The thirtieth anniversary of the smash ABC miniseries Roots (1977) came and went with little fanfare. TV One reran the miniseries a couple of times with extensive on-channel promotion, and Warner Bros. re-released the miniseries on DVD. As we enter a post-network television era, however, it is worth reassessing the promises and disappointments that came in the wake of Roots in order to understand the prospects for African American television today, especially dramatic series.

Roots was the first major television drama featuring African American actors, themes, and stories. In addition to posting a record-breaking 72-share for its final installment, the miniseries raised the hopes of African American viewers and actors that the long drought of African American televised drama might finally be over. Alas, those hopes have gone largely unfulfilled.

Why this persistent lack of African American drama on mainstream television, even after Roots demonstrated the potential popularity? If one listens to industry insiders, African American drama is simply an economic impossibility. White viewers aren’t interested in black drama, and black audiences alone don’t warrant the kind of production investment that television dramas require. I want to question that wisdom, because I believe that it stems from a number of blind spots about race, culture and economics.

The absence of African American drama today owes mainly to perceptions of international buyers’ preferences, because dramas requires good international sales to make back production deficits. Perception of international preferences, in turn, are based on what I want to call “industry lore,” or a set of assumptions about cultural and economic realities that shape industry insiders’ beliefs about what is and is not possible in television.

African American dramas, even those with only one or two prominent black characters, are generally seen as unsaleable abroad. In comments posted here (at the 1 hr., 1 min, 30 second mark), for instance, Susanne Daniels, President of Entertainment for Lifetime Entertainment Services, explains why prime time features so few dramas starring African American women:

I’ve frequently heard this sentiment from television executives, but never in such a public forum. Obviously, the perception is widespread. Daniels’ comments give us a window into how industry lore works, so before pursuing my counter-example of Roots, I want to talk briefly about industry lore.

Industry lore comprises common sense knowledge about audience preference and the possibilities of the medium that get passed along in many forms, including trade journals articles and informal executive education. Often, industry lore draws on particular examples to illustrate more general truths. The fact that predominantly Muslim Egyptian audiences rejected Gunsmoke because Matt Dillon’s badge resembled a Star of David, for instance, provides a general lesson about the dangers of cultural ignorance when selling programs internationally. These features of educative storytelling are what lead me to use the term “lore,” which the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines as “traditional knowledge and stories about a subject,” rather than a more general term like discourse.

Industry lore facilitates the smooth operation of the commercial television industries. Television markets are purely imaginary. Conceptualizing which audiences might be interested in which programs is an act of imagination, even when it is backed up by research, which is seldom the case in international television trade. Industry lore is the product of those collective imaginings. Finally, industry lore is a form of material discourse, which derives from and acts upon other material processes of the television business, including political-economic forces, industry organization, and day-to-day business practices.

In the case of Roots, industry lore at first worked against the worldwide distribution of the miniseries; then, after it became “the world’s most-watched television drama,”1 industry lore stepped in to downplay the importance of the African American elements in the show’s global appeal. Letters from Roots producer David Wolper to the international distribution units of United Artists and Twentieth Century-Fox, as well as acquisitions executives at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canadian distributor Simcom, the BBC, and Australian Channel 7 show that Wolper worked hard to find outlets abroad for the miniseries, but generally failed. While American distributors uniformly praised the miniseries, they agreed that “the primary market for the project would be the U.S. and Canada”2 and they did “not believe that much [could] be done with it overseas.”3

Obviously, distributors believed that viewers abroad would have no cultural frame of reference to understand African American experiences of slavery. Nevertheless, the miniseries sold in 49 territories in its first two years of syndication, and it earned as much abroad as it did in domestic syndication. Industry insiders took two lessons away from Roots’ surprise global appeal: that buyers abroad, especially hard-to-crack European public broadcasters, were interested in miniseries because they fit the scheduling demands of non-commercial channels; second, that historical miniseries rooted in “universal themes” could appeal to foreign viewers.

Roots inaugurated a cycle, in which African American television programs break new ground in international markets, only to pave the way for white series to follow. Roots paved the way for predominantly white historical miniseries. The Cosby Show paved the way for predominantly white middle-class sitcom sales abroad. And The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air paved the way for predominantly white youth programs (though the story here is more complex.)

Why does this pattern recur? Obviously, the disproportionate wealth of European buyers helps explain why those markets drive domestic production decisions more than others. In Roots‘ time, international sales were central to funding the elaborate miniseries genre, much as is the case with dramatic series today. But cultural assumptions, in the form of industry lore, play a crucial role as well. The fragmentary evidence about the reception of Roots abroad suggests that, for some viewers, the story of black suffering was central to their interest in the program, even if that story was melo-dramatized and advocated patient perseverance. The prevalent industry lore, however, erased the specifics of African American history as an explanation of Roots’ success, zeroing in instead on those elements such as historical themes that could more easily be applied to white stories, fitting industry perceptions of their primary audience at home and abroad. Of course, the idea that shared racial identities or historical settings can overcome national cultural differences is rooted in some very specific assumptions about cultural identity and difference.

The irony for African American programs is that, despite their path-breaking sales records, they frequently get pegged as too pedestrian for foreign viewers. This is not so much an example of overt racism on the part of industry insiders as it is a demonstration of how immersed most of them are in white cultural assumptions. They see white culture as universal; in fact, they can’t really see white culture at all, but only non-white culture. For them, the absence of non-white cultural values and allusions is the presence of universal themes.

The economics of the industry have changed dramatically since the days of Roots, with new transnational funding arrangements, new crops of buyers targeting sub-national and transnational audience niches, and an explosion of format sales. Industry lore has likewise become more contested and multi-vocal. But industry lore about African American programming has remained largely unchanged, and until it does, the prospects for African American drama remain dim, as does recognition of the central role that black culture has played in worldwide flows of television culture.

—

I would like to thank the David L. Wolper Center at the University of Southern California for access to their records, and especially Sona Basmadjian for her invaluable assistance.

Image Credits:

1. Roots DVD

2. Maya Angelou and Cicely Tyson

3. Roots BBC

4. Roots Hungarian book cover

Please feel free to comment.

1. Warner Bros. promotional kit for Roots. Undated. David L. Wolper Center archives no. 283-006.
2. Letter from Danton Rissner, Vice President in Charge of East Coast and European Production for United Artists Corporation to David L. Wolper, March 1976. David L. Wolper Center archives no. 282-016.
3. Letter from David Raphel, President, Twentieth Century-Fox International Corporation to David Wolper, March 1, 1976. David L. Wolper Center archives no.282-016

In the run-up to our son’s birth, my wife and I watched dozens of hours of TLC’s A Baby Story. Apparently, we weren’t alone: A Baby Story has ranked among the top-rated original daytime cable series among women 18-34 since 1999. It is particularly appealing to the nation’s wealthiest young parents. It has twice won a daytime Emmy. Anecdotally, every first time parent I’ve talked to has watched at least a couple of episodes. A Baby Story, it would seem, has become a present-day ritual for at least some segments of the expectant-parent population in the U.S.

The show is also highly economical, making it appealing to a shoestring cable network like TLC. Part of that frugality stems from the formulaic narrative structure, which allows efficient shooting and editing of a wide variety of personal experiences into a preset storyline: in the first half of each episode, we meet the expectant parents and hear why they want a child; in the second half, we witness the labor and birth; and in a final coda we return to the family several weeks later and are formally “introduced” to the newborn.

Perhaps the most remarked-upon feature of A Baby Story is its unedited footage of childbirth-what Salon.com TV critic Joyce Millman calls the “mommy shot.” Such footage is rare in television history. As a kid, whenever I saw a portrayal of birth on TV, my mother, a nurse and Lamaze teacher, would inevitably scoff at its over-sanitization and the use of a well-scrubbed baby who was several weeks old. None of that on A Baby Story: we see blood, screaming, squirming, bawling-everything except a straight-on shot of the mother’s vagina, which is digitally blurred during post-production. As noteworthy as these portrayals are, however, they are marshaled for specific textual and cultural ends.

Superficially, A Baby Story engages in a celebration of diverse women choosing among a diversity of ways to give birth: home births, water births, natural births, C-sections, surrogates, African Americans, Latinas, Indian immigrants, single women, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and Wiccans all appear. Beneath this veneer, however, we see a subtle reinforcement of the medical establishment’s mantra that all labors must unfold in the same manner, that bodies that labor differently require intervention. At least part of the reason that this medical narrative dominates is that hospital births, full of medical intervention, have drama; they make for good TV. While medical interventions and the narrative of proper childbirth that underwrites them have dramatically reduced the mortality rate among mothers and babies, they also lead to excessive rates of Caesarean-section deliveries and epidural anesthesia.

My intent is not to advocate for or against any types of childbirth. Nor do I want to diminish the pain and fear that can surround birth and lead women to seek painkillers, doctors, hospitals, etc. But I do want to examine how the medicalized version of birth gets normalized by A Baby Story, despite its apparent celebration of diversity.

Birth narratives are important. Research has shown that women clearly remember the details of childbirth decades later, and that they attribute a good deal of their self-esteem to how they handled giving birth (Simkin, 1991). Midwives often insist that women who have negative memories of childbirth are more prone to postpartum depression (England and Horowitz, 1998).

A Baby Story tends to rob women of agency over their own births by portraying them as protagonists and their bodies as antagonists-a structure that also champions the medical establishment’s narrative: laboring bodies that “fail to progress” require medical intervention to “get the ball rolling” once again. Thus, regardless of the diverse circumstances and birth plans we encounter in the first half of and episode, the birth stories in the second half are almost always the same: women come to the hospital and either make good progress or don’t; those who don’t undergo intervention after intervention, typically without protest or discussion. The doctor simply explains to the camera that the mother requires this or that procedure. Never do we see discussions about whether the intervention is necessary at the given moment or whether non-medical alternatives (walking, warm bath, nipple stimulation) might also work.

By book-ending the birthing scenes with scenes of birth preparation and aftermath, A Baby Story takes the focus off of the mother and childbirth, recentering it instead on the excitement, joy, and challenges of childrearing. The soundtrack of episodes underscores this emphasis, with breezy piano music playing during the hopeful moments of the preparatory scenes, which returns during the coda. Birth scenes, by contrast, use only ambient sounds and a foreboding soundtrack. The foreshadowing of these early scenes is thus fulfilled by the joys of the coda, while the birthing scenes provide the narrative tension in each episode. Consequently, the woman’s body-at least in difficult births-becomes the primary antagonist that threatens the realization of parental joy.

Every episode features interviews with caregivers, partners, and family members during the birth. The women themselves are never interviewed, as they are otherwise occupied. While producers could return to interview mothers a few days later and insert those interviews into the birthing scenes, such a practice would increase the series’ tightly controlled budget. Likewise, mothers could be interviewed immediately after birth, but it seems unlikely that many women would be much interested.

Even the rare episodes that feature home births work to deny women control over the narratives of their births. The central narrative enigma in such episodes revolves around how well the mother will withstand the pain, and we witness several scenes of excruciating pain. Thus, the laboring body again becomes the primary antagonist, battling against the mother’s desire for a natural experience. This narrative of the mother’s relationship to her laboring body is at odds with non-medical portrayals that emphasize her agency and the embracing of, and working through, pain.

While episodes of A Baby Story may reinforce a medicalized narrative about birth, the consequences of such portrayals for viewers are almost certainly more complex. In our case, these stories prompted my wife and me to discuss her birth plan. Specifically, she saw one episode in which a woman waited until she was nearly in transition before she went to the hospital, and she found this appealing. The portrayal of various interventions led us to research their benefits and dangers, as well as alternatives to procedures we found ghastly.

The great benefit of A Baby Story, in my estimation, then, is that it does offer narratives of childbirth, even if those narratives tend to provide little useful information and reinforce hospital birth and medical intervention. Narratives of other women’s birthing experiences, even in such a commercialized and restricted environment, can allow viewers to reflect on their own plans, preferences, and experiences. Fortunately, other resources offering different narratives are available on-line and in libraries-accounts that validate something other than the medical establishment. Still, the narratives of A Baby Story are a significant change from the pain-free, worry-free, blood-free stories of birth that mainstream television has told for decades.

References

England, Pam and Rob Horowitz. Birthing from Within: An Extra-Ordinary Guide to Childbirth Preparation. Partera Press: 1998.

Simkin, Penny. “Just Another Day in a Woman’s Life? Women’s Long-Term Perceptions of Their First Birth Experience. Part I.” Birth 18, 4 (1991): 203-210.

Image Credits:
1. TLC’s A Baby Story
2. First TV Guide, 1953
3. Rachel and her newborn
4. Tim and Rita’s New Arrival

Please feel free to comment.

Cast of Still Standing

The “guy-com” subgenre features a “difficult” white male lead and a nuclear family with non-adult children. Each episode revolves around reconciling the man’s personality with the demands of family and marriage. Recently, the guy-com has also included recurrent characters in the extended family. The lead characters in guy-coms share fairly consistent gender traits. They work in occupations that demand physical rather than intellectual acumen, a fact often underscored by their fatness. They are self-centered, irresponsible, and casually sexist, prone to disrupting domestic harmony with their stubbornness. They are, in a word, juvenile.

Cast of Home Improvement

While domestic sitcoms have long included juvenile men, rarely have they been the genre’s main focus. But in the late eighties, for a variety of reasons, a trio of standard-setting guy-coms appeared: Major Dad, Coach, and Home Improvement. Featuring men with identifiable character defects (strictness, control issues, and childishness, respectively), these series split their action between the domestic space, where the men’s personalities clashed with the demands of family life, and the workplace where they were allowed free rein. The women in these guy-coms worked at jobs that paid better or required more intelligence than their husbands. At root, their message was that, while juvenile masculinity may be tolerable at work, it is disruptive at home.

Cast of Everybody Loves Raymond

One of Raymond’s innovations was the replacement of the workplace with a second domestic setting, Raymond’s parent’s kitchen. No longer could juvenile masculinity escape to work, it was restricted by family on all sides. This new spatial structure restored some of the wedded bliss that earlier guy-coms had undermined: while Ray’s immaturity did cause marital problems, it usually surfaced because of his family-of-origin’s behavior. The narrative resolution of each episode pits the couple against the family-of-origin, reaffirming marital solidarity. Current guy-coms continue Raymond’s avoidance of the workplace.

The inclusion of recurrent male characters from the extended family who are more objectionable than the main characters leaves male leads as the only viable masculine performances. But main characters are also over-endowed with objectionable juvenile traits. This excessive immaturity offers male viewers a position of dominant specularity, where they can identify with the lead character’s attitudes, while distancing themselves from his more egregious character defects. A similar viewing position is constructed for women, who can see their own mates as less difficult than these men.

By bringing the extended family to the fore, Raymond pushed the nuclear family into the background. As Ray quips in the intro, “It’s not really about the kids.” The avoidance of issues of fatherhood, in particular, has an ambivalent ideological impact. On one hand, the influence of juvenile men on children is portrayed as foolhardy and destructive. On the other, the difficult accommodation between juvenile masculinity and fathering, which earlier guy-coms dramatized, disappears altogether, and is easy to ignore.

Characterization and humor do the primary work of portraying juvenile masculinity as superior to other forms of identity. In According to Jim, Jim is the only character who exhibits growth or depth, often at the end of an episode when he explains his behavior, thus balancing his immaturity with more endearing character traits. Likewise, Jim and his guy-coms counterparts are the only ones who generate what I would call exuberant self-mockery, which makes them both more fun and more self-aware than other characters.

Cast of According to Jim

A couple of jokes from an episode entitled “The Grill” helps clarify the different forms of humor associated with Jim and other characters When the family’s two daughters walk into the kitchen wearing ballerina costumes, Jim’s sister-in-law, Dana, twirls around and kicks over a bowl of potato chips. Meanwhile in the backyard, Jim explains the finer points of grilling to 5-year-old Kyle. “Grill my army man,” Kyle exclaims. “Where?” asks Jim. “In the middle, where it’s hotter,” replies Kyle, reciting the grilling lesson he’s just heard. “That’s my boy,” Jim shouts, grabbing the army man with his tongs and placing it on the grill. While the gag with Dana evokes derisive laugher, arising from her refusal to perform an appropriate femininity for her age and surroundings, Jim’s grilling of the toy evokes a more exuberant laugher of recognition: while no one would want to be Dana in this scene, many male viewers might want to be Jim. In fact, much of Jim’s humor involves self-mocking irony of his juvenile attitudes and behavior. This awareness of one’s own faults and the capacity to laugh at them is denied other characters. In a postmodern world, where the production of a cool, detached self is vital to economic, political, and social success, self-irony is key, but in guy-coms, only juvenile men are capable of self-irony; the other characters take themselves too seriously.

The capacity for change, the appeal of the male leads, and their ability to laugh at themselves ultimately make white masculinity comes across as a superior way of being in the world. However, it is the networks’ attempts to retain white male viewers that underwrite this portrayal of hegemonic, juvenile masculinity. While men in the 1990s were still addressed as members of family audiences and early guy-coms included extensive interaction with the nuclear family, as family viewing has continued to decline, the guy-com relegated the nuclear family to a backdrop, and the networks focused more on attracting married viewing couples. Although, as we have seen, men are the center of these stories and remain in the ideological driver’s seat, women characters, especially wives, are portrayed as mature and level-headed, thus flattering both halves of the viewing couple. Moreover, redirecting the narrative conflict from the couple to the extended family fits with couple viewing more comfortably than earlier versions of the guy-com.

Cast of Coach

I would argue that guy-coms have becomes the standard form of domestic sitcom, the stylistic and ideological common sense of the television industry. However, the guy-com also signals the demise of the domestic sitcom altogether. Other generic forms are perhaps more effective in appealing to today’s lower middle-class white viewing couples, such as competitive reality shows like Dancing with the Stars or prime-time game shows like Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader? In 2007-2008, only two domestic sitcoms are on the schedules of the Big Four: Two and a Half Men and According to Jim, which barely got renewed. It may be more accurate, then, to say that guy-coms set the standard for the domestic sitcom in its final years. Ironically, a genre that began its life as a way to integrate women into gender identities that fit the demands of a booming postwar U.S. economy may be ending its life by helping white men rebel against the demands of a volatile global economy at the dawn of the 21st century.

Image Credits:

1. Still Standing cast

2. Home Improvement cast

3. Everybody Loves Raymond cast

4. According to Jim cast

5. Coach cast

Please feel free to comment.