6.5/The Lived Worlds/Television

Cable: The Dial and the Bet, 1989–2001

The Stations That Could Say No

That network, the WB, launched January 11, 1995, with The Wayans Bros.; Jamie Kellner, who had run Fox’s own launch a decade earlier, built the schedule around teenagers and young adults, with a Saturday-morning block for four-to-twelve-year-olds carrying the family name.³ United Paramount Network answered five days later with a two-hour Star Trek: Voyager pilot that drew 21.3 million viewers — a number the show never came near again — and then spent the rest of the decade leaning on the same franchise for an identity nobody at the network had settled on at launch: a Star Trek series was reliable enough to build a schedule around, but it was not, by itself, a reason for anyone outside the franchise’s own audience to keep the channel on. The identity that eventually stuck arrived mid-decade and sideways, built around Black-cast sitcoms — Moesha in 1996, The Hughleys in 1998, The Parkers in 1999 — until UPN was the second-most-watched network in the country among Black viewers specifically, a distinction that did nothing for its ratings everywhere else and nothing to change the arithmetic underneath it.⁴ Neither network turned the corner the affiliate war implied. UPN alone had lost more than eight hundred million dollars within its first five years on the air.⁵

In June 1997, UPN’s own president arrived at a meeting of the station owners who carried its programming wearing a piece of jewelry built to look wounded: a brooch shaped like a cartoon frog in a top hat, a stake through its chest, a bead of red enamel standing in for blood.⁶ Lucie Salhany, running the network since the fall of 1994, had picked the frog on purpose. Michigan J. Frog was the WB’s mascot, and the WB had been out-recruiting her network for affiliate stations since the two had gone on the air five days apart.⁷ She left UPN three months later, her contract expiring amid a dispute with Paramount’s own executives, and the brooch outlived her tenure as the trade press’s shorthand for how personal the rivalry between two barely profitable networks had gotten.

The Dial Fills In

Cable’s own multiplication had started before either network signed on the air and kept going without them. MTV answered a documentary format nobody had revived in twenty years: The Real World, produced by Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray on a premise borrowed from the PBS series An American Family, put seven strangers in their twenties into a SoHo loft at Broadway and Prince, filmed what they did with each other from February to May 1992, and put the first episode on the air that May 21st — a format a decade of imitators then spent copying.⁸ Beavis and Butt-Head, MTV’s animated hit, ran into a harder test the following autumn: a mother in Moraine, Ohio said her five-year-old son had set the family’s mobile home on fire on October 6, 1993, a month after an episode called “Comedians” — the one she named — had aired, killing his two-year-old sister. MTV pulled the episodes already airing that referenced fire, scrubbed the same references out of reruns already sitting in the vault, and pushed the show’s timeslot several hours later into the evening, a scheduling concession that conceded nothing about whether the mother’s account was accurate.⁹

MTV filled its own late-night hour the same way, with an animation showcase called Liquid Television that ran from 1991 to 1995 and existed less to be watched in its own right than to launch whatever grew out of it. Mike Judge brought an eight-hundred-dollar short called Frog Baseball to the showcase and left with a thirty-five-episode order and a seven-figure budget for Beavis and Butt-Head; the same showcase also produced Æon Flux, a nearly wordless action serial whose heroine died at the end of nearly every segment and was alive again for the next one.¹⁰ When Beavis and Butt-Head’s own run wound down, two writers who had worked on it, Glenn Eichler and Susie Lewis Lynn, spun off Daria in 1997 for a deliberately different audience — smarter, more female, unwilling to laugh at the same jokes the original show’s fans had — proof that the niche argument cable ran on could subdivide even a single network’s own hit into two incompatible ones.¹⁰ MTV’s own daily talk hour, hosted by a young stand-up comedian named Jon Stewart, had already tried the format’s other extreme and failed at it: The Jon Stewart Show premiered on the network in 1993, moved into daily broadcast syndication under Paramount a year later, and was cancelled in June 1995 for an audience the format itself never located.¹¹

Comedy Central’s own founding ran through two failed channels before it became one durable one. HBO’s parent company launched the Comedy Channel on November 15, 1989 — a network built entirely around stand-up and sketch reruns — and Viacom answered five months later with Ha!, built on sitcom reruns instead. The two merged on April 1, 1991, and renamed themselves Comedy Central two months after that, once a Canadian broadcaster already using their first choice objected.¹² The new channel spent its early years padding a schedule around whatever comedy already existed on tape — Mystery Science Theater 3000 reruns, a game show called Win Ben Stein’s Money, a low-budget therapy-office cartoon named Dr. Katz — before Bill Maher’s panel show Politically Incorrect, launched in 1993, gave it a program people who did not already love stand-up reruns had a reason to find.¹³ In the spring of 1996, the channel picked up a cartoon pilot from two Colorado animators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, about four foul-mouthed third-graders, after Fox — a network that had spent its first decade daring the other three to match its own appetite for offense — passed on it as too much even by its own standard.¹⁴ By 1998 the channel had reached more than half of American television households, on the strength of exactly this kind of accretion rather than any single hit.¹³ The channel’s real signature hour arrived on July 22, 1996, when Craig Kilborn, a former sportscaster, began reading pop-culture stories as fake news; the man whose own MTV talk show had failed three years earlier, Jon Stewart, took the desk on January 11, 1999, and pointed the format at Washington instead of the tabloids.¹⁵

Around the two comedy networks, smaller bets accumulated on narrower premises. Bravo had been carrying serious arts programming to a modest subscriber base since 1980 and stayed there for most of the period. The Independent Film Channel went on the air September 1, 1994, a Cablevision subsidiary’s wager that an audience existed willing to pay a channel just to leave commercial-free independent film alone; Robert Redford put his own name behind a second such wager on February 1, 1996, when the Sundance Channel launched as a joint venture with Showtime and PolyGram.¹⁶ Nickelodeon’s Nick at Nite, on the air since July 1, 1985, had already spent most of the decade running a smaller, quieter version of the same trick for a different generation: reselling Mary Tyler Moore and The Dick Van Dyke Show reruns to the parents of the children watching Nickelodeon by day.¹⁷

None of these bets required a large audience, and none of them pretended otherwise. A loft full of strangers, a cartoon pulled off a children’s timeslot rather than off the air entirely, a merger between two failing channels that took two tries to find a name nobody else already owned, a documentary channel for people who had given up on finding one film they liked at the multiplex that month — each was a wager that some slice of the national audience, cut thin enough and correctly enough, could be held in place long enough to sell to an advertiser who wanted exactly that slice and no other. The dial had room for all of them at once precisely because none of them needed the whole room.

What the Subscription Bought

None of this touched the one channel whose arithmetic ran the other way. HBO’s business through the 1980s had been reselling theatrical movies after their run in the cinema, with original programming an occasional side project; its chief executive, Michael Fuchs, argued through the turn of the decade that the side project should become the brand, on the reasoning that a subscriber paying the channel directly, rather than a channel selling that subscriber’s attention to an advertiser, freed HBO to run material no sponsor’s standards department would have cleared.¹⁸ The bet was not yet obvious enough in 1990 for HBO to make it alone: that same year, Chris Albrecht started HBO Independent Productions specifically to sell comedies to the broadcast networks HBO was supposedly making irrelevant, developing Roc and Down the Shore for Fox and, later in the decade, Everybody Loves Raymond — a production arm that spent the 1990s subsidizing the ad-supported model on one floor of the same company betting against it on another.¹⁹ The clearest early proof of the bet itself arrived March 20, 1993, when HBO aired Barbarians at the Gate, a comedy dramatizing the twenty-five-billion-dollar leveraged buyout that had consumed RJR Nabisco five years earlier — a film that made the company’s own ousted chief executive more sympathetic than any of the bankers circling him, a joke no network selling time to that same executive class would have financed.²⁰

The clearest later proof came from a story its own creator had first imagined as a movie. David Chase wanted Robert De Niro and Anne Bancroft for the leads when the idea was still a feature script about a mob captain seeing a psychiatrist; reworked as a network pilot, it went to all four networks and came back from each of them, in part because Chase, still writing inside network rules, had let nobody actually die in it.²¹ He rewrote the pilot with the killing put back in and took it to HBO in 1997. The pilot shot that August and September; HBO did not order the rest of a season until December, and more than a year passed between the pilot’s completion and the show’s premiere — a gap James Gandolfini spent gaining sixty pounds and taking voice lessons for a part that had looked nothing like the man who first read for it.²² Steven Van Zandt, the E Street Band’s guitarist, had never acted and auditioned anyway for the lead; the part went instead to the more experienced Gandolfini, and Chase wrote Van Zandt a different role, Silvio Dante, rather than let him leave with nothing.²³ The Sopranos premiered January 10, 1999, and by that September had become the first program from a cable network ever nominated for the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series — a category built, for four decades running, entirely from shows financed by selling somebody’s attention to somebody else.²⁴