Global TV: Exporting Television and Culture in the World Market

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Global TV

Global TV

Exporting Television and Culture in the World Market

Denise D. Bielby and C. Lee Harrington

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

www.nyupress.org

© 2008 by New York University

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bielby, Denise D.

Global TV : exporting television and culture in the world market /

Denise D. Bielby and C. Lee Harrington.

p.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-9941-3 (cl : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8147-9941-8 (cl : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-9942-0 (pb : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8147-9942-6 (pb : alk. paper)

1. Television broadcasting—Social aspects. 2. Television programs—

Marketing. I. Harrington, C. Lee, 1964–II. Title.

PN1992.6.G57 2008

302.23'45—dc22                   2008010218

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

Manufactured in the United States of America

c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

1 The Syndication Market in U.S. Television

2 Television in the Global Market

3 The (Continued) Relevance of Genre

4 Managing Television’s Cultural Properties

5 Discourses of Distribution: Circuit Models of Television

Conclusion: Television’s Culture World

Methodological Appendix

Notes

References

Index

About the Authors

Figures and Tables

Figures

Tables

Acknowledgments

We thank the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, for financial support for this project. The Academic Senate and the Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara, provided Faculty Research Grants that assisted in data collection and research travel, and the College of Letters and Science of the University of California, Santa Barbara, granted a sabbatical for additional work on this project. Excellent research assistance was provided by Molly Moloney, and Marie Vierra’s expertise in graphic design assisted in final preparation of the illustrations for the book. Miami University provided additional research travel support for our fieldwork, and Andrea Parks offered skillful clerical assistance. We especially thank Dick Block of Dick Block Communications, Inc., and of the NATPE Educational Foundation, who generously and graciously assisted us in our study. Ilene Kalish, executive editor at NYU Press, offered her unswerving support and guidance throughout this project, and we appreciate as well the insightful feedback provided by anonymous reviewers on early chapters.

Portions of this project were presented at the International Communication Association, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the American Sociological Association, the Popular Culture Association, and the Console-ing Passions Television Conference. Additional presentations were delivered at the Program for the Study of Arts and Culture at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; the Conference on Media Ownership organized by the Center for Film, Television, and New Media at the University of California, Santa Barbara; the Conference on Economic Representations sponsored by the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside; the Culture and Society Workshop in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University; and the Department of Sociology Colloquium Series, University of California, Davis. Portions of this manuscript previously appeared in Global Culture, Poetics, American Behavioral Scientist, and Media Ownership, and we thank their publishers and editors for permission to use material from these works.

Preface

One of the most recognizable features of the global television industry occurs to scholars and nonscholars alike while traveling abroad and stumbling upon American programs airing in other countries or learning through news reports of a series’ popularity in other parts of the globe. America’s Next Top Model is currently airing in its original U.S. version in more than one hundred countries, including Iceland, Nigeria, and the United Arab Emirates. The soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful enjoys similar global success, and Dallas, the prime-time serial of the 1980s, was a widespread hit throughout Europe and parts of the Middle East, although it was a failure in Japan. Such information often triggers worthy concerns about the global dominance of U.S. products in television trade flows, but to penetrate the issues raised by U.S. presence in global television markets requires a much more fine-grained understanding of the organization and cultural logics of international markets than can be gleaned from such crude evidence of program flows alone. Studying the television industry in comparative perspective is enormously complicated. Industry trade publications regularly feature lists of the top ten American shows in selected countries, and while such lists reveal what has been sold to particular locales, they do not tell us how those shows rank relative to imports from other countries or to local fare. Moreover, focusing on where a series ends up obscures the important insights that are gained by learning how television programs are modified for export and import. In short, while there is much to be learned from exploring why specific programs are marketed, adopted, or rejected by distributors, sticking to the level of trade flows hinders fuller understanding of the way the industry works.

Studying this industry is difficult, in large part, because it is constantly transforming. This change is led, just as it has been since television’s launching, by a seemingly endless array of technological developments intended to enhance its production, distribution, and access. As we wrote this preface, for example, the long-envisioned convergence in the United States of established television distribution technologies with broadband access and content delivery via mobile distribution platforms and devices moved closer to reality. But in spite of the imminent convergence of these technologies, in the United States at least, network program availability on the Web remains spotty, only about 2 percent of U.S. cell phone users watch mobile video, and finding programs for viewing there takes effort, in large measure because of the firm grasp retained by the networks and studios on their properties as sources of revenue. Elsewhere, possibilities for convergence take on complicated forms specific to those locales. For example, even though Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV satellite won the right in 2001 to broadcast within China, its viewing reach is prescribed, and access to the internet within that country is firmly regulated. Despite the promise of convergence’s endless viewing possibilities—which some viewers have likened to falling down a rabbit hole—established media consultants who monitor audiences’ practices find even as new technologies take off that taste for these options is largely limited to the tech-savvy and that most audiences steadfastly prefer watching traditional television screens in a comfortable setting. It would appear that widespread audience acceptance of a technology that will completely transform the way programming is accessed still appears to be a ways off. Perhaps the facts that television functions first and foremost as entertainment and that its consumers expect it to be a comfortable, engaging, and effortless experience are the industry’s bigger hurdles.

Despite impediments to widespread acceptance of new technologies, change within all aspects of the industry is, nevertheless, a given. One need only read the industry trade publications to see just how rapidly the business of the industry transforms. Network deals and hits come and go, seemingly firm program decisions change at the last minute, successful executives are fired or quit and land at rival companies, corporate mergers or partnerships take place and then dissolve, and emerging markets that are on the verge of exploding suddenly contract. Such is the turbulent nature of business in this culture industry, both domestically and internationally, and that turbulence is consequential to its scholarly examination. Time-bound snapshots may not fully capture the current state of affairs. The abundance of information yielded by its constant change means that analysis of its architecture—its organizations, markets, and institutions—must necessarily omit a great deal of rich detail in order to be focused and succinct. Understanding the significance of incremental industry change, especially that occurring in other global regions, can be a challenge, and while it may go undetected by some, others taking a longer view may see the same shifts as evidence of significant maturation of the local scene. But how is such transformation best described and analyzed?

As an outgrowth of our prior work on the domestic fans of U.S. soap operas and our realization of just how popular these shows can be abroad, we became intrigued with the nature and quality of the global market for television—of all programming, not just soap operas and their Latin American counterpart, telenovelas. To gain perspective on television import/export, we directed our attention to the syndication market where such programming is traded. We quickly became aware of just how overlooked this important segment of the industry was by media sociologists. A limited amount of scholarly work existed, which we discuss in the introduction, but even in that work, from our viewpoint as sociologists of culture and media, we could not help but notice the curious lack of attention to the contribution—indeed the pivotal role—of culture per se to understanding the complexities of the industry’s organizational structure and dynamics, particularly when it crosses borders. British cultural sociologist Keith Negus’s¹ admonitions about such omissions reinforced our instincts to attend to such matters. In his writings about the structure of the music industry, Negus argued for the importance of a concerted refocusing in analyses of cultural industries away from the dominant view of how industry produces culture to one that attends to how culture produces an industry. His particular interest in culture’s impact goes beyond registering how production takes place within a corporate environment; instead, he argued for attending to how production takes place in relation to broader cultural formations and practices that may not be directly within the control or understanding of the company.² Negus’s study of record companies found that as these entities sought to understand and intervene in local markets, corporate strategies and organizational practices were themselves shaped by the surrounding culture, largely through company decision makers’ efforts to make sense of their corporate environment.

Organizational sociologists writing about other cultural industries have voiced calls increasingly similar to Negus’s, although their focus has tended to remain on explaining organizational forms as economic indicators of an industry’s or field’s institutional logic. When these works find that the effect of these logics yields a change in the field, culture tends to remain in the background, an outcome rather than a precursor. Patricia Thornton’s³ insightful study of the higher education publishing industry, for example, found that the industry’s shift over the last five decades from an institutional and managerial environment that focused on the production of books to one that foregrounded markets for its releases represented a cultural shift in the institutional logic of the industry. In a related vein, Tim Dowd’s⁴ thoroughgoing examination of the American music industry increasingly attends to the explicit influence of sociocultural factors such as race and gender on its logics of production. Compared to Thornton’s, his work acknowledges the direct relevance of cultural influence upon organizational strategies, although his primary focus remains on accounting for these production logics’ mediating effect on more classical economic issues of competition and concentration in shaping the content and structure of music markets and products. In short, examining the connections between culture as it is lived and experienced by industry participants as they go about their decision making regarding cultural production remains open to study.

Some years ago, noted anthropologist Mary Douglas⁵ launched the important quest to penetrate how institutions think. As we see in the discussion above, organizational sociologists studying institutional logics at the social structural level (the cultural determinants of organizational decisions) and production logics (the social contexts and historical contingencies that shape markets) have been attempting to introduce cultural analysis into traditional analyses of firms and industries. Studying institutional and production logics in this way is very important, but to better understand the mechanisms by which they operate, it is essential to consider the flip side—to bring evidence of organizational, institutional, or economic issues into cultural explanations. We believe we can productively move such an agenda forward by attending to the concrete operations and cultural logics of the global television market itself by engaging the effects of culture—its forms and practices—more directly and doing so at a middle-range or meso-level of conceptualization and analysis. This calls for analysis of television’s marketplace, its cyclicality, its participants, and the fluidity of its products. The latter is especially important to us because in our view, sociological analysis of the television industry all too often loses sight of its commodity—the programs themselves. We are interested in seeing the sociological study of culture industries move toward more explicit engagement of the way the properties of its cultural products matter to the industry. Industry coverage of the hurdles facing media convergence, discussed above, underscores our perspective. Convergence’s dazzling potential receives great coverage by the press, but according to industry journalists Steve Brennan and Mimi Turner, the importance of programs—content in industry vernacular—and access to them, remains key. The bottom line for mobile-content purveyors is that they still badly need the ‘old order’ of studios—or more precisely, the vast array of content under studio ownership. And the studios still look to TV broadcasters, their traditional customers, for the bulk of their revenue and to launch and build franchise programming.⁶

We wanted our sociological approach to reflect the wide range of interdisciplinary knowledge that comprises study of the global television market, because confining its treatment to a particular disciplinary approach or perspective delimited our goal of opening its culture world. Consequently, we devised three sections to capture and reflect its range and complexity. The first section of our book, which consists of the introduction and chapters 1 and 2, covers the history and organization of the syndication market and its relevance to intellectual debates that have dominated the field for some time. In this section we address the way the market in this end of the industry affects the way business is transacted. The second section (chapters 3 and 4) delves into the cultural properties of television programs in order to examine the contribution of the industry’s commodities to the global market. We do so by focusing attention on the complications its cultural products bring to the operation of this industry. The third section (chapters 5 and 6) presents the discursive organizing features that link the multiple sites of the global marketplace, and we consider how insight into the marketplace from a culture-world vantage point furthers understanding of the industry’s institutional and production logics. We conclude by considering how a culture-world perspective can make a contribution to intellectual debates about media hegemony in the global economy.

Introduction

I Love Lucy is said to be on the air somewhere in the world 24 hours a day.

—quote from article in the Los Angeles Times¹

Bonanza is watched by audiences all over the world. We’ve never been off the air in 42 years.

—series creator David Dortort²

This book is an examination of a lesser-known aspect of the entertainment medium of television: the international market for television programming. Others before us have focused upon the domestic television industry’s history, its founders and innovators, and its organizational form when the broadcast networks ruled the airwaves. Still others have written about how its logic as a dominant corporate enterprise shapes, consciously or unconsciously, the social values embedded within its programming, and how specific populations, such as women and racial and ethnic groups, deconstruct those values as an integral part of their viewing habits and practices.³ Television remains a ubiquitous presence in American daily life;⁴ however, this earlier research was written about the domestic U.S. television market in an era when the three major networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—were dominating viewing options. Global concerns were not in focus.

Beginning in the early 1990s, the U.S. cable industry expanded and other networks—Fox, WB, UPN—launched (the latter two having merged in 2006 into the CW network), bringing new and ever-increasing options that have seriously eroded the place of the major networks as a source of entertainment in viewers’ lives.⁵ Other transformative developments emerged by the end of the 1990s, including the proliferation of cable, satellite, internet, and mobile systems of distribution. As these changes rearranged the television landscape, other aspects of the industry were taking hold behind the scenes, including the loosening of federal regulation of the industry and the expansion of foreign markets. Intrigued by these developments, we became interested in how they, alongside actions by industry participants and trends in program development and production, were consequential to the emergence of the international market for television and the contribution of syndicated television to the vitality of that market. We opted to study this market by focusing on elements of its social organization, including its participants and the products that are produced for it. Along the way we explore the kind of product that fills the international syndication market, and attend to the way different types of program genres are marketed and transformed to generate revenues under still-evolving business models. An essential part of the story is the marketplace where this business takes place, and that is where we begin.

Global TV’s Marketplace

Get them into the tent!

—Dick Block, president of Block Communications Group, Inc., and

UCLA instructor, highlighting the approach to selling

at a television trade convention

Each year, four major international conventions or fairs bring together members of media industries for the marketing and purchase of syndicated television. Those gatherings, which serve as the international crossroads for the buyers and sellers of television programming, include the NATPE convention, which is organized by the National Association of Television Program Executives and held in the United States every winter; MIPCOM and MIP-TV, which are the Reed Midem Organization of France’s annual fall and spring events located in Cannes;⁶ and the by-invitation-only Los Angeles (L.A.) Screenings, which are held for two weeks in late May to early June in studios and hotel rooms throughout that city. Attendance at these venues can number in the tens of thousands, and they draw participants from every region of the globe. By way of illustration, MIPCOM 2000 had nearly five hundred exhibitors and twelve thousand participants,⁷ and the NATPE convention that was held in New Orleans in January of 2000 had over 17,500 registered participants, including over forty-three hundred international attendees.⁸ That year was one of the highest attendance records ever for NATPE, with over one-third of the exhibitors representing countries other than the United States.⁹ Attendance at MIPCOM and NATPE fluctuates according to the vitality of the global economy, shifts in local tastes, and the impact of international crises such as the outbreak of the war in Iraq, but overall, participation stays robust. At MIPCOM 2004, for example, 3,557 firms participated, up 30 percent from 2003, and it registered the second-highest number of participants in its 20-year history after a 15 percent drop in attendees between 2000 and 2001.¹⁰

NATPE, established in 1963 to provide the syndication end of the domestic U.S. television industry an opportunity to gather program directors and other middle-level managers together in one place to buy and sell programming, has evolved to reflect the latest developments in the industry in order to stay in business. In response to the emergence of new media and other technological developments and institutional transformations in the marketplace, the annual conference and exhibition is now described as an alliance of media content professionals and as the world’s largest and most influential nonprofit electronic programming and software association dedicated to the continued growth and convergence of all content across all media.¹¹ And as international markets have become ever more important to the vitality of industry, NATPE has adopted an international perspective while still paying homage to its domestic roots. NATPE was built on the King Worlds, Paramounts, the Sonys, Fox, Warners, observed its President and CEO Rick Feldman, and their content continues to be in demand all around the world because that’s the content people want to get their hands on.¹² Attendees are diverse, typically including executives from programming divisions of the networks, television station general managers, account executives, producers, and, increasingly, proprietors of Web-based businesses and purveyors of new technologies who promote the latest innovations in industry access, product, and distribution. As one participant describes it, nowhere else do I see more decision makers in one place at one time.¹³

NATPE conventions are the site of important meetings and serious business, but in the glory days of the 1980s and 1990s the atmosphere was at its most festive and aspects of the convention itself could best be described as carnivalesque, even sordid.¹⁴ Television critic Howard Rosenberg, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, is said to have described the NATPE convention as a gargantuan cocktail party abounding in food, booze, TV chatter and high-powered salesmanship.¹⁵

Fig. I.1. Top: Billboards at NATPE entrance

Fig. I.2. Bottom: Pedestrian freeway routes convention attendees

Fig. I.3. Top: Talk show host Sally Jesse Raphael greets attendees and poses for photos

Fig. I.4. Bottom: Assembling for NATPE seminar

Billboard-sized signs hawking new and successful ongoing series dominate the lobby space outside the exhibition hall, company booths include lavish bars and buffets in their reception area, evening events generate boisterous audience participation reminiscent of burlesque, and stars of hit series sit for hours at scheduled autograph and photograph sessions, where the lure of rubbing elbows with in-the-flesh celebrities turns even the most jaded of executives into attentive bystanders. The exhibit hall itself (which in some of the years we attended was located at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans and in others, at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Nevada) is selected because of its capacity to accommodate enormous crowds. A vast network of wide, carpeted aisles organizes the exhibit hall into orderly rows and facilitates the flow of potential buyers, but those same aisles become virtually impassable near the more extravagant displays.¹⁶ A more recent addition to the floor layout is the large international pavilions, collections of booths of exhibitors from a specific country, usually one with a well-developed industry, who group their displays together. Interactions (and the possibility of interactions) between major corporations and start-up companies struggling to make their first sale are managed in part by the arrangement of the sales floor, the layout of sales stands, and security arrangements at certain stands [which] simultaneously construct and express power relationships among participants.¹⁷ Because these conventions are a major site of trade, the importance of their physical organization is greater than it seems at first glance. At a more essential level they exist for the benefit of the industry’s business and cultural functions, which include facilitating efficient networking, concretizing power relations among participants, differentiating otherwise similar products, and providing the terrain on which distributors construct their corporate brand identities.¹⁸

While the primary function of this congested, frenetic atmosphere is to conduct business, the convention is much more than that. NATPE includes, for attendees who number in the hundreds, seminars about business strategies, new markets, and programming opportunities; morning coffees with successful producers; keynote addresses by the chair of the Federal Communications Commission and other industry leaders; demonstrations of new technologies; and concurrently running educational programs for television scholars from the world of academia. In short, while NATPE exists, first and foremost, to facilitate the business of buying and selling programs domestically and internationally, it is also increasingly a site for the presentation of leading-edge issues confronting the industry, as well as a major social occasion for celebration of the global syndication market.

Fig. I.5. Billboards and red carpet at MIPCOM

At MIPCOM and MIP-TV the atmosphere is more focused and businesslike, albeit tempered by the affluent and sophisticated sensibility of Cannes. Held in the Palais des Festivals, the multilevel building located between the beach and the port filled with expensive yachts that ply the waters of the Cote d’Azur, it occurs at the same site as the star-studded, red-carpeted, photo-op-driven Cannes Film Festival. The convention hall is large and constructed at odd angles, and the layout of the MIPCOM and MIP-TV booths is very dense and mazelike, so much so that one can easily lose sense of direction and location. But it also contains plush, well-equipped theaters for the occasional panel session, free internet stations throughout, coffee bars, lounges, balconies, and terraces that overlook the Mediterranean, and ready access to the sweeping promenade along the waterfront for a quick breather. The only unexpected rupture in the feel of this otherwise well-mannered, all-business convention is the break for the two-hour lunch, which triggers a crush of well-heeled attendees pressing through the entrance of the Palais as if the building were on fire, followed by an equally frenzied return for afternoon meetings. There are far fewer programmatic seminars and all convention events than at NATPE, with the end result being that the focus stays on conducting business.

Fig. I.6. First floor schematic of MIPCOM convention hall

The L.A. Screenings are an altogether different affair. Intended to showcase the pilots for prime-time scripted series picked up by the U.S. networks for the coming season, this international sales event is a two-week-long informal marketplace organized by U.S. sellers for overseas buyers that takes place soon after the broadcast and cable networks traditionally announce their fall lineups in late spring. Buyers number only about one thousand to twelve hundred, and while some attend in order to see the series their existing output deals are providing them (that is, the packages of programming they have already purchased), others come to bid on the new series for their program schedules. In 2005, there were just six major sellers—Warner, Fox, Disney, Paramount, Universal, and Sony—and a handful of smaller independent suppliers, including the now-defunct Carsey-Werner, Reveille, and E! Entertainment. The business of this marketplace focuses exclusively on the A-list series that the U.S. broadcast and cable networks have deemed worthy for their own prime-time lineups, and that list is regarded by sellers as a key indicator