6.7/The Lived Worlds/Television

The Unadmitted Forms, 1989–2001

The Duty a Studio Did Not Owe

The Largest Audience PBS Ever Had

For five consecutive nights in September 1990, the most-watched thing on American television was a documentary about a war that had ended a hundred and twenty-five years earlier. Ken Burns’s The Civil War aired on PBS from September 23 through September 27, 1990; more than thirty-nine million people watched at least one of its episodes, and the nightly audience averaged above fourteen million — the largest audience the public network had ever assembled, before or since.³ The film had no live footage, because none existed. It was built almost entirely from still photographs held on-screen while a camera crept across them, from letters read aloud by actors, and from a single fiddle waltz, “Ashokan Farewell,” that the musician Jay Ungar had composed in 1982 for reasons having nothing to do with the war and that the series used as its recurring theme.⁴ The form was the oldest television had — a lecture with pictures — and it drew a national audience the networks were, that same autumn, beginning to lose.

PBS carried the decade’s serious nonfiction almost by default. Frontline, on the air since 1983, ran the long investigative hour that the commercial networks’ own newsmagazines increasingly declined to fund; The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour ran an hour of talk built on the assumption that a viewer would sit still for it. Burns himself returned across the decade — Baseball in 1994, across nine episodes; a film on the West in 1996; Jazz in January 2001, ten episodes — each an event scaled to a mass audience for a form the trade press filed under education rather than art. The network also carried the period’s signature interview program: Charlie Rose, begun on public television in 1991 and carried nationally on PBS from 1993, an hour of talking heads at a bare table that became the place a certain kind of author or official went to be taken seriously at length. None of it entered the category that magazine critics reserved for the shows they argued about. It was watched, all the same, by more people than watched those shows.

Four Minutes, Live

On October 3, 1992, the musical guest on Saturday Night Live finished an a cappella performance of Bob Marley’s “War,” held a photograph of Pope John Paul II up to the camera, tore it into pieces, said “fight the real enemy,” and dropped them. Sinéad O’Connor had rehearsed the segment with a photograph of a refugee child; on live air she substituted the Pope, and the show’s producers, seeing it happen in real time, had no cut to go to.⁵ The following week’s host, Joe Pesci, opened his monologue by condemning her; two weeks later, at a Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden, an audience shouted her off the stage before she could sing. The act took under a minute and could not be taken back, edited down, or repeated, which was the property sketch comedy had that the scripted forms did not: it went out once, alive, and whatever happened in that minute was the broadcast.

Saturday Night Live spent the early part of the decade churning its own cast. The early-decade seasons brought in Chris Farley, Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, David Spade, and Rob Schneider; the West Coast president of NBC, Don Ohlmeyer, lobbied to fire Farley and Sandler, whom he did not find funny, and at the end of the 1994–95 season the two were let go along with others in an overhaul widely reported as a rescue. The 1995 cast that followed — Will Ferrell, Cheri Oteri, Darrell Hammond, Molly Shannon, with Norm Macdonald reading the news at the Weekend Update desk — rebuilt the show’s standing over the next several years, a reminder that a live sketch program’s fortunes turned on casting decisions made under deadline rather than on any settled house style. The larger fact about network sketch in the period was that it was no longer only NBC’s. In Living Color premiered on Fox on April 15, 1990 — Keenen Ivory Wayans’s show, watched by twenty-two and seven-tenths million people its first night, the first sketch program built around Black writers and performers since Richard Pryor’s short-lived 1977 series, and a deliberate counter-program to the older institution.⁶ It launched Jim Carrey, Jamie Foxx, David Alan Grier, and, among its dancers, Jennifer Lopez. Wayans stopped appearing after the third season, in 1992, in a dispute with Fox over the network’s censorship of his scripts and its rerunning of early episodes without his consent, which he believed would drain the show’s eventual syndication value — a fight over creative control that a Black creator won by leaving rather than by staying.⁶

The form’s other center was moving to cable and staying small on purpose. Mr. Show with Bob and David, Bob Odenkirk and David Cross’s HBO program from November 1995, and The Kids in the Hall, the Canadian troupe Lorne Michaels produced for HBO and then CBS, built the interlocking, densely written sketch style the era’s alternative comedy took as its model, in front of audiences a fraction the size of the network shows’. The Kids in the Hall’s Scott Thompson ran a recurring monologue as an openly gay character, Buddy Cole, at a moment when almost no one on network television did. And the improvised end of the form was organizing itself into an institution: the Upright Citizens Brigade, founded in 1996 by Matt Besser, Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts, and Matt Walsh, ran a Comedy Central show from 1998 to 2000 and opened a New York theater in 1999 that became a training ground for the performers who came up through its stage. What sketch offered, at every size, was the thing that could not be authored in advance: the live minute that no writers’ room controlled once it began.

The Newsmagazine and What It Would Not Show

The most profitable hour on American television for much of the period was 60 Minutes, and in November 1995 it declined to broadcast the story its own correspondents had reported. Mike Wallace and the producer Lowell Bergman had interviewed Jeffrey Wigand, a former chief scientist at the tobacco company Brown & Williamson, who described what the industry knew about nicotine; CBS’s lawyers, citing the risk that Brown & Williamson would sue for inducing Wigand to break a confidentiality agreement, had the segment cut, and the network aired a version with Wigand’s identity and testimony removed.⁷ The corporate context was specific: CBS was in the middle of being sold to Westinghouse Electric, and a multibillion-dollar tobacco lawsuit threatened the sale. The full interview aired only on February 4, 1996, after The Wall Street Journal obtained a sealed deposition Wigand had given in a separate Mississippi case and put the substance on the record anyway. The episode became a film, The Insider, in 1999 — a newsmagazine’s decision not to run a story turned into a theatrical drama about the decision.

The newsmagazine’s other characteristic failure was the manufactured demonstration. On November 17, 1992, NBC’s Dateline aired “Waiting to Explode,” a report on General Motors pickup trucks whose fuel tanks, it alleged, ruptured in side collisions; the on-camera crash that produced a fire had been rigged with incendiary devices and a loosened gas cap by a hired expert, a fact the broadcast did not disclose.⁸ General Motors investigated, sued, and on February 9, 1993, the co-host Jane Pauley read an on-air retraction conceding the network should have told its viewers; NBC settled the next day and reimbursed the company for the cost of its investigation. The form had a standard against which those failures registered. Nightline, born in 1979 out of ABC’s nightly coverage of the Iran hostage crisis and anchored by Ted Koppel, ran a single subject each late-night half hour with an interviewer who declined to be hurried, and held its reputation as the serious end of network news through the entire period. The newsmagazine format — cheap to produce relative to drama, and lucrative — proliferated across the schedule precisely as its two besetting problems, corporate self-protection and staged evidence, became matters of public record.

Daytime, and the Consequences of Being Watched

By the middle of the decade the daytime talk show had discovered that conflict staged in front of a studio audience produced ratings, and in March 1995 one such staging, on The Jenny Jones Show, produced a killing that reached a jury and then an appeals court before the decade was out.²¹

The genre had arrived at that point by escalation. Its signal early moment had come in 1988, when a studio brawl on Geraldo Rivera’s program — an episode staging neo-Nazi skinheads against the activist Roy Innis — left the host with a broken nose, an image that fixed the daytime hour’s appetite for physical confrontation in the public mind.⁹ Phil Donahue, who had built the earnest, audience-questions format the whole genre descended from, ended his program in 1996 after nearly three decades, outrun by the confrontation shows his own form had made possible. The Jerry Springer Show premiered on September 30, 1991, as an earnest issues program and was reformatted within two years around fights, paternity revelations, and staged confrontation. It ran alongside a full roster of the same form — Ricki Lake from 1993, Maury Povich, Sally Jessy Raphael, Montel Williams — each an hour of ordinary people producing spectacle on a soundstage. What made the daytime hour worth a magazine’s contempt was also what made it impossible to ignore: it reached an audience during the hours the prestige schedule did not compete for, and it reached that audience every weekday. The single figure who understood the form’s leverage best spent the second half of the decade walking away from it. Oprah Winfrey, nationally syndicated since 1986, launched a televised book club on September 17, 1996 — her first selection a first novel, Jacquelyn Mitchard’s The Deep End of the Ocean — and in 1998 rebranded her program “Change Your Life TV,” an explicit turn away from the confrontation format toward self-improvement and the sale of books.¹⁰ A single daytime host, choosing a novel, moved more copies of it than any review in any magazine could, which was a fact about distribution the prestige apparatus had no mechanism to match.

The Unscripted Mass Audience

The forms with no script and no professional cast delivered, by the decade’s end, its single largest entertainment audiences. The foundations were laid early and cheaply: Cops premiered on Fox in 1989, following police with a handheld camera and no narrator; The Real World put seven strangers in a loft on MTV in 1992; America’s Funniest Home Videos aired as a special on November 26, 1989, and became a series that January, assembling its program out of tapes viewers shot and mailed in — user-supplied footage sold back to the audience that had made it, an entire program produced by the people watching it.¹¹

The form’s proof arrived at the end. Survivor, adapted by the producer Mark Burnett from a Swedish format that ABC had turned down, premiered on CBS in the summer of 2000; its finale, on August 23, 2000, drew an average of fifty-one and seven-tenths million viewers and ended with a corporate trainer named Richard Hatch outlasting a river guide named Kelly Wiglesworth by a jury vote of four to three.¹² Nielsen estimated that some hundred and twenty-five million people watched at least part of the finale. Nothing scripted on television that year came near it. A second stranger-confinement format, Big Brother, premiered on CBS on July 5, 2000, weeks after Survivor’s own debut, and trailed it badly through that first summer — evidence that the audience had come for the particular contest rather than for the genre in the abstract. The number belonged to a genre with no writers eligible for the awards the medium gave itself. The same lesson had already rescued a network: Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, an American version of a British game-show format, premiered on ABC on August 16, 1999, with Regis Philbin, and by early 2000 the network was airing it as many as five nights a week to shore up a prime-time schedule its scripted hours could no longer carry alone.¹³ A game show and a summer endurance contest were doing the work that a decade of development executives had assumed only a hit drama could do.

The Imported Format

The last of the unadmitted forms came from abroad, and the traffic ran two ways. A finished British program could be brought over and shown as it was: Absolutely Fabulous, Jennifer Saunders’s BBC comedy about a public-relations woman and a fashion-magazine editor drowning in the industry’s own vanities, premiered in Britain in 1992 and ran in the United States on Comedy Central, a series aimed squarely at the world the magazine trade inhabited and largely admired without embarrassment.¹⁴ The finished imports that succeeded tended to arrive as prestige rather than as network product: the political thriller House of Cards, made by the BBC in 1990 with Ian Richardson as a murderous party whip, and the detective series shown on public television’s long-running Mystery! strand — Inspector Morse among them — reached the American editorial class as objects to be admired, at the small scale public television guaranteed. A British program could also be adapted for a network, usually badly. ABC licensed the ITV crime drama Cracker, which had run in Britain from 1993 with Robbie Coltrane as a self-destructive criminal psychologist, and produced an American Cracker: Mind Over Murder; it premiered on September 18, 1997, and the network pulled it in January 1998 after airing five of sixteen finished episodes.¹⁵ The finished show did not survive translation.

What survived translation was the format itself — the rules of a program rather than its cast, licensed and reshot with local players. Millionaire came that way from Britain; Survivor came that way from Sweden. By 2001 the transatlantic sale of formats was an established business, and the forms it carried across were exactly the unscripted, unauthored kinds — game shows and contests — that the American networks had spent the period discovering could hold an audience no drama could any longer guarantee.