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  • The Rise of Cable Programming in the United States: Revolution or Evolution?
  • James Morrison (bio)
The Rise of Cable Programming in the United States: Revolution or Evolution? By Megan Mullen. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Pp. xiii+229. $55/$22.95.

This volume presents the history of the first half-century of cable television in the United States by examining how economics, regulation, and cultural expectations have combined to determine the character of its dominant programming. Megan Mullen explores the question of why cable programming continued through the mid-1990s to resemble and depend upon traditional broadcast programming, despite its technological capabilities to offer a much wider variety addressing specialized audiences and interests. [End Page 432]

While some cable networks devised clever and imaginative ways to distinguish their retransmission and reconfiguration of recycled broadcast material, such efforts served only to reinforce their dependence on syndicated programming. Aside from music videos and home shopping, cable's most notable programming innovation consisted of capturing and maintaining viewers' attention in the age of "surfing," "grazing," and "zipping" past commercials, by devising short, fragmented programming units that could be viewed either individually or in clusters of more traditional program lengths. In showing that cable maintained such a close dependence on the products of the broadcast networks and Hollywood, Mullen reveals why and how the decisions made by cable system operators, regulators, and audiences restrained cable's revolutionary potential by "adherence to tradition, strides toward innovation, and above all, compromise and negotiation" (p. 28).

Mullen shows that the roots of such dependence lie in cable's early stage as community antenna television (CATV), when its role consisted solely in amplifying and retransmitting over-the-air broadcasts to communities unable to receive clear signals because of their location. There were some attempts by the early owners, largely mom-and-pop operations oriented to their local markets, to produce programs locally, but these either mimicked established genres, such as news and sports, or drew from relatively cheap film libraries.

Such economic considerations were soon to be joined by efforts by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to protect broadcasters, through a series of reports and orders limiting CATV systems' right to bypass local signals using microwave relays, to use copyrighted material, and to operate in or near broadcast markets. These moves were in response to the acquisition of local operations by large multiple system operators (MSOs), some of which had ties to other entertainment industries.

By the end of the 1960s, however, as the medium matured and demonstrated potential for enhanced programming capabilities and increased channel capacity, attitudes had sharply reversed. Cable was suddenly being hailed as a means of expanding and improving television service. This was the beginning of the idealistic "blue sky" period, in which government policymakers, academics, and consumer advocates became enamored of the medium's potential to serve audiences they saw as being underserved by commercial broadcasting. The FCC began requiring larger operators to offer local programming and to provide production facilities for public, educational, and governmental (PEG) programming, in return for which they could enter previously forbidden broadcast markets and expand the number and types of broadcast signals they carried.

Still, many cable operators saw these program origination and access provisions as unnecessarily burdensome, and by 1980 they had been lifted either by the FCC or by the courts, leaving only the leniency provisions. A [End Page 433] further reversal ensued, leading to a climate of deregulation in cable paralleled by the ongoing deregulation of the domestic communications satellite industry under the FCC's "open skies" policy. Thus was created the environment fostering the development of the early satellite cable networks such as HBO and other independent pay-movie channels, the national superstations, and the specialty networks we know today.

This is a valuable and unique contribution to the field, as it combines historical, sociological, economic, and textual approaches in a way unmatched by any previous research. Its value lies particularly in its use of primary documents, trade and government publications, interviews, and the full range of existing literature to provide a comprehensive and balanced description of—and explanation for—the modes and genres of cable programming, from its beginnings...

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