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176 8 Outsourcing The Office M. J. CLARKE In a 2002 episode of The Simpsons, the animated family is forced to flee their termite-infested home and find refuge by being cast in a new reality television program, “The 1895 Experiment.”1 The show within the show, which challenges contestants to live as if it were 1895, is the brainchild of an executive of “The Reality Channel” who calls himself the program’s creator but admits in an aside, “by creator I mean I saw it on Dutch television and tweaked the title.” The program is an instant hit, but only until the Simpsons become too comfortable with their old-fashioned lifestyle, resulting in boring television and viewer drop-off. Desperate to retool the series, the executive gathers his inner cabal of corporate thinkers and urges them, “Fixing the show is going to take some original thinking . . . everyone pull out your TV and start flipping around.” As a work of parody, this episode addresses several developments in the production of network television content. For example, the lampooning of the executives’ creative process is a dig at television’s stereotypical unoriginality and unchecked imitation. But more pointedly, this depiction is also an allusion to the increasingly global trade in television formats, by which television producers and distributors respectively import and export, not programs themselves, but the rights to license and reuse the idea of a preexisting program in a new territory. The fact that “The 1895 Experiment” began life as a Dutch series is a coy nod to the Dutch television company Endemol, originator of Big Brother and other reality and talent game shows; by 2006, it netted Outsourcing The Office • 177 €1.1 billion in sales, of which only 5 percent was made in the company’s native Netherlands.2 The fictional executive’s global poaching reflects a contemporaneous trend in the business of television. The episode also comically underscores the executive’s frantic and immediate need to retool and reconfigure the program to make it “work.” This impulse culminates with the show producers dropping the Simpsons’ temporary home into a river to enhance the program’s drama. While there is nothing particularly new about television producers’ willingness to rework material, there is something contextually specific about the executive’s obsession with speed and instant feedback. In an era when the growth rates of advertising revenue have leveled or, in some cases, drastically fallen, networks have increasingly committed themselves to the never-ending search for the oft-invoked new business models for television. Whether this means making labor leaner and meaner, as in NBC’s “NBC 2.0” agenda of layoffs, or rethinking production, as in the reduction of preproduction rituals and overspending through the format trade, or expanding distribution, as in the instantaneous arrival of digital downloads or online streaming, the underlying theme is a preoccupation with quickness itself. The Simpsons episode concludes with a violent rebellion against the producers of “The 1895 Experiment,” in which the family is aided by a group of reality television losers who have been voted off previous programs and literally cast out into the wilderness. Here, the rapidity of production and change is haunted by the unceremonious disposal of seasons past. Such a dilemma clearly resonates with the contemporary condition of “liquid modernity,” described by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, which points to a key shift in the theorization of power, no longer linked to solidity and immutability, but rather to speed and fluidity. The dark underside of this shift is the problem of waste: “waste disposal [is] one of the two major challenges liquid life has to confront and tackle . . . the other major challenge is the threat of being consigned to waste.”3 Network television confronts precisely these two problems in its modifications of the production process and in its reappraisal of the significance and purpose of its own mission. Simply put, this small segment of The Simpsons includes discussions of increasing global trade, current network mandates of speed and corporate agility, and a preoccupation with the problem of waste. However, this reflexivity is not benign; the episode quite emphatically ridicules and critiques these new trends in the business of television. This brief, introductory example demonstrates (1) how certain television programming clearly, though comically, depicts several key transformations taking place within the field of network television production and (2) how attitudes toward these changes have become intertwined with the manifest content of the programs themselves. Armed with this dual-purposed model, this chapter presents...

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