Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting

Chapter 6 Discovery’s Wild Discovery

Chapter 6 Discovery’s Wild Discovery The Growth and Globalization of TV’s Animal Genres Cynthia Chris In the 1970s and into the 1980s, nonfiction wildlife filmmaking reached American television audiences largely in the form of low-cost, syndicated half-hours, such as Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and highbrow series and specials, such as Nature and National Geographic, featured by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS).1 Wildlife could be found by viewers only on the fringes of an industry dominated by three commercial networks. By the end of the 1980s, however, the wildlife genre served not only as a flagship of The Discovery Channel’s innovative and profitable programming strategy, but also as part and parcel of a widespread proliferation of animal TV in various forms. How can we account for Discovery’s savvy use of documentaries, especially the wildlife genre, and the general new prominence of animals on TV? These shifts in the status of a genre resulted substantially from a matrix of changing conditions in the television industry that influenced how both broadcast and cable networks financed, scheduled, and distributed TV programming, and even how they conceived of TV form and content. As shown elsewhere in this volume, in the 1980s and 1990s, cable- and satellite -TV subscriptions increased at a rapid pace the United States, and the number of channels offered by cable systems grew. Many new channels (such as Discovery) started as relatively small operations that depended on economical means of acquiring or producing programming to fill their schedules, frequently turning to nonfiction genres that typically cost a fraction of dramatic and comedy series. Most would relinquish independent ownership to established media giants in order to survive. The Discovery Channel entered the market by means of an innovative set of alliances with already established corporations. It also played a role 137 in repositioning nonfiction throughout the industry, as well as in recommodifying wildlife programs that commercial broadcasters had all but phased out as irreversibly formulaic and unprofitable. The Discovery Channel’s success with wildlife was so convincing that in 1996, Discovery teamed with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to spin off Animal Planet, a channel devoted entirely to companion animals and wildlife. A year later, in 1997, National Geographic countered with its own channel featuring science, nature, and adventure programming. In each case, the competitive media environment nudged these entities in two directions: first, as they moved away from proclaimed early commitments to a documentary form that would educate as it entertained, they moved toward less didactic nonfiction genres such as game shows, talent shows, and “reality-based” programs; second, these channels would go emphatically global, seeking to expand into newly privatizing markets outside the United States. This chapter examines the launch and growth of these three channels, which are paradigmatic of trends in the industry over these decades. The Discovery Channel On June 17, 1985, The Discovery Channel’s premiere reached only 156,000 homes in an improbable, undercapitalized entry into the increasingly competitive cable market. Within a decade, it became one of the most widely distributed cable programming services and the cornerstone of a mid-sized media conglomerate. Discovery Communications, Inc. (DCI) now controls four analogue and nine digital cable channels in the United States. Variations on these services are distributed to a combined total estimated at one billion subscribers in 160 countries. In addition, Discovery controls a chain of retail stores; home video, book, music, and multimedia publishing interests; and more.2 Seeking to reach movie as well as television audiences, DCI created Discovery Channel Pictures to produce the feature The Leopard Son (1996) as well as IMAX films such as Africa’s Elephant Kingdom (1998); it also created Discovery Docs, which co-produced Peter Gilbert’s With All Deliberate Speed (2004), on the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005). Discovery’s brand extensions were not in themselves unusual, except, perhaps, in the extent to which they emanated from a strategically prescient upstart in a media environment that is mostly ruled by old 138 c y n t h i a c h r i s mega-conglomerates. In this way, Discovery has been both typical and exceptional , conducting business-as-usual in terms of the standard practices of the cable television industry and contributing to innovations in industry structure and...