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>> 79 3 The Cosby Show, Family Themes, and the Ascent of White Situation Comedies Abroad in the Late 1980s Beginning in the mid-1980s, changes in both domestic and international media industries led to increased international sales revenues for U.S. programming of all genres. These increases were particularly noticeable in the formerly resistant markets of Western Europe, which had tended to view U.S. programs as overly commercial and ill-suited to their public service broadcasting environments. With the introduction of commercial television in Europe and growing demands for European public service broadcasters to demonstrate their popularity with a broad cross section of the national audience, numerous channels began programming U.S. imports in unconventional ways that led to revisions in the dominant industry lore about the kinds of programs that transfer well across national borders. The impact of these political-economic changes on conventional industry lore and the institutional labors of U.S. exports abroad was profound, both for U.S. television in general and for African American television in particular . Rather suddenly, buyers from specialty channels, commercial channels, and reorganized public broadcasters revised their images of their potential audiences and the kinds of programming techniques that could hold their attention. Buyers were more willing to experiment with imported programs than they might have been only a few years earlier due to the comparative cheapness of program imports and uncertainty about how to attract this newly imagined audience. Such moments of significant political, economic, and regulatory change in the world’s media systems reshape prevalent industry lore because of the uncertainty they produce for both buyers and sellers. They permit—require, really—industry executives at home and abroad to search out new ways of imagining foreign and transnational audiences and their potential connections to imported programming. As part of this search, long-ignored cultural alliances, new historical developments, submerged transnational discourses, historical similarities, and informal cultural flows get activated and, potentially , filter up into conventional industry lore. In the case of U.S. situation comedies, dominant perceptions about their 80 > 81 The Changing Economics of Global Television Trade in the 1980s While the economics of television broadcasting both at home and abroad had encouraged international program trade from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, as nations around the world added television broadcasting capabilities that relied heavily on imports to round out their schedules, television syndication since that time had been largely a domestic affair. Certainly, program trade existed in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, but U.S. syndicators made far more money from domestic syndication to local broadcasters and independent stations than they did from international trade (Havens, 2006). Since 1970, U.S. networks had been legally barred from owning or profiting from the programs that they aired during prime time. Consequently, Hollywood studios and independent producers created most of the primetime programming in the 1980s, including The Cosby Show. The networks licensed the rights to broadcast prime-time programs from the producers, generally for two prime-time runs per season, after which the rights to sell programs into syndication reverted to the producer. These syndication rights included international sales, and the ratio of profits from international and domestic sales differed significantly by genre. As we saw in chapter 1, for instance, the miniseries Roots earned more than half of its revenues overseas, in contrast to the situation comedies we examined in the previous chapter, which earned perhaps 10 percent of their revenues abroad. For a number of reasons, the market for global television trade and the balance between domestic and international revenues changed dramatically in the mid-1980s. Domestically, one of the most significant changes was the 1984 Cable Act, which paved the way for several competing cable channels to challenge the traditional terrestrial broadcasters—ABC, CBS, and NBC —and led to steady declines in network audience ratings. By 1985 Nielsen Media reported that prime-time viewership had fallen below 50 percent of the total potential audience, a decline of about 20 percent from ten years earlier. Along with audience ratings, network advertising revenues fell and program production costs grew, as the networks spent lavishly on signature programs in an effort to stand out from their cable competitors. Decreased advertising revenues prompted the networks to lower the license fees that they paid to program producers, while increased production costs forced producers to seek greater syndication revenues from abroad to cover the difference (Barns, 1981; Boyer, 1986; Richter, 1986). Meanwhile, governments abroad relaxed restrictions on commercial...

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