Could you live in a time when there were only 3 networks on TV?
After talking in his last lecture about the motion picture industry, Paul Cantor discusses the television industry in the 9th lecture of his Commerce and Culture series.
We saw in yesterday’s post that the movie industry started commercially from the very beginning. That it in some ways snuck under the radar. No one knew in 1900 the huge effect that the motion picture would have on the rest of the 20th century. However, it was a whole different situation with TV.
TV started broadcasting just after the end of WW2 and the whole world knew about it right away. It didn’t have to prove itself like the motion picture. Everyone knew the potential. The government was also involved in TV from the very beginning and created many regulations.
However, government-run television has a far smaller role in America television than most other places. Most other countries have television that is completely run by the government. BBC is a network run by the government.
Cantor points out that often the government-run networks are pretty bad. People like to use BBC as an example of good government-run television, but in reality, Cantor challenges the audience to watch an average day of BBC. We see all the period classics — that BBC does an incredible job on — but we don’t see all of the garbage that it’s built on.
It’s not that commercial TV is the only way to produce good shows, but he does think that it gives you the biggest bang for your buck if your aim is to create quality.
When television first began, it was basically the three networks: NBC, CBS, and ABC. All of which were also radio networks. These three networks owned 90% of the air time. This was the case for over 30 years. These networks became giants and never let off.
Cue 1986. In 1986, Fox was founded by Rupert Murdoch. They started as a fly to compared to these other giant networks, but because of the team behind Fox, they were able to create something unique and different from what was already out there. These other three networks had become so similar to each other that they didn’t have unique attractions.
Fox had meetings every week to make sure they were listening to their consumers. They also weren’t afraid to cancel a show in the middle of a season if it wasn’t doing well. The big networks would wait until the end of the season, but Fox was ready for creativity and ideas. Fox knew they had to stand out.
Fox also exploited some unclear regulations that they used to profit themselves. Cantor talks more in detail about this in the lecture. While they never fully broke regulations, they came pretty close. All of this they did so that they could produce the best content. In the 1990s none of the three big networks had the best TV shows. Fox came out of nowhere and dominated the market almost immediately.
Cantor mentions that people talk about the 50s as the “golden age” of television, but he doesn’t see why now isn’t the golden age. In the 50s, you were limited to only three networks. Those were your options. He sees now all the options that are available and feels that in reality, this is more the golden age of television.
People like to call things the “golden age,” but often, golden age just means whatever you had when you were growing up. In 20 years, the golden age will probably be the shows in the early 2000’s. People’s idea of the golden age often has much more to do with nostalgia than it does the actual classics.