Creating Television: Conversations With the People Behind 50 Years of American TV
A Volume in LEA's Communication Series, © Copyright 2004
Robert Kubey (kubey@scils.rutgers.edu)
Director, Center for Media Studies (www.mediastudies.rutgers.edu)
Professor, Dept of Journalism & Media Studies, Rutgers University
Has the Television Industry Changed for Better or Worse Over The Last
Decade?
(bottom line pressures and profits have increased, vertical integration, the financial-syndicate rule)
Each quote is followed by the page number in Creating Television where the full quote can be found.
Question to writer, T. S. Cook: When we met over 12 years ago you made the statement that television is a business before it’s an art form. Has that changed at all in the last decade?
It’s now being driven far more by ratings. Competition for ratings points has become ferocious.
It has become even more true in recent years. Television was always a business. Don’t get me wrong. But there was in earlier years, perhaps as short as 5-8 years ago, a sense that at least at the networks, that they had a public responsibility. That they would do shows that perhaps weren’t always ratings makers. Because there was a desire to discuss this issue or to do this piece of drama. It is really now a bottom line business much more across the board. 209
Talent agent Jeremy Zimmer:
The industry has gotten tougher. The large corporations that came into the industry pumped a huge amount of money
into it and executives and stars were able to start making huge, vast sums of money which made the tone of it much more intense.
It’s no longer a bunch of guys doing well and hoping to someday have a house in Vegas or a house in Palm Springs. We’re now taking Jags,
three or four residences, lots and lots of money, and with corporate America breathing down people’s necks, the tone changed.
And when you’re really able to stick around for a while in one of these big companies, we’re talking $30, 40, 50, 100 million, and I think
people started getting a lot more serious, people became greedier and bloodier and more intense. And it wasn’t just fun anymore. 407
Question to musical specials producer, Gary Smith: How much is the quality of American television hurt by the emphasis on ratings?
A lot. As long as television is an advertising medium, it'll be that way. It's always going to be that way. It's become more and more that way in terms of bottom line delivery, meaning cost per thousand. 241
Witness the vulgar talk shows we have on today. There's a lot of programming that is only on the air because it gets big ratings, much more so than years ago. That's at the network level. I don't think that's true at the cable level. Cable has less concern about that specific program's ratings. They still care about subscription and viewership. 242
Personal manager and producer, Jay Bernstein:
When there is so much product, people are going to have to go to a lot of extremes to sell a whole lot of things. And the competition has made it so bad that everybody has forgotten the rules and they’re just going for the bottom line. It’s not good for anybody except those people who are going for money. 424
Are decisions in television more financially motivated now than, say, 10 years ago?
Absolutely, because the people who run the studios are nice people, but they are businessmen, they're accountants, they're agents. You don't have the same creative forces. You don't have the studio heads who were creative men and businessmen. 421
There’s no way to stop it because television is only catering to the sponsors who are catering to the people. There’s nothing about what’s good for the people except how to make money. We’ve changed gods. 425
I don't know what the rest of the world is like, but I know that here in Hollywood people have a tendency to think that the greatest sound to hear is that of your fellow man crumbling. I don't subscribe to that theory, but if one year I had died, it would have meant to some people that the time slots at 8:00 on Wednesday with Mike Hammer and 10:00 on Wednesday with Houston Knigh ts would be open for somebody else to put their series on. I think that's the very sad part of this town. 416
Jason Alexander:
It’s called vertical integration. From a corporate point of view, you put a guy in charge of your studio who knows how to turn
a profit, who knows nothing about the art or craft of doing anything. But that’s the guy you’re now serving. So, my business becomes
serving guys who know nothing about what we do. 356
Writer-producer Arla Sorkin Manson:
It’s changed enormously. The vertical integration of companies means that one, large parent company holds many, many media outlets.
The management has a style, and that style starts to filter into the different companies. 196 The economics have changed, the marketplace
has changed and then the law changed. And when you put all three of them together, you’re facing a different selection process. 199
Producer and executive, Bruce Sallan:
Nobody thinks it’s fun anymore. Nobody. It’s absolutely not fun. Competitive and cutthroat instead. Number one is the consolidation
and corporitization of the business. Number two is that they repealed the financial syndication, or “fin-syn” rule. 279
Grant Tinker:
The fact that the networks all fell into bottom line-oriented hands exacerbates the problem. They say, “I want this news division to
be a profit center or damn close to it.” I say to those people, “Get out of the business. If you want to maximize your profits, go and
get another business—buy T-bills, whatever the hell will do it for you—and let’s let the guys who don’t just think of the bottom line own
the networks.” . . . It’s the devotion to those shareholders that is the problem, and that some executives see their duty as delivering
the biggest bang for their buck. That bothers me. 99
Question to Chris Albrecht, CEO of HBO: HBO would seem to be revolutionizing what’s possible in the medium.
There’s a notion that network television will change down the line. What do you think is going to happen?
I think there will be a slow erosion of the network business model….and the first person on the broadcast side to figure out how to reinvent
one of those networks will be a true pioneer. At the same time, I think you’ll see more vertical integration, and people in big companies
aligning their downstream windows to make the ever increasing investment in programming accordable.. . . It’s going to be a slow process
of change that I think will eventually result in a sea change. 480
Question to producer and executive Lee Rich: Now networks can own a percentage of their negatives where previously
that had been prohibited. Now they can own all of a program.
It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened in the industry. 100
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