BLACK AND WHITE TV
LAST, JONATHAN V.
Black and White TV Truths and Myths of Narrowcasting By Jonathan V. Last Conservatives who like to believe that whites and blacks are fully integrated in the culture should consider this: Not one...
...What Zook and her friends don’t or can’t understand is that this is not show politics but show business...
...Now Kristal Brent Zook has written a book exploring this practice and the cultural divide to which it is responding...
...With cable television increasing in popularity and Fox inspiring imitators, it’s no wonder many people in the industry think that narrowcasting is the future for all television...
...Many of its black shows were sacrificed to make space for such programs as Beverly Hills 90210, Party of Five, and Melrose Place...
...So that was my agenda coming in...
...My other aunt is also an activist...
...Zook begins her slim volume promisingly with a discussion of the practice of narrowcasting for black audiences and a glimpse into the world of the infant Fox during the late 1980s...
...audience, were 25 percent of Fox’s audience...
...One of the popular parlor games among TV people of the 1970s and early 1980s was imagining what it would take to launch a fourth broadcast network to compete with NBC, CBS, and ABC...
...Color By Fox tells the story of the rise of the Fox television network (part of News Corporation, the parent of THEWEEKLY STANDARD...
...We felt a responsibility to do issue-oriented shows...
...I was raised by these women...
...She opens with the well-documented fact that black audiences overwhelmingly prefer shows starring black actors...
...When the Fox television network was launched in 1986, cobbled together from a few seldomwatched UHF stations in major cities, the TV establishment chuckled dismissively and assumed that it would quickly fold in the face of overwhelming competition from the majors...
...The largest part of Color By Fox is a misguided textual analysis of such shows as The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Roc, and New York Undercover, in such prose as: “What these aesthetics accomplish is an ideological reframing of the debate itself, recontextualizing ‘unwanted compliments’ as part of an ongoing legacy of womanist resistance...
...Fox once again defied the odds by smoothly trading its old core audience for a new, more profitable one...
...She is so in love with her four pillars of black-television success that she never gets around to talking about what will become of the concept of narrowcasting...
...Fox’s success established a blueprint that has since been followed by two new start-up networks, the failing Paramount (UPN) and the thriving Warner Brothers’ (the WB...
...Even though its viewership is small (it ranks ninetyninth among all viewers), it has the most coveted niche: Felicity has the highest concentration of eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old viewers in households with incomes over $75,000...
...In fact, in recent years, television networks have been able to capture nearly the entire black audience without attracting any white viewers at all, and “narrowcasting” has emerged as a dominant programming philosophy among television executives...
...As heroes, she offers cultural activists like Ralph Farquhar, a black TV executive involved with the show South Central, who has a plaque on his desk that says “Life is more important than show business...
...However, blacks—whom one producer referred to as the “Nike and Doritos audience”— are, financially speaking, a lowyield audience who don’t attract bigmoney advertisers...
...Like starting a new major movie studio, it was fun to talk about, but looked economically insane...
...Did Fox first raise and then destroy the expectations of black audiences...
...Reggie and I both had high aspirations from the beginning...
...By the end of her book, Zook has degenerated into inarticulate moral outrage at Fox’s abandoning of its original black shows—when what would have been fascinating is moral analysis of why the network was wrong, or right, to do so...
...This TV stepchild is now recognized as the fourth major network...
...My aunt is a Chicano studies professor at East LA College, chair of the department...
...Jamie Kellner, the chief executive of the WB, says that even network television has become a battle for niche: “It’s going to be a fragmented marketplace, [so you have to] make sure the one you’re hanging onto is the most valuable one in terms of audience...
...In the early 1990s, however, Fox embarked on a not-so-subtle quest to change its identity and capture a wider and more commercially attractive audience...
...Was Fox’s turn to shows like Beverly Hills 90210 a silencing of the black creative voice...
...and Natalie Chaidez, who, with Reggie Bythewood, worked on New York Undercover, proclaims, My mother is an activist...
...So even while Fox guaranteed its viability in the short-term by finding a foothold in the marketplace, the network seemed to weaken its viability for the long-term by closely linking its brand to a relatively undesirable demographic group...
...But Fox wisely chose not to compete at all with the Big Three, but to aim at an underserved audience: black America...
...Just not by Kristal Brent Zook or any other of the political malcontents, both conservative and liberal, who are furious that popular entertainment is a financial enterprise with no loyalty to their agenda...
...She has a pet thesis, which is that black audiences respond to four distinctive elements of black-produced programs: autobiography, improvisation, “black aesthetics,” and drama...
...Zook misses this entirely...
...This is the type of viewer, with reams of disposable income, who makes advertisers salivate...
...But she then moves to trying to differentiate what black audiences do not in fact seem to differentiate: black-produced shows (such as Living Single) from merely black-cast shows (such as Family Matters...
...This atomization of the industry is the legacy of Fox’s courting of the black audience, and surely there is a fascinating book to be written about it...
...My grandmother worked in unions...
...unexpected success: By 1995, blacks, who are only 12 percent of the U.S...
...In the world of television, a show like the WB’s Felicity is one of the most valuable franchises around...
...Black and White TV Truths and Myths of Narrowcasting By Jonathan V. Last Conservatives who like to believe that whites and blacks are fully integrated in the culture should consider this: Not one of the ten mostwatched television programs in white America is in the top ten for blacks...
...Zook is absolutely right that the topic is fascinating, and she’s absolutely wrong about why...
...And she presents the thesis over and over again, in the apparent hope that endless and numbing repetition will overcome the fact that she’s wrong...
...But a season of a television show costs more than $11 million for twentytwo episodes (the top-rated show, ER, reportedly costs $13 million per episode), making the production of entertainment a high-stakes endeavor...
...This gambit of network-wide counter-programming proved an unexJonathan V. Last is a reporter for THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
Vol. 4 • March 1999 • No. 27
