8

“This Is What I Need, This Is What Will Travel”

Television Programs in the Era of Transition

Shawn Shimpach

Although long referred to in casual industry parlance as “development” or “property,” television programs have recently seen a subtle but significant shift in the way the industry perceives and values them. This new value on individual programs is emerging during a period of rapid institutional and technological change, characterized by the fragmentation and dispersal of what was once imagined to be a mass audience for television. As this audience disperses through space and time and across multiple media, television programs that are produced with specific characteristics designed in essence to pursue this dispersing audience are growing in value. This value, moreover, is different from the way television programs have been valued in the past. It used to be the case that a program's value was strictly a function of the eyeballs it attracted to the channel and/or network on which it aired, and for which it therefore dictated advertising rates. Recently, however, the value of programs has begun to shift perceptibly, as they become increasingly understood to be properties in and of themselves, with their own value to be marketed and developed by their owners – as distinct from the particular channels or networks that might show them. This transformation can be traced in large part to an institutional environment characterized by uncertainty, which arises from a series of recent regulatory, institutional, and technological changes that have altered the dynamics of television. Thus, even as ownership and institutional relations are changing, the space and time of the viewing experience of television is changing as well. This chapter is therefore about an approach toward new production considerations and imperatives amidst these tidal changes rather than about the specific individuals behind the production of the programming. These production imperatives are intended to accommodate, even capitalize upon, these changing spatial and temporal relations and the transforming televisual economy.

As products of a robust and professional culture industry, television programs result from particular conditions and specific (if perhaps overdetermined) decisions. Such a statement is not, however, an argument for a simple reflectionism, where the meaning of a program invariably mirrors the conditions (and much less the specific practices) of its production, but it does suggest the theoretical impoverishment of watching or “reading” media texts such as television programs without attempting to account in some ways for their conditions of reception, circulation, and production. The study of production, no less than other analyses of media and media institutions, stands to benefit from an integration of methodological approaches too often kept apart. If one is accounting for both the institutional conditions and the textual characteristics of media production, media such as television programs can be understood (1) for the way in which institutional policy and global economics impact the circulation and meaning of these texts, even as (2) they circulate as culturally significant sites of (multiple, contested) meanings and identification (including dis- and counter-identification). Such an approach to the peculiar biography of a television program involves apprehending the television text precisely at the point where economics and meaning encounter each other, tracking significant moments in the lives (and afterlives) of distinct television programs, and treating the commodity sign of the television program – its spatial and temporal travel as well as its common significations – through a conjunctural practice of analysis, allying socioeconomic with narrative and representational approaches (Miller, 2006, 2008; Murdoch, 1995). From Raymond Williams' early articulation of “flow” right through to John Caldwell's concept of “televisuality,” the televisual form has been demonstrated to be inextricable from the industrial infrastructure of media production and distribution. This chapter focuses mostly on US television as an example in considering the stakes for the study of production when the arbitrary critical divides between production, distribution, and viewing are instead blended, the program being ultimately the object that all three share in common. The concerns and imperatives of television production – during certain transitional moments such as this – can be particularly revealing of the priorities of institutional relations as well as of the significance of textual markers.

Television Program and Changing Value

Through aggressive policy lobbying and a large and comparatively wealthy domestic market, the US television industry makes for a fascinating and dominant force in global television production and distribution. Moreover, because of its relatively unique arrangements for financing big-budget individual television productions – deficit financing, in which initial license fees fall short of production costs – the mergers of production companies with distribution companies (like networks) have dramatically remapped the interests of intellectual property holders. In the US the financial interest and syndication (Fin–Syn) regulations, which severely restricted the ownership and prohibited the syndication interests that a broadcast network could have in the programming it aired, relaxed in the early 1990s, until the 1996 Telecommunications Act repealed the rules altogether. Repeal meant that television broadcast networks could now also be television producers and intellectual property owners. A series of corporate mergers immediately followed, which saw independent television production companies being bought up by larger media corporations and Hollywood studios being merged with national television networks. Soon ABC American Broadcasting Company and Disney were part of the same company, as were CBS (formerly Columbia Broadcasting System) and Paramount Studios for a time, and then NBC (National Broadcasting Company), Telemundo, Universal Studios, and, later, Comcast, all joining Fox and 20th Century Fox.¹ During the early years of this deregulation, so significant was the integration of production and network distribution that Time-Warner launched the WB, to pair it with Warner Bros. Television, and Paramount helped launch UPN (United Paramount Network) for Paramount Television; thus two new national networks were created. The move was largely undertaken with the intent to avoid having television productions leveraged into shared ownership by other companies, which had merged with already existing national networks² (Shimpach, 2010, pp. 21–2). Now production studios, television networks, and cable channels (even cable system operators) were all together, in vertically integrated corporations that controlled production, distribution, and delivery. Moreover, these corporations were part of larger, horizontally integrated media conglomerates that also included print publishers (magazines, newspapers, comics, books), video game companies, movie studios, and other media companies. The initial showing of a program on television – whether on broadcast network or cable – has been, ever since, only the first part of its usefulness as a piece of property to be leveraged across corporate divisions, potentially for years to come. As media corporations have merged into vertically (production, distribution, exhibition) and horizontally (multiple media) integrated conglomerates, network, station, and even cable programming feature only as a part of much larger corporate agendas. A new value has been placed on individual programs as properties that can travel and transcend corporate divisions, making their ownership a significant factor in broadcasting and distribution decisions.

This means that television programs are looked at differently now. They are increasingly valued as properties in themselves, not simply there to win an audience for a station or a network, but to be sold and resold, as distinct commodity productions. This new significance is not only a function of corporate conglomeration (the prospect of syndication rights has loomed for years, after all), but, in combination with new ownership structures, it is also a result of distribution and consumer technologies that have allowed the traditionally imagined television mass audience to disperse across time, place, and multiple media. For much of the history of television, programming strategies have sought to attract viewers to a particular channel and to encourage them to “flow through” from one show to another, spending extended time tuned to that channel. While individual episodes were temporally limited, requiring viewers to tune in at a certain time for a specific duration or to miss the ephemeral airing, such episodes were part of a continuous and non-stop sequence of programming content, constantly airing without a break. From a programmer's perspective, this was the best strategy for keeping a national mass audience tuned to a single channel for as long as possible; offering a steady, uninterrupted diet of what former NBC executive Paul Klein famously called “least objectionable programming.” If there was no particularly compelling reason to change the channel, it was thought that viewers would surrender to inertia and simply keep watching the programming on offer, flowing through one program after another, rather than making the effort to change channels (Schiesel, 1998). From the viewer's perspective, this onslaught of programming content – constantly interrupted by commercials, promos, announcements, and newsbreaks, but never pausing or relenting – could also be experienced, in Raymond Williams' (1990) canonical term, as “flow”: one long, continuous, objectively incoherent televisual text.

To a large extent, programming practices premised on this model continue, and it is still possible to simply “watch TV,” allowing whatever is being shown to appear on screen when and for how long the station decrees. However, as both space- and time-shifting consumer technologies proliferate, the experience of programming flow has become only one option for the television viewer. Individual television programs are increasingly more likely to be available in more places, effectively expanding the possible time and space available for viewing a single episode (or an entire season) of a program. Not so long ago you either saw an episode when it “aired,” or perhaps you happened upon the rerun months later or encountered it in syndication, years after that. Today that same episode might be shown one night, “repurposed” on cable later that same week, made “streamable” on network and other websites the next day, offered on demand by a cable provider later that week, downloadable from iTunes the next week, purchasable and rentable on digital versatile disc (DVD) later in the year, and then available in syndication after that. At the same time, viewers were offered rapidly proliferating means to access individual programs for themselves, outside of the scheduled programming flow. A series of consumer electronic devices and services have encouraged the practice of “time-shifting” the program-viewing experience. Starting with the video cassette recorder (VCR), which extended to the personal video recorder (PVR) or to the digital video recorder (DVR) and was joined by services like downloadable compressed video sites, streaming video sites, and peer-to-peer file-sharing protocols (like BitTorrent), as well as by cable services such as pay per view and video on demand, consumers and viewers have been able to extract individual programs from the television programming flow and to watch them at a time of their own choosing. Consumer devices such as portable video game players, portable DVD players, and portable media players (like the iPad) as well as applications that allow an individual to encode and stream television broadcasts (such as Slingbox) have complemented consumer time-shifting with the additional ability to space- or place-shift the viewing experience as well.

One result of these changes has been that television programs are increasingly designed and produced to attract viewer attention and investment amidst these multiple and growing options. This process began with producers' and programmers' growing self-consciousness about the look of television, producing what John Caldwell (1995) has termed “televisuality,” a “stylistic exhibitionism” in which programs elicit interest through an emphasis on the visual aesthetics of individual television programs. Whether aping the lush, saturated look of cinematic production values or flittering the “videographic” look of live newsfeed, the actual look of television programs began to grow in significance as a production consideration. As programs developed distinct looks and styles in order to attract attention amidst so many viewer alternatives, they began to alter the kind of value they offered to networks. If the ascension of stylistic exhibitionism signaled a new focus on the individual program amidst the growing clutter of television programming's relentless flow and was encouraged by changing viewing practices, then the outcomes of subsequent technological and regulatory transformations have placed even greater pressure on the integrity – while increasing the value – of individual programs as distinct from programming flows. As the growth of competing technologies has developed, production practices have exceeded mere stylistic enhancements and new strategies have developed to adapt the television program to digital technologies across various media platforms. The autonomous television program, viewed on a television channel, is likely to be part of a larger possible experience, which may also include multiple related websites, short tangential episodes for internet and mobile device viewing, associated publications of periodicals, books, and documentaries and DVD “extras,” not to mention the growing opportunities for social engagement with the program, from blogs and Twitter feeds to fan fiction and video sites, to discussion rooms and social media sites (e.g., Facebook, MySpace, Google+).

While franchising and merchandising have long been important ancillary practices for media industries (Johnson, 2009), including television, this kind of cross-media expansion differs from what happened in earlier eras. First, it involves more programming, and much sooner. Even before audiences have seen a program, cross-media proliferation begins, as part of the launch strategy of wooing target audiences, of generating anticipation for the program, or of begining to develop fans of the franchise. Cross-media expansion targets the young, affluent market that is so desired by advertisers and yet is migrating from television to other media forms as their primary entertainment medium. Second, as Brooker (2001), Jenkins (2006), and others have detailed, cross-media expansion frequently involves the elaboration of an increasingly expansive, elaborately interrelated narrative world in which various media pieces might function autonomously, but almost certainly they contribute to a larger understanding of the narrative. Third, more often and more explicitly (if not exactly intentionally) it involves unscripted viewer production and investment in creative, time-intensive, often social engagement with the program franchise.

These trends have been broadly described in a process that Jenkins has termed “transmedia storytelling.” As he explains, “a transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole” (2006, pp. 95–96). Each contribution tends to be self-contained, so that consumers can make sense of it without necessary reference to another contribution, but each should also contribute something unique to the overall transmedia experience. As Jenkins observes, from an institutional vantage, “reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption.” This, of course, serves the interests of intellectual property holders much more than television channels or stations, and it does so by “offering new levels of insight and experience[,which] refreshes the franchise and sustains consumer loyalty” to a particular program rather than to a channel's overall flow (p. 96).

Such a strategy not only acknowledges and leverages the dispersion of television audiences across multiple media, but it does so in ways that utilize the horizontal integration of media conglomerates, encouraging audiences to flow now in-between television channels, internet portals, paper publications, and video game franchises, each one often owned or sponsored by the same corporate entity and ostensibly produced in complex coordination with the others. It also heightens the significance of individual programs, even above and beyond the particular network or channel on which they might be first encountered, so that a program can act as the connective tissue binding these various media sites, providing a kind of continuity for the audience experience of different media. Beyond these scrupulously scripted encounters, opportunities abound for less predictable and more social, intersubjective considerations of the program, ranging from snarky plot summaries (e.g., televisionwithoutpity.com) to deeply affectionate fan-produced fiction and websites, to re-edited footage on videosharing sites, and to the latest individual micro-blog feed.

Producers and networks, however, hardly ignore these institutionally unscripted elaborations of their programs. Showrunners (or their staff) lurk on fan-produced digital media sites, using them as free, instant focus groups to gauge responses to plot and character developments (Shimpach, 2005, pp. 352–353). Beyond treating the Internet as uncompensated market research, networks have attempted to lure viewers to their programs through various efforts at digital media integration. The Fox network, for example, began airing “tweet-peat” episodes of its programs Fringe (2008 to the present) and Glee (2009 to the present) in the fall of 2009, allowing viewers who watched certain episodes on television simultaneously to follow a running commentary by cast and crew members through the micro-blogger service Twitter (Kohn, 2009). The ABC network tried a similar strategy with its struggling new program No Ordinary Family (2010–2011) in the next year. Other shows, meanwhile, are now designed to encourage YouTube-able moments, promoting themselves through “viral” videos circulated by interested viewers to friends, co-workers, and online contacts. Such moments strive for the global popularity of clips such as that of surprising, erstwhile lay crooner Susan Boyle performing Les Misérables' song “I Dreamed a Dream” from a 2009 episode of the television program Britain's Got Talent (2007 to the present). It was several years earlier, after all, that NBC's senior vice-president for alternative programming (i.e. “reality” shows) noted of Talent's creator and on-screen judge, Simon Cowell: “He cracked that nut in how to do a variety show with a YouTube feel” (quoted in Schneider, 2006). These reproduced and redistributed Internet moments range from humiliating auditions for apparently (but, alas, not singularly) talent-tess American Idol wannabes (2002 to the present) to memorable skits from Saturday Night Live (1975 to the present) and bits from The Daily Show (1996 to the present), to David Letterman admitting backstage affairs (Carter & Stelter, 2009), and to faux music videos introduced within the diegesis of sitcoms, like Modern Family (2009 to the present) and How I Met Your Mother (2005 to the present)³ – all almost immediately available for complete and repeated viewing online.

All of this has led to changes – both subtle and significant – in what eventually reaches viewers' screens, whether these screens remain in the living room, on computers, or in the viewer's pocket. If, after years of supposedly watching television together, as a mass, audiences are now dispersing to multiple channels and multiple media, new and extra value will accrue to those television programs designed and produced to pursue the audience. The value of a television program, therefore, is increasingly a function of its ability to appear to audiences everywhere, all the time. Thus, as NBC Universal's chief digital officer announced recently, signaling the new strategies of television programming: “We believe in ubiquity distribution” (Littleton, 2007).

This context suggests, above all, two things. First, individual programs now function as – and are, probably increasingly, best understood to be – semi-autonomous properties with their own unique biographies and circulation, for which individual agendas may be developed. As Michael Curtin has summarized:

As a result, programming has changed, so that individual programs can draw attention from within a crowded environment, sustaining interest over time and across media and traveling across temporal, technological, and national borders. Second, despite being semi-autonomous, these programs are properties of vertically and horizontally integrated media corporations with complex and not always efficient agendas for expanding markets and growing revenue.

In order to fully understand how this era of transition has impacted the production expectations and ultimately the programming generated, it is necessary to approach the television program both in its materiality and in its immaterial value. The television program is a product of the context of production conditions, which are situated within changing institutional imperatives, while at the same time it produces its own cultural value as a ubiquitous property to be mobilized across space and time. The economy of scarcity that gave value to a program sold to advertisers is being replaced by an economy of abundance in which a wide range of industries, their producers and consumers, capitalize upon the program's value as a property.

A Taxonomy of Imperatives

What this means on the ground is that program producers are now compelled to create programs specifically designed as individual properties with extensive lives and afterlives that travel across geographic, technological, and temporal borders. The task of the media scholar becomes one of understanding these developments, as they function together to change both the economic value and the semiotic value of the television program. This task might be achieved by considering the production imperatives that guide and drive television today. We might usefully group these imperatives together into the four Ts of TV. Given this new economy of television production, program producers are now compelled to create programs specifically designed to travel over borders and through time, translate to different cultures as well as to media, tether to new viewing and new sponsorship practices, and, throughout all these conditions, continue to tantalize viewers, attracting and holding attention of industry and audience alike at all these different sites.

Travel

We can sit down together and say, “This is what I need, this is what will travel.”

Roma Khanna⁴

Programming is now designed to travel, both spatially and temporally, as never before. US-produced television programming has always circulated internationally. However, where once a program would establish itself and gain popularity on a US network, become profitable in US syndication sales, and then be offered abroad at inexpensive (but by now nonetheless profitable) rates, now international distribution figures as part of the initial program pitch, the program's global circulation being a production consideration from the start.

Thus now even modest programs with short-lived or failed production and network runs find international distribution. For example, the sitcom about a small-town family, which, through a misunderstanding, takes in a Muslim exchange student from Pakistan, Aliens in America (2007–2008), aired for only one season in the US, having produced just 18 episodes for the CW Television Network. Yet this program sold in more than 20 other national markets, from Turkey to India, from South Africa to Israel (albeit in non-prime-time timeslots). This travel to screens around the world, moreover, was only the latest leg in this program's global voyage. The US-based production, for example, was filmed in British Columbia, Canada and featured 24-year-old Adhir Kalyan, a South African actor, in the role of Pakistani teenage high school exchange student Raja Musharaff.⁵ Similarly, the science-fiction mystery drama FlashForward (2009–2010) sold in more than 100 worldwide markets in 2009, including in Africa via M-Net, in the Middle East via Orbit Showtime, and in markets in Sweden, Russia, and Japan. This was done months before a single episode had shown anywhere (Hopewell & Keslassy, 2009). Signaling the thinking behind this approach to television programming, FlashForward's global distributor, Disney–ABC Worldwide Television's president of global distribution, Ben Pyne, announced that “we believe this type of release helps to spread the buzz around the world” (quoted in Hopewell & Keslassy, 2009, p. 7). This effort to generate a global “buzz” about the program has to do with more than piracy concerns and signals a corporate imperative that exceeds simple market expansion.

It is not news that US television programs are played globally; this has been the case since the earliest days of television, when program copyright holders discovered how lucrative a syndication market exceeding the US borders could be. For years, however, this model of distribution still relied on a successful US network run to produce a market for the program over the three to four years it took to produce the nearly 100 or so episodes needed for an off-network syndication market to “strip” the show across a weekday schedule. With the advent of Fin–Syn in the 1970s, the syndication market became crucial to independent television producers, who were increasingly forced to deficit finance their network productions and could only recoup costs on programs that were successful in the syndication market. International syndication, as a next step, then added to the profit margin of these successful programs, while implicitly helping to pay for those that failed to reach syndication.

What these recent examples demonstrate is that (1) a global market is now regularly being considered as part of a program's initial run; and (2) the purpose of this initial run is, at least in part, to create “buzz” about the particular program. Buzz in this sense suggests an informal familiarity with aspects of the program that might build it into a “brand” that can be sold and leveraged in the future. Branding is corporate jargon for a process of adding commercial, “iconic” value to intellectual property above and beyond any single iteration of that property (Blumenthal & Goodenough, 2006, p. 160). Brand equity is a corporate phrase used to describe the current and future value of the commercial and cultural aura of a property being “buzzed” about (Moran & Malbon, 2006, p. 108). Thus the simultaneous international distribution of television programming is not only about accessing global markets, though studios do want their programs to reach markets before pirated copies are available. Studios also want to build future value for an individual program globally, through practices of ubiquitous distribution. This practice demonstrates the extent to which it is increasingly believed that the value of a program grows as that program travels.

Programs are produced to travel in order to generate value in the form of brand equity against future uses of the property. Such programs are therefore necessarily also produced to travel through time. Thus the television programming produced to travel geographically must also be durable, sustaining interest and gathering more audience members over time, rather than merely for one or two ephemeral airings. As the indomitable US industry trade journal Variety frequently reminds its readers: “What must also be considered though, is playability for a show beyond the immediate ratings. Keeping a series on the air despite questionable numbers, execs look to see how the show plays overseas and what the DVD prospects are – monies that help offset ever-rising production costs” (Levine, 2009). Temporal travel is required to turn transient and ephemeral programs into durable properties. This means that such programming is increasingly produced not only with its life on television in mind, but also with the growing significance on the value of the program's “afterlife” in mind as well – its continued circulation, repackaging, and repurposing beyond its initial iteration. Aliens in America's mere 18 episodes can still be purchased on iTunes. FlashForward was available as video on demand weeks after its television debut in many of the national markets in which it was shown. In the US it was available on the video-streaming consortium site, hulu.com, run by NBC Universal, Fox Entertainment, and ABC. That entire series was soon officially available on iTunes and DVD, unofficially on YouTube. And Aliens in America and FlashForward were two programs that failed, that were cancelled in their first season!

Indeed, by commercial television industry's own standards, the vast majority of new prime-time programs fail to garner ratings of the size and kind deemed necessary by their networks to keep them in production past their initial year. Yet these shows continue to live on in some form, being available to be purchased and viewed. They traveled geographically in their short lives, and they continue to travel temporally both in institutionally scripted and in unforeseen ways through their afterlives – quite a scope and span for failures! Imagine the potential for commercially successful programs.

It might be noted that both of these particular examples thematized the new cosmopolitan dynamics of geographic and temporal travel in their own storylines. Aliens in America satirized intercultural misunderstanding, parochial ignorance, and the tensions of transnational exchange. FlashForward offered globalized mystery and conspiracy – it was happening simultaneously to all of us, around the world – amid the mass experience of nonlinear temporality. While such strategies clearly do not guarantee long-term success, they nevertheless help to offset production costs and to build a global brand, prompting some kind of sustained afterlife.

Meanwhile, very successful programming trends emerged that would appear to offer counterexamples to the geographic and temporal travel imperatives governing television production today (see, for example, Raphael, 2004). Live sports events as well as reality contest programs seem designed to draw viewers into their “liveness,” offering up television's unique ability to bring what is happening elsewhere right now to you, in your home, as it is happening. Such liveness has long been considered central to television's appeal and influence, while it privileges certain forms of access to reality (Feuer, 1983), thus organizing social reality (Couldry, 2004) and negotiating experiences of both immediacy and spatiality in the viewing experience (White, 2004). Such considerations clearly inform not only the cultural impact, but also the institutional strategies involved in programming “reality” television formats. So-called unscripted “reality” programming seems designed specifically to counter changing viewing habits and ubiquity distribution practices by offering explicit incentives to viewers to watch the programming when it is initially shown. This genre has found less success overall when rerun and is less often offered on DVD or as a download. A program like American Idol (2002 to the present), a reality competition focusing on the national audition process for a young new pop singer, for example, has drawn large enough prime-time audiences to be the top rated program in the US for several years. The draw of the program is in part derived from an “interactive” component in which the contestants are eliminated from the show by viewers who either telephone or use the short message service (SMS) to send in their “votes” as text message. The final results and the new season's winners, moreover, are announced during a “live” television event. None of these textual strategies can be effectively sustained into time-shifted viewing, which thus elevates the “live” ratings of each episode. Not only does time-shifting negate “liveness” and eliminate the possibility of text-message participation, but the internet is filled with commentary about the program within minutes of the winner's announcement. The results are discussed at work and at school the very next day. While such appointment television stands somewhat apart from traditional programming flow, nonetheless it provides multiple incentives to watch the show when and as it is first offered, “live.”

Yet such programming does travel, both geographically and temporally. American Idol, despite its title, actually traveled to the US. A franchise of the British talent contest originally called Pop Idol (later reconceived as The X-Factor), the program is co-owned by 19 Entertainment (founded by Simon Fuller, formerly of Spice Girls fame) and FreemantleMedia. It has travelled globally as one of the most successfully franchised program formats in the world (Adalian, 2002). The over 40 officially licensed versions include Australian Idol, Idols West Africa, India Idol, Indonesian Idol, Nouvelle Star (France), Pinoy Idol (in the Philippines), Superstar (shown across the Arab States), as well as versions from Sweden to South Africa, from Singapore to Greece, and from Malaysia to Bulgaria. Meanwhile unlicensed versions of the program are shown in locations from China (Super Voice Girls) to Afghanistan (Afghan Star). Temporal travel consists of clips packages later available on television, continuously on the Internet, and eventually on DVD. These tend to feature “favorite” performances and memorable “moments,” “best and worst of” montages, and season-finale performances and highlight recaps. The continuing careers of winning contestants (and even of popular non-winning contestants, all of whom sign extensive contracts with an affiliated entertainment company) extend the afterlife of the program. Thus even the programming most aggressively encouraging viewers to enter into television's traditional viewing practices in the end subscribes to the new imperative to travel through space and time.

Translate

There is no point in trying to sell a program that is parochial or culturally exclusive to one territory.

Donna Wiffen⁶

Intimately bound to travel, television program production's second imperative is to translate – that is, not only to travel globally, but also constantly to find local amenability. Such translation is not limited to new national and cultural settings; it extends to new media platforms as well. The production of television programming must now consider and actively include possibilities for translation across languages, localities, and cultures as well as translation across screen size, distribution platforms, and indeed media. As the trade journal Variety reminded its entertainment industry readership, so far as international co-producers and distributors are concerned, “before the accountants and lawyers get down to work, the script must be able to transcend national boundaries” (Clarke, 2009). In other words it is one thing to distribute a program around the world, in an effort to expand the program's market and to create international “buzz” for the program's brand potential, but it is another thing to imagine (and then attempt to capitalize upon) the ways in which that program might find local resonance and amenability in a wide variety of local sites of television viewing around the world. Similarly, while it is a relatively straightforward (if, until recently, novel) practice to distribute a program over the Internet, onto portable media devices and mobile phones, in DVD collections, and through other outlets, it is perhaps less clear how that program's transmedia coordination and expanding narrative will actually play on so many different devices, screen sizes, and over extended periods of time. Thus, while translation is intimately bound to travel, it nonetheless offers the opportunity to focus upon those textual features of a production that are intended to facilitate not only travel, but also specific, various, and often unpredictable moments of accommodation across cultures and media.

Programming translates, for example, as the licensing of program formats for reality programming. Program formats are sold around the world by intellectual property rights holders, while local broadcasters tailor details of a program to local practices and tastes (Esser, 2010; McMillin, 2007; Moran & Malbon, 2006; Straubhaar, 2007). Such financial and production partnerships assure that reality programs are produced “with an in-depth knowledge of the local market” (Remy Blumenfield, ITV director of global formats, quoted in Clarke, 2009). Thus the Indian version of I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! (Iss Jungle Se Mujhe Bachao) saw licensing and production arrangements negotiated three ways between ITV Studios, Sony TV India, and the local Indian production company MidiTech (Clarke, 2009). The British program Weakest Link, meanwhile, could air in more than 40 countries, but it could feature local references and be hosted by local or regional celebrities in each iteration. For the third season of Gran Hermano – the Argentine version of the initially Dutch and now internationally recognizable Big Brother – the increasingly familiar program was kept fresh by offering a contestant exchange with Spain's version of the same program (Johnson & Newbery, 2002). Program formats that failed in one national market (e.g., Power of 10, hosted by Drew Carey on CBS in the US, 2007–2008) could prove popular and successful in another (e.g., Dus Ka Dum, hosted by Salman Khan on Sony TV in India, 2008–2010: see Hasan, 2008). Such renewable success in so many different locations, with seemingly so many different versions of a show's idea, is the result of detailed and extensive production practices designed to translate a program's success around the world while growing its value as a property with a commodity brand.

Recall the example of the global success of Pop Idol. This program's textual characteristics allow every version of the show, in so many different cultural and national locations around the world, to appear on television as locally produced. Each iteration of the program is carefully translated for its local market, with regional celebrity hosts and local musicians/celebrity on-screen judges. Each version of the program has local contestants compete by singing music familiar to and popular with local audiences. Finally, crucial to this program's success has been the participation of the local audience: viewers telephone or text-message their preference for a winner, and the tabulation of those votes results directly in determining the winner (Lisotta, 2006). To facilitate adaptations, the production distributor Freemantle does not conclude its involvement at the signing of the license agreement. Instead the company “has an arm of ‘fliers,’ executive producers and other experts who travel the world” (Brown, 2003, p. 6) – to guide, inform, and train national and regional production partners in the “secrets” of the program's success. Fremantle's president of worldwide entertainment at the time, Alan Boyd, argued:

Beyond the question of Iceland's importance (or medical care), these life-or-death metaphors suggest the extent to which such advice and supervision demonstrate the intellectual property holder's commitment not only to successfully implemented versions of the program, but also to its maintenance of the property's global value, even through multiple translations.

Scripted narrative programming can also “translate” through similar format licensing agreements, though it tends to do so less often. Even as the US suburban melodramedy Desperate Housewives (2004–2012) was shown with Spanish subtitles on Sony Entertainment Television in Argentina, Canal 13 there debuted Amas de casa deses-peradas (2006–2007), an officially licensed, Spanish-language adaptation of the Disney-owned property (Kunz, 2010, p. 309). US television schedules meanwhile have seen faux documentary sitcoms like The Office, licensed by NBC from Great Britain, serial dramedies like Ugly Betty (2006–2010), licensed by ABC from Columbia, and psychological dramas like In Treatment (2008 to the present), licensed by HBO (Home Box Office) from Israel. Each has its premise and format translated into successful US productions. That is, while the premise and format of the program is licensed from elsewhere, the cast, references, language, and in many cases the very tone of the program can be localized for a new television market. As an NBC executive suggested about changes made to The Office for US audiences, “I think Americans need a little more hope than the British” (Kunz, 2010, p. 321).

Narrative programming, the value of which is derived from specific stories and characters (and often actors), has, however, more often been sold as produced. Such programs frequently rely upon spectacular visuals and special effects, visceral action sequences, and graphic violence and sexuality to assure interest and basic translation across national, cultural, and linguistic barriers. Certain textual and narrative elements have long been thought by television producers to be more “accessible” to viewers across linguistic and cultural difference. Program qualities thought to offer “a high degree of cross-cultural translatability” include rapidly paced narratives that rely more on action than on dialogue, visceral spectacle and visuals, as well as “ostentatious consumption, provocative sexuality, breathtaking stunts, stylized violence and (increasingly) sensational special effects” (Osgerby & Gough-Yates, 2001, p. 28). These textual markers have been characterized by program producers and by television scholars alike as qualities that can be “easily recognized, understood and assimilated in a diversity of contexts and markets” (p. 28). Some programming, in other words, is produced ready to translate. Thus recent years have seen the growth of internationally successful, visually stunning forensic crime dramas like the CSI franchise (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, 2000 to the present; CSI: Miami, 2002 to the present; CSI: New York, 2005 to the present), as well as action-hero dramas, from Smallville (2001–2011) to 24 (2001–2010), Chuck (2007–2012), and Human Target (2010–2011). Programs such as these tend to travel globally as they are produced (rather than in locally produced format licensing form), relying on their compelling visuals of special effect, action, violence, and high-end production values to aid in translations.

The need to translate across multiple media platforms internationally also impacts the programs' look and stories. Television programming, in its expected travels, is increasingly designed to translate to differently sized screens, from giant plasma screens in the living room to small cell-phone screens on the go. These different distribution and exhibition platforms imply new viewing situations, from that of the casually glancing couch potatoes to that of the actively engaged web surfers, from that of detail-focused, invested fans to that of distracted multitaskers. A single program must “translate” so that casual viewers are not impeded from simply watching television as they presumably always have, even while the avid viewer is meant to perceive this cross-platform convergence as significantly heightening the possibilities of narrative engagement with the program. In fact, this appeal is meant to be amplified through interactive web designs encouraging the investment of both time and emotion in exploring minutiae related to the production or the diegesis (or both) of a specific program. As television program narratives have been produced to follow their audiences through space and time across multiple platforms, convergence has favored production strategies aimed at digitally literate viewers with access to high-speed Internet – that is, particularly at younger audiences with (access to) both financial and cultural capital. Thus, while the aesthetics of such programming strives for visual attention amidst the clutter of other programming, the form and the narrative might be designed to reward motivated pursuit across multiple websites and intersubjective viewing practices fostered by social networks, blogs, and discussions concurrent with Internet exploration, and to bolster efforts at getting fragmenting audiences to converge upon their branded intellectual property.

Television's expansion into “new media” realms has gradually resulted in texts intentionally designed to be experienced in multiple ways. Narrative material showing snippets of back story, the exploits of minor characters, video diaries of recurring characters, and other narrative enhancements effectively translate what was once a single narrative, on the one hand, to each medium and, on the other hand, to this new environment of dispersed audiences, and they do so through a strategy of semi-autonomous textual dispersal. Yet the work of translation across media is done at the expense of the industry's labor force, as networks and studios insist to guilds that the creative work of digital media does not fall under the “television” work for which they have been contracted and for which payments are made. Even as an enormous amount of labor in necessary for vast expansion into multiple media realms, the creators of ideas, narratives, and characters are frequently left out of the expansion, elaboration, and residual recompense of their very creations (Banks, 2010).

Programs, from Smallville to Lost to FlashForward, have made exhaustive diegetic use of the Internet as part of their characters' activities within the program. Smallville's main character Chloe accesses in each episode multiple encrypted websites, many of which are available online for fans to investigate themselves. Similarly, Lost supplied viewers with an actual website for booking tickets on the fictional Oceanic Airlines while they scout for clues about the narrative and learn abut the program. More overtly, FlashForward's FBI agents quickly assembled the online “Mosaic,” which is designed to aid in their investigation and to offer episodes of a fictional public television documentary series, Stories from the Mosaic. Promotional efforts on behalf of FlashForward, meanwhile, extended the text to the Internet site, which encouraged viewers to pretend that the premise of the show was real and to contribute their own visions of the future. These efforts also included early experiments in “augmented reality,” with magazine ads (which in this case were to be scanned by a computer's webcam, which led to a “10-minute experience” of promotional video: see Schneider, 2009). Much of this translation was created and enacted outside the usual labor pool.

Tether

This combination of travel and translation puts considerable strain on the integrity of the television text, pulling it in multiple directions, asking of it multiple results, demanding the television text to tie together a wide variety of not necessarily compatible imperatives. Thus television production must now consider a text's ability to tether these demands together into a coherent text, even as that text is often further asked to tether fragmenting, diverse, and dispersed viewers together, into a collective “audience,” and to tether programming elements together with advertising elements. Tethering allows us to understand the suturing role of the individual television program within the broad economy of commercial television programming, in which individual programs bear the work of uniting dispersed audiences with commercial content.

Television tethering now involves two simultaneous tasks. A program that travels and translates, in search of television's dispersed audience, is valued for characteristics that allow it to bring together multiple audience constituencies into one larger audience for the program. In addition to traveling to audiences and translating for the benefit of various local encounters with the program, the program often seeks to attract multiple and distinct constituencies. Second, as programs disperse and translate in order to amass audiences beyond television's traditional flow, they must tie textual features with commercial sponsors through a variety of techniques, from cooperative productions to “product integration” and corporate tie-ins. In short, producers value a single program for the way it tethers textual appeals to dispersing audiences that can be tethered back together into an audience to be sold to commercial sponsors.

With increased competition for advertising dollars and with the ability for viewers to “zip,” “zap,” and otherwise avoid commercial breaks, programs that can tether the sponsor's message to the program's text are highly valued. Television programming increasingly incorporates advertising products within its text, the paid placement of consumer commodities occupying screen and narrative space. Programs also incorporate incentives for viewers to seek out media spaces more fully controlled by individual sponsors. The program Heroes (2006–2010), for example, worked closely with auto maker Nissan in designing a narrative environment for multiple and sustained product integration. Product placement subsidized the show's budget and marketed the show through ongoing experiments with customized content touting both program and sponsor. As NBC Universal's president of sales and marketing put it, the network's effort was to “enhance the effectiveness of using our content for advertisers to deliver their messages” (Steinberg, 2007). Nissan sought a “TV property the automaker could own with audiences through multiple media channels” (Halliday, 2007). Before its pilot had debuted, “Nissan's product placement planner [. . .] worked closely with the show's producers to place vehicles in 10 episodes” of the first season (Graser, 2007). Nissan was effectively tethered to both the program's text and the program's online Heroes comic book, which, in turn, linked to Nissan's own website (Halliday, 2007).

The same consumer technologies that facilitate these complex schemes to tether product to program capitalize upon audiences dispersing across multiple channels and multiple media. Therefore a second tethering imperative for program production is to tie these audience fragments together to the show, in effect reimagining the mass audience that has driven commercial television sales since the 1950s. It is not uncommon for individual programs to mix multiple, simultaneous genres in a program. Supernatural (2005 to the present), for example, is a family melodrama, a buddy action show, and a fantasy horror program, all in any given episode and each intended to appeal to different audience groups, simultaneously. Lost (2004–2010) was an ensemble psychological drama, a tropical adventure story, and an eerie science-fiction program. Desperate Housewives was a domestic melodrama, an ironic comedy, and a suburban mystery show. FlashForward offered science – fiction, domestic drama, police procedural, and mystery, all within most episodes. Action shows are also domestic dramas, with an occasional comedy or fantasy episode to be expected. Each of the genres in these and many other programs are thought to appeal to different segments of the fractured, dispersed audience.

Similarly, in an effort to attract the casual viewer while sustaining the interest of more committed audience members, programming form now regularly tethers episodic with serial attributes. While individual episodes tell complete stories and end conclusively within a single airing, the serial structures allow for certain narrative elements – such as central enigmas, villainous plots, budding romance, or character development – to continue over multiple episodes, and even over multiple television seasons. Hence the crime of the week might be solved by the hero of a police procedural, and the bad guy might be captured. In the same episode, however, the romance between the heroine and her attractive lieutenant remains tantalizingly ambiguous, and one more piece of a recurring character's mysterious past has been revealed, all to entice more invested viewers. Programming tethers multigenre, multiform, product-placed textual attributes together in one program. Awareness of the imperatives of tethering allows us to look at production techniques designed to recombine a program, an audience, and advertising in new ways beyond programming flow, as the audience disperses and the program travels and translates.

Tantalize

Verb: to torment with, or as if with, the sight of something desired but out of reach; tease by arousing expectations that are repeatedly disappointed.

Dictionary.com

To travel, translate, and tether in this fashion, a program must continue to tantalize, attracting and holding the attention of industry and audience alike, in all these different locations of travel and translation and amidst all these multiple tethering strategies. Commercial television has always been produced to attract the right kind of audience (that is, those whom advertisers would like to reach), and it has often done this by providing aspirational characters and settings. However, as television programs travel and translate in an environment with ever more competition for audience time and attention, they are now produced specifically to ask for more and different kinds of attention, rather than simply fitting into the programming flow, unobjectionably. As Michael Curtin has argued – and industry wisdom appears to agree – “given a greater range of choices, audiences are drawn to the products by textual elements – characters, story lines, special effects – rather than by the technological and regulatory constraints formerly imposed on the delivery system” (Curtin, 2004, p. 281). The relentless sequencing of Raymond Williams' “planned flow” (1990, p. 86) is increasingly understood as being less persuasive than the qualities of individual texts in attracting audiences within twenty-first-century media clutter.

Certainly some such qualities emerge from the growing ubiquity of the aesthetically arresting “stylistic exhibitionism” of Caldwells' (1995) “televisuality.” Disparate textual elements with aggressively visceral aesthetics and graphic effects are central to generating interest in programs. From CSI's graphically animated and rapid zooms (now clichéd) into gaping bodily wounds to The Office's increasingly familiar faux documentary shooting style or to the explosive barrage of sound and graphic effects that introduce and interrupt prime-time sports, all are designed to tantalize viewers.

Program narratives organized around singularly intriguing and/or suspenseful concepts are also meant to tantalize by intriguing viewers with hints of future developments. Online speculation, exegesis, and intersubjective and social viewing practices meanwhile expand the brand. Dramas, from Lost to 24 to FlashForward to The Event (2010–2011), offered central enigmas and high-concept premises combined with serial narratives, all designed to sustain viewer interest. Indeed, even while translation strategies devalue creative labor in television production, tantalizing strategies presuppose increased efforts for showrunners, writers, and other workers who keep track of complex narratives within stylistically heightened visual presentations.

Tantalizing viewers across geographic and temporal travel and translation and amidst multiple tethering practices also extends, in production practices, to populating programs with characters that elicit strong emotional responses (affection, attraction, hatred, etc.), and with characters presumed to look like the primary audience demographics being sought. Thus melodrama, with its exaggeration of Manichean contrasts between good and evil characters, remains a popular genre in much television programming (including unscripted reality shows), even while the growing trend of populating program casts with multi-aged, multi-ethnic, even multinational ensembles is intended to signal entrée for viewers of corresponding demographic groups. Further experiments in tantalizing audiences through interactive options – to vote characters off the program, to exchange Internet messages with fictional (or reality) characters, or even to customize character identities for future episodes – suggest the extent to which subjective identification with television characters factors into efforts to tantalize into viewing specific television programming.

Conclusion

What these four Ts of TV mean for the study of media production is that, as the “property” of programming is distributed into ubiquity, the same activities and options that motivate television convergence practices, the circumvention of temporal scarcity, and the fragmentation of the audience are also the cause and the result of the remarkable growth in the transformation of production practices. Amidst this period of transition from scarcity to abundance of viewer access to individual programs, the function, and indeed the very definition of television programming, has been transformed. Conceived of within the industry as intellectual property with brand potential, programming is no longer simply the content of broadcasting, but instead has become best understood as being itself a valuable commodity in textual form, disseminated across a multiplicity of viewing and institutional practices. Any given television channel has become just one means of encountering (a part of) the program on offer. Any given program is increasingly conceived of and produced so as to be experienced in multiple places and over an extended period of time. Servicing a television network's broadcast schedule and ad sales is now imagined as only the first step in a program's sustained and expanding life as a valuable property. Ultimately, the expanding spatial reach of a temporally limited program is being replaced, as an institutional strategy, by another, which emphasizes the spatial and temporal ubiquity of access to that program. Mitigating against the increasing uncertainty of a fragmenting audience is only one component in this new attention to television programs.

This is a broad transformation in television production, which could not be adequately accounted for and described without considering both political–economic influences on institutional practices and the textual analysis of programming in circulation. Television now requires specific, integrated strategies for viewing and analysis if we are to understand and adequately engage with all that we see. The four Ts offer a way of imagining the work necessary for us to know, together, the labor and the leisure, the making and the meaning, of the television programs with which we have been invited to spend our time.

NOTES

1 Fox had largely eluded Fin-Syn enforcement in its first decade as a network through special considerations in the name of competition and by not broadcasting a full prime-time schedule.

2 In the event, a series of mergers and divestments involving CBS, AOL, and station group owners, combined with continuing demand for Warner Bros. and Paramount, produced programming on other networks; the changing fortunes of broadcast television in general and the difficulty of launching even one, much less two new networks combined so that The WB Television Network and UPN (United Paramount Network) merged into The CW Television Network in 2006.

3 See, for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66TqUyjqM40 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF1b1pf9DRY (not available in some countries).

4 Head of NBCUniversal Media's international networks and digital businesses, quoted in Pfanner (2007).

5 Taking full advantage of the end of Fin-Syn, the program was produced by the CBS Corporation's production division, CBS Paramount Network Television (subsequently to become, in 2009, simply CBS Television Studios). It aired on the CW Network, which is half-owned by the CBS Corporation.

6 Vice-president of production and networks for worldwide drama at international media distributor FremantleMedia (quoted in Clarke, 2009).

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