Page 59 - Communication Theory and Research

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46 Communication Theory & Research
The high percentage of series from other countries (17 percent) on the
Italian commercial channels has to be attributed to the Latin American
telenovelas. They are a purely Southern European (and recently also Eastern
European) phenomenon. In Italy, the telenovelas are almost exclusively
broadcast on Rete 4, one of the three Mediaset (formerly Fininvest) channels.
Rete 4 specializes in soaps and telenovelas for a mainly female audience
(Buonanno, 1998a: 53).
The analysis shows the cultural fragmentation of the European audiovisual
market while at the same time the American audiovisual industry has succeeded
in breaking through all these cultural barriers. The American success formulas
are sufficiently well known by now. The themes of American television are
derived from emotional, daily life and concentrate on personal conflicts. Love,
jealousy, hatred, ambition and the lust for money are the major themes. The
cause of all good and evil lies with the individual, not with society. Each serial is
characterized by an intelligible content, identifiable situations and a touch of
suspense. At the same time, American television fiction offers escapist dream
material, which Vasterman (1981) and Berger (1992) compared with fairy tales,
based on simple dichotomies of good and evil, and with a built-in hope for a
better life, more happiness and prosperity. There is no room for experiments;
‘safety first’ is the motto of the American networks, which stands for imitation
and following up of existing success formulas (De Bens, 1994: 92). Gitlin (1983)
summarizes it as ‘nothing succeeds like success’.
As for films, the evolution since 1991 has more or less stabilized (see Table 4.6).
Between 1988 and 1991 there were still big shifts: a decrease in the share of
national series and an increase in the share of American series. Between 1991 and
1997 the shifts are much less marked and are certainly less univocal if one takes
into account the limited sample period. It looks as though the slight increase of
national series is at the expense of non-national European series, but certainly
not at the expense of American series.

European audiovisual policy

The results of our programme analysis from 1997, like the results of similar
research – the Eurofiction reports for 1996 and 1997 (Buonanno, 1998a, 1998b)
and the figures from the European Audiovisual Observatory (1999) – confirm
that the same trends apply to the 1990s as to the 1980s:

• The importance of fiction on the European television channels;
• The dominant position of American fiction;
• The limited distribution of European fiction.

This is not self-evident in view of all the policy measures taken since the end of
the 1980s to stimulate European audiovisual production and distribution in
resistance to the dominant American industry. [...]