Conservatives who like to believe that whites and blacks are fully integrated in the culture should consider this: Not one of the ten most-watched television programs in white America is in the top ten for blacks. In fact, in recent years, television networks have been able to capture nearly the entire black audience without attracting any white viewers at all, and “narrowcasting” has emerged as a dominant programming philosophy among television executives. Now Kristal Brent Zook has written a book exploring this practice and the cultural divide to which it is responding. Color By Fox tells the story of the rise of the Fox television network (part of News Corporation, the parent of THE WEEKLY STANDARD). Zook is absolutely right that the topic is fascinating, and she’s absolutely wrong about why.
One of the popular parlor games among TV people of the 1970s and early 1980s was imagining what it would take to launch a fourth broadcast network to compete with NBC, CBS, and ABC. Like starting a new major movie studio, it was fun to talk about, but looked economically insane. When the Fox television network was launched in 1986, cobbled together from a few seldom-watched UHF stations in major cities, the TV establishment chuckled dismissively and assumed that it would quickly fold in the face of overwhelming competition from the majors. But Fox wisely chose not to compete at all with the Big Three, but to aim at an undeserved audience: black America.
This gambit of network-wide counter-programming proved an unexpected success: By 1995, blacks, who are only 12 percent of the U.S. audience, were 25 percent of Fox’s audience. However, blacks — whom one producer referred to as the “Nike and Doritos audience” — are, financially speaking, a low-yield audience who don’t attract big-money advertisers. So even while Fox guaranteed its viability in the short-term by finding a foothold in the marketplace, the network seemed to weaken its viability for the long-term by closely linking its brand to a relatively undesirable demographic group.
In the early 1990s, however, Fox embarked on a not-so-subtle quest to change its identity and capture a wider and more commercially attractive audience. Many of its black shows were sacrificed to make space for such programs as Beverly Hills 90210, Party of Five, and Melrose Place. Fox once again defied the odds by smoothly trading its old core audience for a new, more profitable one. This TV stepchild is now recognized as the fourth major network.
Fox’s success established a blueprint that has since been followed by two new start-up networks, the failing Paramount (UPN) and the thriving Warner Brothers’ (the WB). Zook begins her slim volume promisingly with a discussion of the practice of narrowcasting for black audiences and a glimpse into the world of the infant Fox during the late 1980s. She opens with the well-documented fact that black audiences over-whelmingly prefer shows starring black actors.
But she then moves to trying to differentiate what black audiences do not in fact seem to differentiate: black-produced shows (such as Living Single) from merely black-cast shows (such as Family Matters). She has a pet thesis, which is that black audiences respond to four distinctive elements of black-produced programs: autobiography, improvisation, “black aesthetics,” and drama. And she presents the thesis over and over again, in the apparent hope that endless and numbing repetition will overcome the fact that she’s wrong.
The largest part of Color By Fox is a misguided textual analysis of such shows as The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Roc, and New York Undercover, in such prose as: “What these aesthetics accomplish is an ideological reframing of the debate itself, recontextualizing ‘unwanted compliments’ as part of an ongoing legacy of womanist resistance.” By the end of her book, Zook has degenerated into inarticulate moral outrage at Fox’s abandoning of its original black shows — when what would have been fascinating is moral analysis of why the network was wrong, or right, to do so. Did Fox first raise and then destroy the expectations of black audiences? Was Fox’s turn to shows like Beverly Hills 90210 a silencing of the black creative voice?
As heroes, she offers cultural activists like Ralph Farquhar, a black TV executive involved with the show South Central, who has a plaque on his desk that says “Life is more important than show business”; and Natalie Chaidez, who, with Reggie Bythewood, worked on New York Undercover, proclaims,
My mother is an activist. . . . My grandmother worked in unions. My aunt is a Chicano studies professor at East LA College, chair of the department. . . . My other aunt is also an activist. . . . I was raised by these women. So that was my agenda coming in. Reggie and I both had high aspirations from the beginning. We felt a responsibility to do issue-oriented shows.
But a season of a television show costs more than $ 11 million for twenty-two episodes (the top-rated show, ER, reportedly costs $ 13 million per episode), making the production of entertainment a high-stakes endeavor. What Zook and her friends don’t or can’t understand is that this is not show politics but show business.
In the world of television, a show like the WB’s Felicity is one of the most valuable franchises around. Even though its viewership is small (it ranks ninety-ninth among all viewers), it has the most coveted niche: Felicity has the highest concentration of eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old viewers in households with incomes over $ 75,000. This is the type of viewer, with reams of disposable income, who makes advertisers salivate.
Zook misses this entirely. She is so in love with her four pillars of black-television success that she never gets around to talking about what will become of the concept of narrowcasting. With cable television increasing in popularity and Fox inspiring imitators, it’s no wonder many people in the industry think that narrowcasting is the future for all television. Jamie Kellner, the chief executive of the WB, says that even network television has become a battle for niche: “It’s going to be a fragmented marketplace, [so you have to] make sure the one you’re hanging onto is the most valuable one in terms of audience.”
This atomization of the industry is the legacy of Fox’s courting of the black audience, and surely there is a fascinating book to be written about it. Just not by Kristal Brent Zook or any other of the political malcontents, both conservative and liberal, who are furious that popular entertainment is a financial enterprise with no loyalty to their agenda.
KRISTAL BRENT ZOOK
Color By Fox
The Fox Network and the Revolution In Black Television
Oxford Univ. Press, 148 pp., $ 14.95
Jonathan V. Last is a reporter for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
