TV is no more a vast wasteland

Jeff Greenfield

“The boob tube”

“The idiot box.”

“The plug-in drug.”

“A vast wasteland.”

When one began writing about the television industry in the mid-1970s, the above were some of the kinder terms of endearment.

When technology replaced scarcity with abundance, every core assumption about TV began to crumble. Everything about the medium — how we receive it, how we consume it, how we pay for it, how we interact with it — has been altered, and TV is infinitely better for it.

In the mid-1970s, all TV was divided into three parts, at least as far as almost every American viewer was concerned. Every evening, the three broadcast networks, CBS, NBC and ABC, drew more than nine out of 10 viewers. The only revenue came from advertisers, which led countless chroniclers of the industry to the same surprising conclusion about the nature of the business.

NBC executive Don Carswell said, “We’re not selling the programme. We’re selling the audience for the programme.” The bigger the audience — and the more desirable in terms of buying power — the more the networks could charge.

One prominent programmer of the day, Paul Klein of NBC, had a theory about this. He called it the ‘Least Objectionable Programme’ concept. Viewers, he said, didn’t watch a programme, they watched TV. They clicked on the set and browsed until they found something reasonably acceptable.

The key to the old TV world was scarcity. Only so many channels could beam through the air without running into each other. But in 1975, RCA introduced the first of two ‘Satcom’ communications satellites, and the three-network monopoly was dead. Now competitors could deliver their fare to stations and cable systems coast to coast. That year, a fledgling pay service, Home Box Office, put its signal up on the satellite. An all-news network? An all-sports network? Networks aimed at women, children, shoppers, movie buffs? Sure, via wire or satellite. Unlike over-the-air TV, there was room for everybody.

And for these new providers, a whole new economic model arose. Cable operators paid monthly fees to these networks based on the cable company’s overall number of subscribers, not just the ones who watched that particular network.

A more revolutionary impact of abundance came with the arrival of pay cable and in recent years streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime. “One thing I truly believe,” says Dick Wolf, the creator of Law and Order, “is that broadcasting is different from cable. And one of the things you can get away with on smaller cable networks is antiheroes. Sorry, they don’t work on broadcast. You can’t have a Walter White. You’re dealing with a different mind-set.”

There’s another old belief about TV that has to be seriously rethought: the idea that it isolates us from each other. In 1971, the historian Daniel Boorstein wrote in Life magazine that the age of television created “a new sense of isolation and confinement.” The viewer could see, he wrote, “but nobody (except the family in the living room) could know for sure how he reacted to what he saw.”

Today, a viewer can use a second screen — a phone, a tablet, a computer — to connect with friends, strangers and even creators of the shows to dissect a plotline, deride a piece of dialogue and question a twist in the story line, even as the show is being broadcast. When a compelling programme like Mad Men, Breaking Bad or The Sopranos approaches the end of its run, the digital cloud is filled with arguments about what should happen; a line of dialogue, a hair style or a piece of clothing will be analysed intensely about its possible hints. You can call all this a 21st-century way to waste time, but even if it is, these interactions with television are anything but “isolating.”

Is there still a mountain of junk on TV? More than ever. The same cable abundance that brings us Mad Men and Justified brings us the Real Liposuctioned Housewives of Springfield. Still, anyone looking to create a new set of insults to aim at TV is going to find it hard going. That vast wasteland has turned into a dazzling landscape.