American Television and Consumer Democracy

...American visual culture always politicizes sex, but we learn nothing about "law and order" itself from the sexual bickering between, say, Kuzak and Van Owen...

...one dramatized best-selling novel episode...

...Because similar types of products cannot meaningfully be patented or copyrighted, B and C would immediately copy A if A's innovation were successful, and A's brief lead in marketing a new product would disappear (after one season, if we are thinking of television shows...

...A "consent" defense to a rape charge actually requires that the character of the victim be blackened, in order to show that the defendant could reasonably have expected this woman to "consent," despite the possibility that in her own mind she had no intention at all of doing so...

...The case for the police is stated with unequivocal tough-mindedness in all these series...

...Even more so than in the case of the BBC, there is no built-in pressure for reducing or eliminating this subsidy, since its ultimate source is the indirect and invisible tax that advertisers impose on consuming viewers (and in any event, the argument that particular licensees have a right to hold this license in the first place, and to do anything they want with AMERICAN TELEVISION AND CONSUMER DEMOCRACY it, is simply incredible...

...Just as in the midst of a bitter divorce we can enjoy a weekly narrative of family unity, in the middle of political crisis we can enjoy a weekly narrative of social integration and political passivity.' American television's addictiveness, and its unending, unimaginative conformity to a narrow range of intellectual and aesthetic possibility, is not without consequences...

...Instead, Catherine resigns to join a radical law collective that she had previously scorned for its marginality...

...The notion of "consumer democracy" describes a system in which producers respond to every shifting demand of the market, and the implication we are supposed to draw is that cultural production shares the most important feature of political democracy, consumer choice being a close analog to voter choice...

...Thus to call the British system "elitist" and the American system "democratic" would be to miss the point...

...This public cannot help but recognize its re-presentation as ghettoized...

...the explosion of same-sex weddings in the 1996 season is a case in point...

...and how it is that a good policeman may be not quite a good man...

...Put simply, Homicide was a paean to the efforts of those who try on behalf of the rest of us to make "law and order" a reality...

...Assigned by her firm to defend the accused man, Catherine Hughes demurs with the uncompromising statement, "I don't do consent rapes...

...American television is governed by an economic elite and, where public, a nonrepresentative political elite...

...The problem with the theory of mass society was not so much its aesthetic snobbery as its understanding of communication as always and only one-way...

...2. The most notable exception is the HBO movie Criminal Justice, with Forest Whitaker as an alleged, and ultimately convicted, murderer whose rights are given scant acknowledgment, and of whose guilt or innocence we are never certain...

...ALTHOUGH THE programs I've referred to here are exceptional rather than typical, even a more general account of the British system makes the same point...

...Television is specifically intended to be addictive, like heroin or crack or any other addictive substance...

...and visual distraction itself (the source of television's immense profits) is firmly positioned as a central—perhaps the central— communal need...

...On BBC-TV's Blind Justice, its female protagonist was doing the very same thing...

...a collective whose members presumably will understand why she doesn't "do consent rapes...

...There is systematic injustice, and there is police work that ineluctably leads to it, yet seems necessary in its own right...

...To support this argument, I will first draw a few contrasts between American television (at its most prestigious) and its quite different British counterpart...

...Watching Between the Lines, we are confronted with the real meaning of the slogan, "the personal is political...

...two segments of an extraordinary, multi-episode documentary film (produced by Channel Four) of daily life in China...

...By its very terms, though, this cultural account can hardly tell us why the more democratic nation produces a monolithic televisual culture, compared to the variegated output of its more authoritarian counterpart...

...Millions of advertising dollars, and more important, dozens or even hundreds of well-paying jobs, can be lost on a single ratings point...

...With this sleight-of-hand, the hope that media of mass communication might encourage moral ambiguity, transformative critique, or the justification of structural change, simply disappears...

...Hollywood television is made for people who, in the ordinary course of events, will spend their evenings passively consuming its cultural commodities...

...Channel Four, the "minority interests" channel, was instituted in the early 1980s...

...In principle, BBC One vies DISSENT / Spring 1 998 • 51 AMERICAN TELEVISION AND CONSUMER DEMOCRACY for audiences with ITV, the commercial channel, and is considered to be performing well if it stays within ITV's range...

...All the major advertisers on commercial television are in exactly the same position as the networks: they are competitors in an oligopoly, trying to maintain or improve market share...

...In each episode, the defense attorney apologized to the victim at the end and was told by her to go to hell...

...These British shows do what cannot be done on American commercial television: they challenge the ideology of "law and order" itself...

...the networks are the planets...

...There is one ultimately aesthetic and political characterization, though, that can be offered with confidence...

...The key to the operation of this system is that, as has often been said, networks do not DISSENT / Spring 1998 • 53 AMERICAN TELEVISION AND CONSUMER DEMOCRACY sell programs to audiences but audiences to advertisers...

...And as political/economic subjects, we not only find that our cultural milieu rewards passive consumption, but we are also assured that there is ultimately nothing to be active about...

...1. See Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), ch...

...Particular products or advertisers are not identified with particular programs, and the American style of corporate pressure on producers, or of interest-group pressure on corporate sponsors, is unimaginable...

...its only purpose is to prevent imaginative acts of creation from taking place...

...Nothing on network television could possibly equal the visual terrorism of Psycho, the nightmarish nihilism of Jacob's Ladder, the elegiac look and tone of Unforgiven, the unrepentant vengefOness of I Spit on Your Grave or Thelma and Louise, or the sexual transgressiveness of Basic Instinct...

...This is the most likely outcome of all such cases, but one that L.A...

...People share gender unity as members of families and class equality as consumers...

...The sub-business class that controls American television may well be more democratic in its composition, but that is irrelevant...

...and then try to account for the difference...

...This doctrine of "consent" wipes out a woman's perception of her own non-consent, and thus the law's pretence of neutrality and equality is belied in practice.' For a lawyer who takes the rights of women seriously, then, the larger question is how she can do her job in an unjust society...

...and the bad guys are them, on the other.' Prime Suspect 3 and Between the Lines are not about the defense of law and order...

...There the similarities end...

...9; and also Carole Pateman, "Women and Consent," in The Disorder of Women (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp...

...Market share within the oligopoly must be roughly maintained, if for no other reason than to guarantee the power and wealth of its rulers...

...one serious quiz show and one game show...

...The theorists of "mass society" criticized commercial television from a standpoint informed both by intellectual disdain for cultural trash, and political fearfulness in the face of cultural conformity...

...BBC-TV and Channel Four function behind a protective wall, and this wall was designed to protect them not only from market competition but from the political process...

...one appeal for Bosnia, carried in a short form every night on the BBC...

...The average viewer may be different at different times of day, and for different television genres: children for Saturday morning cartoons, women for daytime television and soap operas, men for professional sports, adult families for prime-time television, adult men for cop shows...

...knowledge of significant social differences among them is suppressed...

...Its ambiguity runs even deeper than that of Prime Suspect 3, for the narrative and symbolic manipulations by which ideological narratives lead us to their unique conclusions are entirely absent...

...It's not just that only the average viewer is addressed by this system, but that the average viewer is offered only average aesthetic experiences: nothing that might turn our attention away from television-watching itself, by throwing us into a state of real emotion or intellection, Exceptions stay firmly within the bounds of humanistic naturalism, do not stray far ideologically, and refuse any possibility of formal innovation that might confuse viewers who understand television as a site of relaxation and passive enjoyment...

...and Stephen Kline, "Limits to the Imagination: The Marketing of Children's Culture," in Ian Angus and Sut Jhally, eds., Cultural Politics in Contemporary America (New York: Routledge, 1989...

...America is celebrated (by Kuzak) for its protection of civil liberties, the rapist goes to prison, and having it both ways wins the day...

...two full-length news coverage programs every night...

...The tradition of cultural elitism at the BBC probably accounts for the occasional prime-time appearance of Restoration tragedies or sober discussions of postmodernism in the arts...

...As with other tertiary services, the pressures of globalization assure that it won't be so much longer...

...In this respect HBO is in a position comparable to that of Channel 4 in Britain, as discussed below...

...In the soap opera Brookside, one 1993 episode featured both a political party debate on the National Health Service and a discussion between a teacher and her student about the latter's lesbianism, which concluded with the two going off to make love...

...But each of the networks must reproduce and expand its value, because the oligopoly is competitive...

...Law, Kuzak (unsuccessfully) defended an accused rapist by attempting to show that the victim's conduct could reasonably have led the accused to believe that "she wanted it...

...On ABC-TV's L.A...

...But other producers, even the pay-for-play movie channels, are mere satellites within this system...

...5. We should not confuse the stylistic difference of series such as The X-Files or Millennium with the aesthetic imagination...

...Nothing in the United States is equivalent to those challenges to dominant understandings of the world described above...

...4. The original and still perhaps the most influential analysis is that of Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957...

...Why," snaps Kuzak with the last word, "don't you just shoot the bastard and not bother with a trial...

...There are no conclusive reflections about "putting a rapist back on the streets," because for the creators of Blind Justice the issue is not one strand of conventional thought versus another...

...6. See Neil Postman, "The Teachings of the Media Curriculum," and George Gerbner et al., "Charting the Mainstream: Television's Contributions to Political Orientations," in Donald Lazere, ed., American Media and Mass Culture: Left Perspectives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987...

...For delivering this kind of entertainment which, to paraphrase T.S...

...But it cannot account for the political radicalism of Blind Justice, the corrosive cynicism of Between the Lines and Prime Suspect 3, the uninhibited female self-expression of Absolutely Fabulous, or (later at night) the musical outrageousness of Frank Zappa, who never appeared on American network television— the first name in what could be an endless roster of creative artists subject to the same negative characterization...

...During the time frame from which these comparisons are taken, the entire over-the-air system consisted of four channels...

...Thus the hierarchy of American television, in which (especially on "prime time") the expensive programming of narrative fiction and Hollywood movies is privileged compared to all other uses of visual technology, is here overturned...

...At this point, then, we are finally in a position to understand how the British public service system, both as I am idealizing it and as it more or less has been working for fifteen DISSENT / Spring 1998 years, actually sustains itself...

...At first glance there was a superficial resemblance, in that all three concluded with failure...

...Channel One and Channel Two are both BBC public service channels run by an independent board, but Channel One is considered to be the "popular" channel and Channel Two the more "cultural" channel...

...that is, quite deliberately structuring and then appealing to a fractured public...

...In order to understand the way this system of oligopolistic competition determines the production of cultural commodities, we have to rid ourselves of fantasies about "free markets...

...Prime Suspect 3 and Homicide both featured a detailed interrogation of a "prime suspect," who walked away unscathed at the end...

...Though there is no evidence that watching television changes minds in any particular ideological direction, there is plentiful evidence of its pacificatory effect...

...There is no fixed source of income: theoretically, every program produced by NBC or CBS or ABC or TNT or Fox could not only lose money but fail to return a single dollar, if every viewer absolutely preferred a competing program on some other network...

...four police series (including a rerun of Between the Lines...

...With the exception of Channel Four's founding, the creators of British television have not had the faintest intention of providing either more democracy or more pluralism in visual culture...

...Public television has thus been refinanced yearly, without the necessity of asking for any legislative appropriation...

...And Channel Four is considered to have a "very satisfactory performance" in the ten-to-twelve range...

...Portions of this essay are excerpted from his Cracks in the Pedestal: Gender and Ideology in Hollywood (C) University of Massachusetts Press, 1998...

...They do not succeed in every case, but as one detective remarks, "the great thing about being in Homicide is that there's always more of them...

...What's truly political is the revelation of how thoroughgoing, how all-enveloping, is the life of secrecy, betrayal, and antisocial solidarity that the police are forced to lead...

...See "The Transformation of the Television Industry and the Social Production of Blackness," in Herman Gray's Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995...

...But with the exception of only the most successful "crossover" programs (for example, The Cosby Show, L.A...

...two original plays...

...Just as, for example, the central purpose of visual pornography ("hard core") is to get its audience to watch more pornography (or else the industry would go out of business), so the central purpose of any television episode is to get the viewer to watch more television: the next segment, leading to the next set of ads...

...is their common motto...

...one soap opera...

...Blind Justice moves in another direction entirely...

...one program of childhood reminiscences of a well-known politician...

...What exactly are we to think...

...three popularsong and culture programs...

...Neither real politics nor uncensored female (or male) sexuality is permitted on American network television, for either of those shocks to the system might prevent some element of the audience from being delivered to the advertisers who foot the bill...

...S ERENDIPITY AGAIN: in one week of December 1993 it was possible on British television to see episodes of two police drama series, Prime Suspect 3 and Between the Lines, in sequence with an Emmy-winning two-part episode of the American Homicide...

...Civil liberties wins the argument but the rights of an innocent victim win our emotions...

...This is also the constant theme of Between the Lines, a series about a mythical "Complaints Investigation Bureau" that investigates alleged (and often real) police crimes...

...DISSENT / Spring 1998 n 57...

...It would be wrong to think that network television always remains the same...

...Rather, they are about the frightening ambiguity of police work, or of the very concept of the "police," who, as any picketer or community activist could testify, do not exist only to protect citizens from crime...

...The presumption is that to be immersed in it but not really engaged with it is the normal way of living...

...What they know is that if the other oligopolists advertise and they don't, their product will fade from sight...

...In the case of BBC, its financing has traditionally been provided primarily by the television license fee, which must be paid annually by every television-owning household in Britain, for every television set that is owned (or rented...

...it's the differences that are revealing...

...nobody is perfect, especially when forced to endure the hazards and bruAMERICAN TELEVISION AND CONSUMER DEMOCRACY talities of "life on the street...

...The American episode concludes, after the accused's conviction, with a confrontation between Kuzak and Van Owen, which soon devolves into the familiar subideological conflict between order and constitutional liberty, "putting a rapist back on the streets" versus "even a rapist deserves the best defense he can get...

...AMERICAN NETWORK television can be characterized simply: it is a marketdriven industry par excellence...

...The entire range of programming that in the United States would be ghettoized as "public television," less than and different from the real thing, appears interchangeably with Dynasty and Roseanne, Murphy Brown and Home Improvement, all together making up a metatext that to American eyes is unrecognizeable...

...Carried to this point, subjectivist theories of interpretation justify political passivity...

...This is not a genuine democratic pluralism, but a pluralism that cancels itself out...

...There are certainly profound cultural differences between the United States and Great Britain, the one being anarchically and even violently democratic, unequivocally consumerist, and relentlessly progressive...

...Here, the good guys are us, on this side of the interrogation table...

...The male lead is a philanderer who at one point systematically betrays both women in his life: an ironic commentary on his assigned task of rooting out the same kind of work-related behavior among his colleagues...

...Socialization is a two-way process, and we can never predict, for any particular individual, what will happen during that process...

...the elimination or the attenuation of competitive pressure produces variety...

...As men and women, we are reassured that a fundamental sympathy, recognized in the institution of marriage and the family, binds us together...

...This is the strange, inverted version of Hollywood naturalism, beautifully realized in its gritty urban surfaces, but totally unlike the socially conscious naturalism of Zola or Dreiser or Norris...

...the main goal of any commercial television program is not to be switched off...

...On the other hand, it would be a mistake to make too much of the phenomenon of communications "feedback...

...The murderer in Prime Suspect 3 does not walk away simply because Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison is unable to break his alibi, as in Homicide...

...Monopolizing a group of channels is not what it once was, now that the UHF band on cable television is almost indefinitely extensible...

...any developmental needs that can't be expressed as patterns of material consumption might as well not exist...

...Law has carefully hid50 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 den from us...

...71-89...

...6 Unlike movies (which seem to emanate phantasmatically from within ourselves), television appears simply as the "real" upon which we are eavesdropping...

...7. An American television watcher would have to see a nonnaturalistic product of British television such as Pennies From Heaven or The Singing Detective even to begin to comprehend what such television might look like...

...Much more crucial, however, is the fact that the main source of protected revenue for Channel Four is a legislatively mandated set-aside: the commercial channel allocates 10 percent of gross revenues as a subsidy to Channel Four, and this is part of the cost it must bear for being licensed to monopolize public airspace...

...Why bother, when anyone can generate her own critique in the privacy of her own home by "appropriating" Seinfeld—as though mild amusement had somehow become socially defiant...

...But these all run in the early evening when Americans, whose real night life has not yet begun, are watching endless local and national recountings of the same "news...

...politics on American television is notable only by its absence...

...and the same program(s) next week, leading to &repetitive seeing•of the same ads...

...The pervasive argument that human life makes sense, social forces are comprehensible, "happy" endings are normal (justice is done), and the meaning of what people say is ultimately unambiguous—all this represents a secular version of the sentiment that "God's in His Heaven/All's right with the world...

...In this version of storytelling, "problems" are introduced only to be solved, critiques only to be repudiated...

...Instead, it offers the passive consumption of culture as one alternative to all those other, less passive modes of linking cultural productions with their material referents...

...These merely add febrile paranoia to an already unhealthy dose of unreality...

...Whatever the genre or time, though, only the mass audience—of women, of families, of men, of children—is the advertiser's target...

...Rather, he walks because the police hierarchy and powerful political forces have combined to make it impossible for her to pursue her case properly from the beginning...

...Nevertheless, the various components of the system produce results strikingly variant from those American televiewers are used to, and it is worth considering just how this is accomplished...

...But in the television world they are always brought under control in the end (if only via the extreme sanction of cancellation...

...one "true crime...

...As though individual acts of consumption had somehow become politically significant...

...Eliot, is designed to distract us from distraction by distraction, American television is unexcelled...

...Occasionally this system produces major "events," recognized by everyone with a kind of astonished reverence, before they disappear back into the metatext from which they so briefly emerge...

...and from a unique and indescribable Channel Four series of short plays, an episode in which the antiSemite Degas and the leftist Jew Pissarro, both once central members of the Impressionist movement but now no longer talking to each 52 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 other, are brought to the Channel Four studio to debate the Dreyfus Affair...

...This much is true in the sense, and only in the sense, that political parties are also oligopolists, and that party competition is oligopolistic competition...

...More specifically, only the mass audience of likely consumers is the target...

...two private eyes (one of them a woman, the other Sherlock Holmes...

...However, forced by circumstances into finally taking the case, she does what she has said she won't do—"just doing her job''—and secures the accused's acquittal...

...Unlike L.A...

...How can this be...

...3. The fate of "minority [a euphemism for "black"I-oriented" television is a sad case in point...

...sixteen documentaries or exposés of various kinds, including three about controversial political issues, two about cancer, one about gay nuns, two of particular interest to women, two about cars, and one about American movies by blacks...

...There the resemblance ended, however, and it is again the fundamental difference that was so striking...

...If we must spend some of our nights watching other people's versions of the worlds we live in, this is certainly the most varied, pluralistic, and open way in which those nights can be programmed for us...

...and if we use this word rather than its more particular counterpart, "subsidy" we can see what it is that makes the difference...

...The failure of the police symbolizes their humanity...

...In a wonderful moment of serendipity, the same story line appeared on two very different television networks one night in 1988...

...Watching him negotiating his sex life we wonder not about male philandering, which would be a trivializing response, but about policing as an organized activity: whether "law and corruption" might not be a more accurate epithet than "law and order...

...Since for any given film it has a guaranteed audience which has already paid to see whatever films it's going to show, its projects do not have to pass the standard marketability tests...

...And even though we know that life is not a sitcom or soap opera or police drama, even while we may laugh at their silliness, they still seem to be about American people leading American lives...

...Network television caters only to the average viewer...

...But in the wellknown analysis of rational-choice theory, competitive parties organized for the winning of elections therefore tend to deliver similarity rather than diversity...

...As citizens of diverse social backgrounds, we are told that only "whiteness" gives access to the highest level of rewards, but that tolerance of differences is a recognized social virtue...

...as long as the fee could be raised without resistance, the system was stable...

...This appropriation may indeed happen from time to time...

...to 11 P.M.: Two sporting events...

...Law, Blind Justice recognizes that in the law of rape, consent is inferred only on the basis of what a man as a man might "reasonably" have thought a woman "wanted," even though force has admittedly been used...

...The answer is that reversing the structure of American commercial television also reverses its priorities...

...six sitcoms, two of them American...

...But it remains an argument, rather than, as in American versions of the genre, a conclusion all the more decisive for being implicit...

...When a white woman watches a program for white women she knows what she is watching (if somehow she managed to miss this point, it would be brought forcibly to her attention at the first commercial break...

...The caustic wit of Roseanne, the quirky multiculturalism of Northern Exposure, the sometime feminism of Cagney and Lacey, the racial consciousness of Frank's Place or A Different World, the social satire of The Simpsons, the sometimes counterideological "movie of the week" productions of Robert Greenwald and his successors have stretched television's boundaries slightly...

...Suppose company A decided to market a distinguishable product...

...This television is not designed to compete with other ways of living life, except with its generic cousin cinema...

...Today, the cultural field is seen by postmodern theorists as a realm of plurality, play, and multiple meanings, where members of different subcultures appropriate cultural commodities for their own purposes...

...Thus HBO is receptive to commercially dubious projects as long as they might get favorable reviews, and not raise the kind of flak that can result in falling subscriptions...

...The ratings game, which measures market share, is a lifeanddeath matter...

...and the more so the greater its pretensions to "realism"— which do reach a kind of apogee in episodic television...

...three comedy programs...

...BBC Two, the more "elite" channel, is considered to be doing very well if it draws an audience share of fifteen as opposed to thirty-five to forty for the popular channels...

...Unlike Kuzak, she makes us aware of a crucial asymmetry within the accepted standards of "fair trial" and "due process of law...

...the other being authoritarian and hierarchical, and still marked by strong elements of traditionalism and social deference...

...Thus postmodern critics substitute a legitimate insight about the freedom with which ideas circulate—all of us can reinterpret any text for our own purposes—for the quite separate truth that there is an enduring material structure of cultural power to which those of us who merely consume cultural commodities are always subject...

...4 ASIMPLE THOUGHT experiment will show why this must be so...

...Even obsessive television watchers are not passive receptacles...

...So the most important criterion for maintaining a vitally pluralistic visual culture on the public service model is that its management and its financing are independent of both political and commercial pressures...

...the next program, leading to four new sets of ads...

...Free-market oligopoly cannot produce diversity...

...It is also possible to "live with" British television this way, especially its soap operas, which are even more the subject of national attention in all social circles than are their American counterparts...

...In fact, profit, as is the case for most oligopolies, is guaranteed, in that the worth of the basic asset— the network franchise—is beyond price...

...American television series are carefully tailored to fit into genres that are sexually and also nowadays racially coded to find and not to offend a particular primary audience, an audience that can instantly be identified simply by watching the ads...

...The game is not worth the candle: little to be gained and much to be lost...

...The elite that dominates British television (historically) is, contrastingly, an elite drawn in large measure from the creative community...

...Get on with it...

...all decisions on the ground are subject to their imprimatur...

...an appreciation of the Chrysler Building by John Malkovich...

...that is, one catering to a part of the market not yet actually satisfied by the oligopoly...

...So ideological ambiguities of race, class, and gender do occur and reoccur, because the social order itself is immersed in them to a perhaps historically unprecedented degree...

...Though profit seeking is only comparative, it is as desperate and ruthless as if it were absolute...

...It is not a total, selfreferential world, designed literally to screen out all alternatives to passive consumption...

...It's not merely that Between the Lines emphasizes the reality of injustice more than the humanity of its characters or that its "hero" himself engages in cover-ups to "protect the honor of the force," but that even the humanization of its protagonists is equivocal...

...It's not that this question couldn't be answered on American television, but that it could never be raised...

...two series about doctors...

...It has always lacked appropriate regional, minority, and female representation, but in principle it is open to the claims of those groups, as long as their representatives have the talent to make a contribution—as why should they not...

...If, less dramatically, their programs are only marginally less popular than those of their oligopolistic competitors, that may or may not be bad for sales, but it cannot possibly be good: once again, heads will roll...

...In one week in England in 1994, for example, the following programs appeared during the "prime time" hours of 9 P.M...

...The BBC was conceived of (by Lord Reith) with a frankly elitist and paternalistic mission, and though it might be barely possible to imagine a similar outcome of some future reform effort in the United States, its explicit justifications would have to be totally different...

...nine films, seven of them American, the others Australian and English...

...Advertisers would go on strike, shareholders would disinvest, the network's stock would collapse, and hundreds of corporate raiders would be competing to buy control and throw the existing ownership and management out on its collective ear...

...Let us imagine three companies, A, B, and C, that dominate a particular consumer market and whose products are largely indistinguishable— the condition under which oligopolies arise in the first place...

...In the absence of oligopolistic competition, standards of "success" change drastically...

...Nothing I have said here constitutes a judgment of aesthetic quality...

...two programs of questions directed at public figures...

...EVEN THE occasional originality of Hollywood cinema is beyond the reach of American television...

...Channel Three is "independent" (that is, commercial) and is governed both by an independent board and "the market" (that is, advertisers...

...Instead, the metatext of American commercial television reveals a unique national ideology and aesthetic style that go hand in hand...

...Innovation or originality are therefore, and for good reason, fundamentally suspect.' Commercial television, though its narratives are often predicated on a neverending tease, must still in the end give the kind of satisfaction that maintains interest in a given program as a series of meaningful outcomes, the most meaningful of which is the advertising time it sells...

...That television's message is often "seen through" by women or minorities (or audiences generally) should not lead us to mistake its general direction...

...Market competition produces conformity...

...Catherine's only possible response, in her own view, is the morally disturbing conclusion that she must change her life...

...This is especially true of television, where the traditional product is so familiar, the costs of production so high, and the risks of failure so great...

...In sum, British television does not colonize AMERICAN TELEVISION AND CONSUMER DEMOCRACY the consciousnesses of its potential audience in the same way or to the same extent as its American counterpart...

...The police exist also to aggrandize their own powers as an interest group and a closed fraternity, and above all to protect the state and the elites that staff and run it from having to undergo full democratic accountability for their own often illicit behaviors...

...and of its tendency (espeDISSENT / Spring 1998 n 55 AMERICAN TELEVISION AND CONSUMER DEMOCRACY cially when watched heavily by children) to bring about a confusion between the real and the fanciful...

...On the other hand, if the innovation were a failure, A would have wasted precious resources and lost some portion of market share by being, in effect, a guinea pig for the rest of the industry...

...the unalloyed aesthetic naturalism of television positions us as inhabitants of the same world it is bringing into our living room.' OR IS THE apolitical character of television without a serious politics...

...I want to argue instead that "mass society" theory is still essentially correct, once the confusion between helpless audiences and passive DISSENT / Spring 1998 • 49 AMERICAN TELEVISION AND CONSUMER DEMOCRACY consumers is clarified...

...However, HBO is an exception only by virtue of its institutional position...

...WHAT'S MOST decisively different about this system is that it makes possible the destruction of artificial connections—which in the United States have the hard reality of a natural phenomenon— between television genres and viewing-time segments...

...More precisely, it is an oligopoly, in which a handful of producers dominate the bulk of the market and compete with each other for profit...

...This is not to say that intellectual thoughtfulness will never be found in fictional presentations on commercial (or public) television, but only that it must be kept in its place, bracketed off from the rest of the schedule and at the same time reintegrated into it by a major publicity campaign, so that it will not lead us to want to do something other than watch television...

...It cannot cater to minority or exceptional tastes unless these can be isolated as an identifiable group of potential consumers...

...Imagine a new network financed by the existing networks and mandated by the Federal Communications Commission to give special representation to women, gays, African-Americans, and so on, and one can begin to imagine the extent of the difference...

...But at no point will network television ever be intellectually independent or aesthetically imaginative in the British sense...

...In the future there may be possibilities for democratizing the production of mass culture that will go far beyond the British model...

...It is just there being life...

...There is a difference, though, between cultural artifacts that leave the field of interpretation open and those that attempt, even if sometimes unsuccessfully, to close it...

...What cannot be inserted into the schedule of commercial television is precisely what is inserted, only occasionally but often enough to be noteworthy, into the British television schedule...

...As for those independent but still recognizably narrative films that trail in Hollywood's wake, there is no equivalent anywhere within the television system, no matter how many channels cable has added to it...

...PHILIP GREEN is professor of government at Smith College...

...Only attention to institutional structures, to the way visual culture is produced and distributed rather than to the cultural ideals it might be presumed to express, can provide the necessary explanation...

...That Tony Clark betrays his wife and his mistress (herself a policewoman involved in a cover-up), while compromising two of his own cases in the process, does not by itself reveal anything about the alleged politics of personal life to us...

...This would re54 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 quire a major diversion of resources, but at great and pointless risk...

...Law), they accomplish this via the technique of "narrowcasting...

...As for Channel Four, it is permitted to sell time to advertisers within certain limits agreed on with the commercial channel, but the sponsor relationship is mostly arm's length...

...A man whose job it is to root out lies is himself constantly telling lies, and does not even notice the contradiction...

...In this way American television's simulacrum of pluralism affirms the divisions of the sexual and racial order even while seeming to appeal to particular subject positions within it...

...But they will have to start from its basic rejection of the false promises of "consumer democracy," for the "free market" can never produce anything but an unfree culture...

...This being the case, we can no more imagine American television producers consciously trying to insert into the middle of this schedAMERICAN TELEVISION AND CONSUMER DEMOCRACY ule a sense of holy terror, unbearable anxiety, Brechtian cynicism, or profound outrage at injustice, than we can imagine the producer of a pornographic film inserting one of Bergman's endless husband/wife dialogues in between two scenes of orgiastic coupling...

...Because most people do not regularly suffer from false consciousness, one of the effects of ideological discourse is always to call up resistance to itself...

...The opposite of competition, of course, is protection...

...British prime-time television, contrastingly, is also and perhaps even equally made for people who might otherwise be spending their evenings reading, or working, or pursuing hobbies, or going out, or engaging with the unpleasant material world...

...Here we are left in a genuinely ambiguous state of unease about "law and order...