Page 65 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Streamlining 'television audience' 53
determine in advance, but must confirm and reconfirm empirically. After all, it is the
relative success or failure of the broadcasters’ efforts to attract audiences which is the
ultimate rationale for audience measurement. What the streamlining procedure does, in
fact, is the calculating of that success or failure (i.e. of ‘audience response’) in
compliance with a prefabricated formal structure. As a result, all too big surprises are not
likely to occur: uncertainty about audience response is reduced to uncertainty about the
number of viewers in each parcel of the map. Empirically found variations within the
streamlined audience are conveniently contained in ‘types’ and ‘patterns’; developments
over time are straightened out in terms of ‘trends’. This is the core productivity of the
streamlining procedure: it purifies, through a kind of filtering process, people’s concrete
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viewing activities by representing them in a smooth, totalized but adaptable map.
The map of the streamlined audience then is characterized by variation in regularity,
regularity in variation—stable enough to guarantee continuity, malleable enough to allow
for responsiveness to temporal fluctuations. The map is very handy indeed for the
industry: it supplies both broadcasters and advertisers with neatly arranged and easily
manageable information, a form of knowledge which almost cannot fail to provide a
sense of provisional certainty, as maps generally do. For example, the ranking of
programmes according to their ratings performance constitutes a weekly flow chart which
is used as a reliable and agreed-upon indicator of ‘popularity’, and thus of the value of
the audience commodity.
But such discursively constructed ‘facts’ are not only indispensible guidelines for both
broadcasters and advertisers in their economic negotiations; they are also made to serve
as cultural clues for the networks to develop and commission new programmes. This use
of ratings is made possible by the construction of the ‘hit show’ for instance. It is a
peculiar oddity indeed that while the networks know perfectly well, thanks to ratings
discourse, which programmes have been ‘successful’, they do not know why they have
been and which new ones will be. There is no way to foretell the ratings performance of a
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new programme. Therefore, the use of past ‘successes’ in the constant search for future
ones remains a gamble. As one network programmer, Donald Grant of CBS, has said:
‘When I originally picked out Dallas, I didn’t know it was going to be a hit—it was only
after it was on that it sparked Knot’s Landing and Dynasty. Hits create trends, not the
other way around’ (in Wilner 1987:44). Even so, although ratings and demographics are
estimates about audience size and composition for a past situation, the regularities
highlighted by ratings discourse allow the industry to take decisions that do affect the
future. These regularities furnish a sense of predictability and, as a consequence, the
(imagined) power to anticipate and act upon it, in an attempt to bring the variable element
in the streamlined audience under control.
The impact of this power to anticipate is reflected in the iron repetitiveness which
characterizes television scheduling and programming in American network television. A
programme that proves to be a ratings winner is likely to set the tone for a whole number
of other programmes, either in the form of spin-offs or of copies. As a consequence, a
kind of streamlining of television programming itself is achieved, a form of what Gitlin
(1983) has called ‘recombinant culture’. The construction of the streamlined audience
then goes hand in hand with the streamlining of television’s output: the categorization
and structuring of programmes in terms of formulaic genres, the segmentation of time in
regular units, the placing of programmes in fixed time slots, and their sequencing into a