The Long Goodbye -- the networks are taking a long damned time to die

Yesterday I posted a link to Clay Shirky's essay comparing the big media empires to societies like the Roman Empire that collapsed under the weight of their own complexity. I commented that I doubted his conclusions. Here's one of the reasons why.

Back in the early Nineties, when I was still picking up some extra money as a freelance writer, I did a long feature on the surprising vitality of broadcast television in Northwest Arkansas. The vitality was surprising because broadcast television had been under a death watch for more than a decade.

These ominous prognoses had started started sometime in the mid to late Seventies, prompted by the arrival of home video and the rise of cable and satellite-based cable stations. By the beginning of the Eighties, most observers agreed that the outlook was dire. At least one columnist predicted that one of the networks (his guess was NBC) would be gone by the end of the decade. (The columnist obviously didn't have a lot of faith in that Tartikoff kid the network had just hired.)

By 1990 there were exactly twice as many networks as the columnist had predicted and one more than anyone had expected. What happened? Entertainment executives had been trying to launch a fourth network since DuMont went dark in 1956. Why was an industry facing an explosion of new competition suddenly able to support a major new player?

What industry watchers were overlooking was that broadcast stations fell into two distinct groups: VHF and UHF. For the VHF stations, cable really was a threat to a virtual monopoly. it marginally improved their picture quality but it brought in numerous new channels. UHF stations, however, had poor picture quality and low range. As businesses, they were only viable in large, heavily populated areas (and then only marginally). With cable, though, a channel 39 could compete on an equal footing with a channel 2.

This was what made Fox and later the CW viable businesses.

But to me the most remarkable thing about this story is the way the standard narrative has changed so little over the decades. For more than thirty years, there has been a steady stream of stories about reduced schedules, mergers, and deaths of networks and with the exception of the creation of the CW, every single one of them has been incorrect. Over three decades of wrong.

Just to put this in perspective, ABC, the last of the big three, started broadcasting in 1948. That was also about that the other networks started moving past the experimental stage. If we pick that as our starting point, network television has spent more than half of its life under a prognosis of imminent death. During that time the number of networks has gone from three to four to five (and might have been six if not not for some disastrous strategic errors by the heads of WB and UPN) and CBS, the network that reacted the least to the changes in the market (sticking mainly with sitcoms and hour dramas and keeping a very small web presence) is arguably the healthiest of the bunch.

Of course, this could all change in the next year or so. There is no reason to assume the current networks are any more immortal than DuMont was. All the same, we've been told since the late Seventies that this section of the sky is just about to fall. Perhaps it's time to question Mr. Little's credibility.