹³ Between them they broadcast to a Spanish-speaking population in the New York area that numbered in the millions — Puerto Rican neighborhoods established for two generations, a Dominican Washington Heights growing through the whole period, Colombians and Ecuadorians in Queens — and for a large share of those households the two channels were not a supplement to American television but the whole of it.

The programming ran on a different grammar than the English-language networks’. The telenovela, the form that filled Univision’s prime time, was a serial with an ending: it ran nightly, five nights a week, for months, and then finished, its close an event scheduled and advertised in advance. The novelas were mostly imports from Televisa, the Mexican network that part-owned Univision, and their leads were stars of a celebrity culture that the English-language press did not cover and their audience did not need it to. Saturday nights belonged to Sábado Gigante, a variety marathon of games, contests, music, and audience pieces, hosted by the Chilean broadcaster Don Francisco and produced in Miami from the mid-1980s — a single program that ran for hours and held its slot through the entire period.¹⁴ Univision’s daytime carried El Show de Cristina, the talk hour of Cristina Saralegui, and from 1994 Primer Impacto, a fast newsmagazine that moved crime, immigration, and spectacle at a pace the evening noticiero did not.

The noticiero itself was the load-bearing hour. Univision’s national newscast, anchored from Miami by Jorge Ramos and María Elena Salinas, covered Latin America as a home region rather than a foreign desk — a Mexican election or a Caribbean hurricane led the broadcast because much of the audience had family in it — and the local newscasts on 41 and 47 covered the city’s immigration offices, its consulates, its bodega robberies and rent strikes, in the language of the households those stories happened to. For an immigrant city inside the larger city, the six o’clock noticiero did the civic work the eleven o’clock news did elsewhere on the dial, and it did it for an audience that the rest of the industry had trouble seeing.

The trouble was partly a measurement problem. Nielsen’s standard local samples and diary methods had long undercounted Spanish-speaking households, and through the 1980s the Spanish-language stations were effectively invisible in the ratings currency the advertising business traded in; in the early 1990s Nielsen introduced a separate metered index for Hispanic households, and the numbers it produced showed audiences that the older method had missed.¹⁵ By the closing years of the decade, WXTV’s newscasts were at times drawing more of the young-adult audience in New York than the English-language stations they ran against — a ranking that would once have been dismissed as a sampling error, now printed in the same trade papers that ranked everything else.¹⁶ The advertising rates never caught up to the audience within the period; a viewer counted late was a viewer discounted. But the size of the thing was no longer deniable, and it had been there, watching channels 41 and 47, all along.

The Rule Behind the Schedule

The rule that kept a studio’s later payday out of a network’s hands survived two decades of network lobbying before it began to give way. A divided FCC, split three to two, eased the restrictions in April 1991, letting the networks hold a limited financial stake in some of what they aired.¹⁷ Two years later the FCC and the Justice Department went further, clearing away most of what remained and leaving only a set of older antitrust consent decrees — restrictions the networks had separately accepted in the late 1970s, written to mirror the FCC’s own rule — as the last barrier standing.¹⁸ Those consent decrees expired on September 21, 1995, weeks ahead of their own scheduled deadline.¹⁹ A network could now own, outright, the equity in the shows that carried its name, and could keep a program’s syndication revenue for itself rather than watching it flow entirely to a studio three thousand miles away.

The Year of the Conglomerates

The rule’s disappearance did not by itself cause what followed — the merger wave had already started moving before the last consent decree expired, driven as much by cable’s growing bite into network audiences as by any change in Washington — but it removed one of the last obstacles to a network owning its own supply chain, and owners moved quickly once it was gone.

Sumner Redstone’s Viacom had already spent five months outbidding QVC for Paramount Communications, its tender offer closing in February 1994 at $107 a share.²⁰ Eighteen months later, over two consecutive days at the turn of August, two of the surviving three networks changed hands. On July 31, 1995, the Walt Disney Company agreed to acquire Capital Cities/ABC for nineteen billion dollars, the second-largest corporate acquisition in American history to that date and the largest ever inside the media business; the deal closed the following February.²¹ The next morning, Westinghouse Electric announced it would buy CBS outright for $5.4 billion, at $81 a share, combining Westinghouse’s own television and radio station groups with CBS’s into a single company whose two station groups each reached roughly a third of American households; that sale closed by Thanksgiving.²² Time Warner announced its own acquisition of Ted Turner’s cable empire that September, a $7.5 billion stock deal that brought CNN, TBS, and the Atlanta Braves under the same roof as HBO and Time; the Federal Trade Commission required the combined company to restructure some of its cable holdings before clearing the deal the following September, and the merger itself closed on October 10, 1996.²³²⁴

Congress caught up to the industry rather than leading it. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed by President Clinton on February 8, 1996, raised the cap on how much of the national television audience one owner could reach from twenty-five to thirty-five percent of households, and eliminated the national ownership cap on radio stations outright — a single company had previously been restricted to roughly forty stations nationwide.¹ The Act’s clearest force fell on radio, not television: the big network mergers had already been negotiated in the year before it was signed. Clear Channel Communications, a company that had owned fewer than fifty stations in 1995, completed a $23.5 billion purchase of AMFM Inc. in August 2000, adding more than four hundred stations in a single transaction and putting more than eleven hundred stations under one owner.²⁵

The Audience That Left

By the time the Telecommunications Act reorganized who could own what, the audience that made ownership worth fighting over was already smaller, and more divided, than it had been in 1989. Seinfeld’s two-part finale, on May 14, 1998, drew seventy-six million viewers — a number no comedy or drama approached again before the decade ended, and one that belonged to a kind of television event that was itself becoming rare.²⁶ Three networks had reached most of the country in 1989; by the century’s final years, six broadcast networks and dozens of cable channels split the same national audience, none commanding the share any one network had commanded a decade earlier.

Two developments compounded the split. Internet advertising, negligible in 1994, was drawing measurable dollars away from broadcast and print budgets alike by the last years of the decade, before a stock-market collapse beginning in March 2000 wiped out much of the online advertising money that had briefly seemed like a rescue for everyone else’s shrinking share. And a new economics was quietly proving itself on cable, where a subscription channel needed only a fraction of a network audience to justify a show’s budget — the first sign that owning a smaller, devoted audience could be worth more than chasing a bigger one that no longer existed to be caught.

The two forces were connected rather than coincidental. The same conglomerates that had spent 1995 and 1996 buying broadcast networks for their mass reach were, by the decade’s final years, also building or acquiring the cable channels whose economics ran on the opposite premise — a premise nobody inside the rooms that negotiated the Disney-ABC or Time Warner-Turner deals had priced into the number on the table, because the nineteen billion dollars on offer in 1995 was still, unmistakably, a bid for the mass audience and nothing smaller.