stream of programming through the set and the manner in which narrative, advertisements, and promotions all intermixed. The continuous infiltration of control devices into television use has greatly disrupted flow as a fundamental characteristic of the medium, at least in terms of television flow being determined by someone other than the individual viewer.
Television’s transition from its network-era norm as a mass medium toward its post-network-era function as an aggregator of a broad range of niche and on-demand viewing audiences has required significant adjustments to industrial assumptions about the medium. For example, in his 1989 book The Capitalization of Cultural Production, Bernard Miège located television among media industries that operate under a “flow” model (this use of the term differs substantially from that of Williams) and rely on “home and family listening,” “an undifferentiated, indirect mass market,” the “instant” obsolescence of content, and the use of a programming grid that creates daily interaction and cultivates viewer loyalty, all of which eroded during the multi-channel transition. By the mid-2000s, the market characteristics of U.S. television had come instead to resemble those of his “publishing” model, which features a “segmented mass market” and the “dialectic of the ‘hit and catalogue,’” along with the purchase of individualized objects—in this case, particular episodes of television shows.45
Noting that “‘television’ now functions as a bookstore, a news stand, or a library,” Newcomb has departed from the “cultural forum” concept he and Hirsch offered in 1983 and conceived of the medium similarly to Miège’s publishing model.46 Television has adopted multiple possible revenue streams in ways that mirror the bookstore (DVD sell-through, iTunes downloading), magazine subscription (premium cable networks such as HBO), and the subscription library (MVPD on demand, Netflix). Each of these possible transactions of capital for content created new and distinct relationships between the economic model, programming, and how these forms of television might function as a cultural institution. And, as Newcomb notes, these alternative transaction or publishing models thrive on specialty, distinction, and niche taste, all of which unmistakably distinguish the practices of the multi-channel transition and post-network era from network-era norms that privileged the opposite characteristics.
Post-network-era practices have led the television audience not only to fracture among different channels and devices, but also to splinter temporally. The control over the television experience that various technologies offer has ruptured the norm of simultaneity in television experience and enabled audiences to capture television on their own terms. Moreover, as the New York Observer columnist Tom Scocca notes, the ephemerality once characteristic of the medium has also come to be less prominent; for example, the video experiences offered by YouTube allow for archiving images so they may be called up at will.47 New devices have provided tools to capture television and consequently have produced a norm of asynchronous viewing that has altered the interaction of the culture with the medium in crucial ways. Television devices remain ubiquitous and accessible in the post-network era, but the ubiquity of specific content has been eliminated as broad audiences have come to share little programming in common and less frequently view it simultaneously.
The nature of post-network television will likely be profoundly different than that of the network era, but the contradictory affordances of these changes make assessing the relative quality of either era difficult. The uncertain future often instigates a nostalgia for past norms that imagines the past differently than it was experienced. As Time’s James Poniewozik opines,
The irony of the nostalgia for TV’s “golden age” is that it romanticizes the very things people used to condemn. Mass media were once homogenizing; now we miss how they unified us. Cultural critics once said TV appealed to the lowest common denominator; now cable’s ambitious niche shows cater to elitists. Some even romanticize commercials—commercials!—as making TV for the masses possible.48
And it is not only the experience of viewers and insights of scholars that are changed, the adjustments to the U.S. television industry chronicled here provided as extraordinary a shift for those who work in it. The diversification in economic models, changing industrial relationships, and challenges to regulatory practices posed by new technologies all required revisiting many of the foundational industrial assumptions of television and how it operated.
Theorizing Niche Media: Identifying Phenomenal Television
Regardless of whether we have truly reached the post-network era, the U.S. television industry and its norms of operation have changed significantly. The most noteworthy adjustment, already evident by 2005, was the erosion of television’s regular operation as a mass medium. Although it has continued to play this role in isolated moments, television is no longer organized in this way and has not been since the mid-1990s. By then, it was already apparent that we needed to reassess television and see it as a medium that primarily reaches niche audiences. Continued transition in television’s core economic models would only further adjust the type of programming that could be profitably produced and television’s operation as a cultural institution.
No mass medium arose to supplant television in the wake of its industrial change, and it might be that mass media as they existed in the twentieth century were remnants of a particular set of industrial and economic relations from another era.49 Niche-focused media long have played an important role in society by communicating cultural beliefs, albeit to narrower groups than mass media. Women’s magazines provide an illustrative example, as ample critical scholarship has explored how this media form that targets a specific audience consistently reproduced certain discourses of beauty, identity, and female behavior.50 Niche media are identified as important voices to specific communities, but have received less critical attention than mechanisms of mass messaging.
Theorizing the cultural significance of niche media might begin by exploring those industries that have operated in this organization for some time, and the magazine industry—with its era of mass distribution earlier in the century—may provide the most relevant point of comparison. In considering the process through which this industry transitioned from mass market publications with titles such as Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post to more narrowly targeted magazines, Joseph Turow argues that demand from advertisers to reach ever more specific audiences fueled the fragmentation.51 While acknowledging the economic value and efficiency targeting provides to advertisers, he raises a cautionary flag about such fragmentation and rightly notes the dangers for ideals of democracy and community that result from what develop into “gated informational communities.”52 The redefinition of television in the course of the multi-channel transition as a medium that supports fragmented audiences and polarized content consequently has exacerbated the cultural trends and outcomes that Turow identified in the magazine industry.
Television’s new abundant offerings make it difficult to determine a proper frame through which to examine programming and assess its significance. We are accustomed to moral panics and activism that develop from concern about the vast reach of mediated messages. Thinking about television in the age of narrowcasting requires that we take into account the substantial variation now encompassed by its programming. “Successful” television programs might now gather audiences that range from tens of thousands to tens of millions, while channels might be accessible in anywhere from three million to one hundred million homes. Some programs stream into the home without any viewer payment, others require a subscription for a channel of programming (HBO), and viewers now can buy particular programs on DVD or as single-show downloads. With such ample variation in the availability and ubiquity of television programming, we need more specific models for understanding television’s operation in the culture, ones that will enable us to differentially assess its significance.
Toward this end, I propose “phenomenal television” as a particular category of programming that retains the social importance attributed to television’s earlier operation as a cultural forum despite the changes of the post-network era. In the network era, television content derived its relevance
