Tv: THE INTERRUPTIBLE MEDIUM
Lermack, Paul
Criticism of commercial television seems to increase each year. Educators complain that it has not lived up to its potential. Political scientists, who expected TV to increase communication...
...their demands for "impact" have filled the airwaves with violence...
...The room lights need not be dimmed...
...But the fault is not in television's commercial bias...
...For instance, a common plot used by situation detective dramas will have the detective-hero accused of commiting a crime...
...TV programs work best as collections of short scenes each of which stands wholly or partly on its own...
...They have very little knowledge of what viewers want...
...Because they are familiar, they can often be grasped even by a viewer who gives them only partial attention...
...Public broadcasting exists as an alternative to the 186 commercial stations, but it too has been seduced by "normal television...
...Starsky and Hutch, "people" news stories, and certain team sports are suited to television, while lengthy political speeches and Hamlet are not...
...The proposed cures will not improve its quality...
...This explains why made-for-television movies are never quite like "real" movies: they must obey television's "rules...
...Most viewers, it is said, deplore this state of affairs but are locked into the system...
...Viewers will look up momentarily to watch an ordinary-looking person being clobbered by a huge pugilist labeled ACID INDIGESTION...
...The fault is in what we require from home viewing...
...Music, jingles and humor work the same way...
...A viewer who misses one can still understand the next...
...A viewer who missed the first set of quips can nevertheless appreciate the second...
...if it is brief and well-done, a viewer who begins to watch it will remain attentive until the last punch or shuddering crash...
...Raincoats, sheepskins, and even lollipops are associated with characters...
...We would be much better off if we realized that TV's limits are the limits of the living room...
...indeed, they are so useful that many public and cable stations, which don't use them, put "intermissions" into their longer programs...
...TV sports programs are not simply contests without the need to sit in uncomfortable arenas...
...TV always avoids ambiguity...
...Sportscasters function, in truth, to make it possible for home viewers to give the game only intermittent attention...
...A viewer may have seen the program before, but he is unlikely to have seen all of it before...
...The receivers are passive, and can influence the content of the message only by refusing it...
...After the last quip, the laugh track roars...
...In place of serious attention to politics, TV provides the half-hour news program...
...Thus, a film clip of the remains of an explosion may be set in Beirut, in South Africa, or in a New York City airport...
...Fourteen percent of all Americans are college graduates...
...Since they can increase their rates by increasing the size of the audience they deliver to advertisers, broadcasters are driven by greed to continuously enlarge the pool of viewers sitting before their "electronic billboards...
...They would then assume that they had missed some vital bit of information, and that, consequently, the program is too complex to watch with limited attention...
...These are most visible in commercials (which, to broadcasters, are the most important bits), but not limited to them...
...Murders, crime, and serious accidents are well covered...
...but no professional athletic competitions have ever before felt it necessary to supply their fans with guides or interpreters...
...Early innovative uses of television, such as Studio One, were quickly eliminated...
...The relationship between TV and its viewers clearly must be more complex than its critics have assumed...
...They know only that certain kinds of programming—including The Beverly Hillbillies— is uniformly received, and other kinds—including Hamlet and most documentaries— are uniformly rejected...
...And so, the argument goes, their greed has replaced good programs with sellable ones...
...Such diverse films as A Night at The Opera, Rocky, and Jaws all obtain their effects by sucking viewers into their worlds and never pausing long enough for doubt to creep in...
...This is also true when television is watched in such semipublic places as bars, military or prison dayrooms, or the lounges of college dormitories or senior-citizens' homes...
...All these proposals are meant to control what is seen as the greed of broadcasters, and to liberate the creativity that this greed holds in check...
...It has failed, according to critics, not only because it does not broadcast the great classics of drama, but because it has not developed an art form of its own...
...According to Russell Baker, once it was decided to use TV as a marketing device, it had to become "a flickering billboard that would provide constant advice about what goods were available for purchase...
...Most TV dramas and comedies are series or serials...
...The same attention is required for modern plays, fast-moving sports like hockey, and films...
...The senders, the broadcasters, are aptly named, because they cast their signals broadly...
...All the programs in a series share the same actors, characters, and plot conventions, but each tells a complete story...
...A serious drama like Hamlet demands full attention...
...Is it not a paradox that in recent years, while higher levels of educational achievement brought about a new interest in ballet, the establishment of new regional professional theater groups, and some interest in serious films, TV alone declined in intellectual content...
...Jane will then tell Beth (adding that she, Jane, has also had an abortion, but that her ex-husband doesn't know about it...
...Background detail, or tone of voice, or the mannerisms of the characters identify the scene even if the viewer can't hear all the dialogue...
...Television, by slowing down the pace of programs and by imposing its own conventions, transforms the content of other media...
...Although TV once brought us Richard 111 and the Kennedy-Nixon debates, its time now is usually filled with such programs as Charlie's Angels and Let's Make a Deal...
...TV cannot give us Hamlet, the antibroadcaster argument goes, because TV must appeal to the largest possible audience...
...The laugh track roars again...
...Since all of the staples of TV content were borrowed from other media—sitcoms and sitdramas from radio, serials from magazines, news from newspapers, and variety shows from vaudeville—it looks as if television has not developed distinctive programming of its own...
...Beth will tell Helen (adding that Jane's ex-husband is now Judy's husband...
...In 1975 violence was curtailed through the selfcensorship of the "family hour," but the result was not an improvement...
...But viewed as television, the standards change...
...Reducing the number of commercials, or eliminating them, or holding them responsible for accuracy, may produce many good effects...
...To keep their programs from degenerating into background noise, broadcasters use a variety of short-term attentiongetting devices...
...They would never give attention to a half-hour program in which scientists presented evidence on which the products's claim is based...
...But in order for television to be so accommodating—in order, that is, for it to be understandable without full concentration— its content must be considerably different from that of more demanding media...
...A story about a labor dispute, for example, may be accompanied by a film clip of a picketer striking a policeman (or vice versa) instead of film clips showing the negotiators...
...Suspects in a murder mystery may be jealous, insane, or seeking revenge, but they cannot be, like Hamlet, ambiguous...
...Attention gained in this way is always short-lived...
...To understand why and how people watch TV we must study the TV experience...
...Limited relaxation is possible there, if it can be managed between interruptions...
...When the message is of poor quality, we assume the senders are at fault, for they have the initiative...
...Unlike staged drama and film, which strive to obtain the emotional involvement of their audiences by making the action as fast and intense as possible, TV must slow down its action and break its programs up into short, discrete bits...
...Even trained chemists who during their working hours are interested in the properties of antacids would not watch such a program...
...Many important problems—like unemployment— are actually processes that continue over long periods of time, affect different parts of the country differently, and cannot easily be divided into separable units...
...Commercials provide similar pauses...
...If people must come in late, they do not mind missing the first act—as they would if they had to pay $15 for tickets...
...Characters must never act out of character: the good doctor must always act to spare his patients pain, and the good policeman must always fight injustice...
...Television must be interruptible...
...There is nothing inherently dull about these problems...
...An attempt is usually made to include happy stories (like the birth of quintuplets or the reunion of a five-generation family), but most "people" stories are unhappy...
...It is possible to speak of suitable and unsuitable television subjects, just as it is possible to speak of suitable and unsuitable music for the organ...
...188 One way to insure that characters and visual cues will be familiar is to schedule series...
...When baby-sitters are available, adult viewers will seek more engrossing forms of entertainment: bowling, movies, bridge, etc...
...TV news content is heavy with familiar and uncomplicated "people" stories: the antics of movie stars or the shocking behavior of the teen-age sons of prominent people...
...Violent scenes are often presented before commercial breaks to "wake the viewers up...
...Even though television presents comedies and melodramas, it cannot simply copy the content of other media...
...If the viewer comes in in the middle of a scene and observes two actors talking, he must be able to reconstruct the thrust of their conversation from what he already knows and fit it into its plot context...
...If the play was important, they repeat it on instant replay—"for those of you who might have missed it...
...In order to be interruptible, the pace and structure of TV programs must differ from those of other media...
...It may take a few weeks for the audience to realize that Colombo will always wear his tan raincoat, but, once this convention is learned, it greatly simplifies viewing...
...It has attracted large audiences only by broadcasting programs similar to those of the commercial stations...
...There is a feeling that the early 1950s, when such programs flourished, represented television's "golden age...
...Movies, especially, are very fastpaced...
...TV dramas are not just staged plays brought into the home...
...They are not bored—as they would be if they had to watch familiar material in movie houses—because they are distracted by other things, and because they are always a step or two out of touch with the action...
...The best attention-getter available to dramatic programs is violence...
...The answer is no...
...People do other things while viewing: they eat, write letters, or knit...
...More than 80 percent of the dramatic programs studied by the National Commission On The Causes and Prevention Of Violence contained violent scenes...
...The laughter dies down...
...Since there is no emotional involvement in the TV experience, there is always the danger that viewers will stop paying attention altogether...
...Because of the constant repetition of the information, a viewer who has missed a program, or part of it, can still keep up...
...In order to aid viewers in identifying and following the characters, visual cues are used...
...But they do not know why this is so, for they don't know why viewers watch...
...Such visual cues identify scenes as well as actors...
...People watch television to get bits of enjoyment when they are not entirely free...
...Suggested remedies include reducing television's domination by businessmen...
...Instead, television gives us The Beverly Hillbillies, which poorly educated people will watch...
...Many more have partial college education or are still students...
...Viewed as sports, drama, or politics, TV programs provide appearances without the distinctive emotions with which they are usually associated...
...to understand a problem like unemployment requires considerable information about patterns of business, the supply of money, etc...
...Although most Americans now claim to get most of their information about politics from their sets, TV journalism, interruptible as all programming must be, can provide only very superficial coverage...
...it may look like the coronation ceremony of a king, or the funeral of a dictator...
...Violence includes fast movement and loud noise: the car with squealing tires plunging down the street out of control, the screaming robbery victim, the exploding building...
...If violence attracts more viewers, they will produce violence...
...we must look at it from the viewer's perspective...
...The lead story is mentioned, as a headline, during the program's introduction...
...The simplest is to turn up the sound...
...No one has to worry about driving in traffic, baby-sitters, or being late...
...a logotype of a clenched fist appears before stories about terrorism and a black cross or tombstone illustrates stories about traffic accidents...
...Standard and often-repeated scenes are used: the detective-hero questions the widow of the victim...
...All forms of TV programs are generally slow...
...Communication involves senders and receivers...
...Some stations give additional visual cues by using standardized symbols...
...But even the most casual viewer can follow the surface action, and can get a glimpse of genuine sorrow, while making only a very small investment of attention...
...at one time, each hero of a Western series had his own trick gun...
...Attempting to televise Hamlet is like trying to perform Beethoven's Ninth Symphony using a seven-piece jazz combo, or baking a cake with a cement mixer: the instrument is not suited to the function it is asked to perform...
...Many Americans deal with such matters during their working hours, and many more read political magazines...
...Poorly educated people, a majority in most parts of the country, will not watch Hamlet...
...There are special ways for a television lawyer to interview his client, for a detective to question a suspect, and for a doctor to console the relatives of a dying patient...
...The best examples are the soap operas...
...If distractions cause the viewer to miss a bit of 187 the program, then perhaps he can catch up by asking questions of someone else in the room...
...People watch TV in their homes, without any special preparations...
...The American Medical Association estimates that the average American child watches 18,000 murders on television before reaching the age of 18...
...TV plots are usually elemental conflicts (a tale of revenge, for example, or a love triangle), and do not have many subplots...
...TV demands no special preparation or attention...
...Television does best with sports in which the action is separated into a series of discrete plays, like football or baseball...
...Just as it must use simple plots, so TV must use simple characters who have easily graspable motivation...
...These examples indicate that the content of other media, when televised, must be transformed...
...Because it is such a useful attention-getting device, it is unlikely that violence will ever be entirely eliminated...
...In politics, campaign stories may consist only of the insults exchanged by the candidates...
...Whatever impact violence had was replaced with drippily sentimental melodramas (as in The Waltons), or with the hysterics of the game shows...
...And because the plot is not important, reruns are possible...
...If there were inconsistencies—if, for instance, the good doctor were shown splitting a fee, or the good policeman accepting a bribe—viewers might become confused...
...Children play with toys, snatching glimpses of programs and then turning away into their own imaginations...
...Knowing all this, they may miss some scenes without much loss...
...Since the "electronic billboard" only works one way, they cannot communicate to the broadcasters their desire for higher quality or less violence...
...TV needs its own content...
...Aside from elderly persons living alone, few people have frequent opportunities for prolonged uninterrupted viewing...
...There are also business reasons for this: the series format simplifies the hiring of actors and technical personnel, makes it possible to write scripts quickly (because the conventions are always the same), and allows advertisers to buy time in a known commodity...
...But this will not provide improved television content, as judged by the standards of the theater or the cinema...
...But these business reasons, by themselves, are not sufficient to account for the dominance of series and serials...
...At its close, TV's staples became "normal TV": situation comedies and situation dramas, game or variety shows, news and sports...
...Soap operas are not just televised romantic novels...
...But to a viewer who sees this film, and who doesn't hear the commentary (perhaps because he is on the phone), the picture carries its own partial message: the terrorists are at it again...
...Beer glasses must be refilled and ringing telephones answered...
...That is one reason home TV is not very good for educational uses...
...Hamlet and other classics have been broadcast many times—often in innovative and polished versions—but have never been commercial successes...
...Political scientists, who expected TV to increase communication between citizens and government—to enhance democracy—now complain that it has deteriorated into an advertising service for politicians...
...In the early days of TV, many dramatic programs (Playhouse 90, Four Star Playhouse) were continuous in name only, presenting totally different stories each week, and retaining only the technical personnel and some of the actors...
...The time between jokes is filled with the laugh track, so that the comedians often seem to be waiting for the laughter to die down...
...Viewers always know how the story will come out...
...They are certainly much better educated than the audience for which Hamlet was written...
...The viewer need only catch a glimpse of light-colored clothing in long shots in order to know that Colombo is on the screen...
...Viewers turn off "good" political programs, and shun even the most carefully made documentaries...
...But TV programs like Starsky and Hutch, which are suited to television's needs, should not be judged by the standards of the theater...
...Upstairs, Downstairs, for example, is a soap opera, more carefully made than any of its prime-time commercial equivalents, but a soap opera...
...Archie Bunker gets up from his chair and exchanges insults with his son-inlaw...
...Like an alarm clock, this gains everyone's attention...
...Unlike movie screens or stages, TV screens take up only part of the viewer's visual fields and are rarely the only source of activity in the rooms in which they are located...
...Since "Nile audience doesn't want to sit for ten minutes to watch a well-done, well-written story, [but rather t]hey want ten seconds of the school crisis and ten seconds of Liz and Dick,"* news programs are made up of very *Walter Jackson, co-anchorman of the evening news program for CBS' Chicago station...
...Most forms of entertainment are not interruptible...
...brief stories, each little more than a headline, and most illustrated with videotape...
...But it has...
...the misguided police, who are trying to arrest him, must be led astray by his faithful sidekick so he will be free to find the real murderer, etc...
...The sets are located in living rooms, dens, or kitchens...
...Variety and "talk" programs are collections of songs, jokes and skits, each understandable without reference to the others...
...The details of the action are related to the audience in conversations: if Judy has an abortion she will mention this to Sue, who will tell her neighbor, Jane (adding that Judy's husband doesn't approve...
...Violence is ubiquitous on TV...
...Serials, which are similar, have continuing actors and characters, but each program is an episode in a continuing story...
...But television rarely gives 191 any detail about the candidates' policy positions...
...And the recent successes of such mini-series as Roots indicate that other ways of scheduling programs are commercially feasible...
...The most important reason for the series format is that it permits the audience to become familiar with the conventions of the programs gradually...
...The violent scene catches the eye by combining shouting visuals and sound...
...For example, news programs are always collections of stories, each complete in itself and illustrated with its own picture...
...Viewers in the stadium or arena—who often can see the game less well than television viewers—get along without commentary...
...anyone who goes out for popcorn in the middle will miss something, and he will not be able to catch up easily...
...since the viewer cannot put down the soap opera when interrupted, slack must be built in—in the form of repetitions— to make it interruptible...
...It may look like sports, or drama...
...There are visual equivalents: zoom shots, shifts in focus, and the use of dizzying color...
...Without these laugh tracks, situation comedies would seem slow and tedious...
...Situation comedies are collections of jokes...
...Adults must give attention to crying infants, or to children who bicker, shriek, or ask questions...
...But in reality, it is TV...
...Archie Bunker sits down in his chair and exchanges witticisms with his wife...
...Quoted in Newsweek, October 11, 1976, p. 78...
...With fewer commercials, society may perhaps be able to cut down on mindless consumerism...
...but they cannot hold the viewer's undivided attention...
...studies show that commercials using jingles are the best remembered...
...A moment later their attention wanders...
...TV is whatever can be absorbed by a person while he is sitting with his feet up, a glass of beer in his hand, and a child competing for his attention...
...Sports with more continuous and sustained action, like hockey or soccer, do not televise well, although changes in the game's rules and frequent time-outs can be used to slow them down...
...it is then discussed in detail, and, finally, mentioned again during the "recap" at the end...
...There is a great deal of repetition...
...But this argument, plausible as it first seems, is not sufficient to account for television's sad condition...
...Specific proposals include elimination of commercials (and paying for programming by user charges), censorship to reduce violence, or the creation of a federal regulatory commission to oversee programming...
...TV will never be capable of truly detailed coverage of public affairs...
...They are different because they must be adapted to provide the interruptibility that television needs...
...They are the best-remembered 190 parts of such programs as The Six Million Dollar Man, Kung-Fu, and Baretta...
...As the details of Judy's life are revealed in the repetitive conversations, tangled plots (by television's standards) can be woven together...
...Viewers must be able to grasp the conflict even if they miss the first act, or miss stray scenes along the way...
...To do anything more strenuous—to the mind, as well as to the body—we have to go outside...
...The need for slowness and separability of 189 scenes can also be observed in the broadcasting of sports...
...But this is really a great control: over time, by refusing certain kinds of messages, they can set constraints on what is communicated...
...In a sense, then, television's distinctive art is the art of adapting the content of other media to fit the constraints of the living room...
...The same stories are used over and over, so the audience is familiar with them...
...They watch in groups...
...Even in other stories, violence may be emphasized...
...Nor is commercial TV a good medium for public affairs...
...This means that television content does not vary...
...To be televisable, dramatic plots cannot be too complex...
...But there is an unasked question behind this line of reasoning: if poorly educated people will not watch Hamlet because it is unsuited to their intellectual level, why, then, won't well-educated people similarly refuse to watch The Beverly Hillbillies...
...But politics requires attention that cannot be mustered during evening socializing, beer-drinking, and baby-sitting...
...Because it is always available and can be viewed in bits and pieces, TV fills half the leisure time of the average American...
...Even programs that seem more unified are actually made up of separable bits...
...In news programs, as in drama, violence has impact...
...Shocking language is almost as good as violence...
...Surprisingly, this is difficult to achieve...
...Using violence, broadcasters can call attention to parts of their programs...
...No one has to come home from work early, or put on his good clothes, because the family is going to watch TV...
...Housewives dart in and out while cooking...
...By raising their voices, sportscasters call attention to unusual plays...
...The subject matter of American public life is complex...
...Most notable of all, television is accused of failing even as entertainment...
...If asked, sportscasters describe their function as an explanatory one...
...The pace is very slow...
...Home TV watchers cannot give undivided attention to their sets because they are frequently distracted or interrupted...
...There is a great deal of distracting motion and noise...
...The audience knows that the accusation must be false (if for no other reason than that the hero must return for next week's episode), and they have watched enough similar programs to know that he will try to clear himself by finding the real criminal...
...A pause...
...A good doctor will be silver-haired, a good policeman square-jawed...
...The pace is further slowed by filling the time between plays with comments of sportscasters, who repeat and interpret what has happened...
...TV's failures are usually blamed on the people who operate the commercial stations...
...Most have been tried and have not had the desired effects...
...Teen-agers read, study, or talk on the phone...
...Would reducing television's dependence on business alter this state of affairs...
...This Hamlet cannot do...
...and their reluctance to offend any possible viewer has killed political broadcasting...
...For two reasons—because TV has neither the right form nor the right audience setting— TV programs cannot arouse and maintain the emotional involvement of their viewers...
...A faithful viewer, who knows that Judy's husband (and Jane's ex-husband) was once also Helen's lover can enjoy the story as a continuing saga...
...Helen will tell her mother-in-law, and so on...
...Businessmen are not committed to aesthetic values, nor are they ashamed to produce trash...
...He can then follow the action with only a quick glimpse now and again...
...Starsky and Hutch is designed to provide intermittent entertainment...
...If the viewer missed the first report that there had been an earthquake in Guatemala, he will be able to deduce this information when a reporter, during a later story, says that the President called the earthquake a "tragedy," or when an expert explains that this is Guatemala's third major earthquake in a decade...
Vol. 25 • April 1978 • No. 2
