The Battle for Your Head:
From Early TV Sitcoms to Free TV Online
By James Mulvey
Part One. Why TV online can save the entertainment industry.
Television is dying.
But it's nothing to be sad about. The old horse had to go sometime. Network television, big budget events, and the tired parade of failed sitcoms each year, are all falling into a collective grave because advertising—the lifeblood of traditional media—has exhausted itself.
No longer can you just attach a jingle, a celebrity face, or testimonial to a product. These methods are dead. But consumers aren't necessarily smarter, cheaper, or less enthusiastic about feeding their pennies into the capitalistic machine. Simply put, they just don't pay attention anymore. Amid all the clamor of advertising messages, the implosion of traditional media can be heard. And its audience is trickling away from the giant box in their living room to a host of free TV online.
For preparation of this article, I decided to unplug from my outdated entertainment center and watch TV online instead. Commercial-free, instant, updated daily with new content. An easy sell. No need to watch Ghostbusters on my budget cable movie channel for the second time this month.
But if the future of TV is online and how we consume this daily staple changes its medium of delivery, there's still one consequence to consider. The history and future of TV isn't just about how we receive entertainment content. In the minds of the corporate producers, the content is the useless part—the freebie that is tossed to the masses.
The real question is how the corporate machine will get us to pay for its content. Anyone familiar with the new frontier of TV online knows that this small pocket of free content can't last forever.
In order to understand what the future of TV will look like we need to understand how TV came to depend on advertising and how we, the masses, came to accept advertising as part of the TV package.
The central character in this story is the sit-com, the main staple of American culture for sixty-plus years. It began in radio, and made a successful transition to TV. Will it survive the switch to TV online? How will TV episodes online alter not only the form of shows, but also the future of the commercial?
Part Two. Early sit-coms and TV advertising
Like any good Capitalist love story, TV and the endless flitter of advertising that came with it began with the challenge of how to turn a good idea into better profit. As early as 1876, a civil servant named George Carey was drafting designs for a technology that would allow people to "see by electricity." But it wasn't until 1927 that Philo Farnsworth showed his first functional television set to the press. The technology existed, but not the ability to make money from it.
"The magazine concept"
Just as there is a lot of debate over the best way to make money with TV online, early attempts to actually make TV programming profitable went over some hurdles. The magazine, although contributing little to the entertainment aspect of TV, helped to solve the problem of how best to make money with the new technology.
Today, entertainment websites try to provide some sort of free content (such as free streaming TV episodes at sites like or ) and then try to get indirect sponsors. Surprisingly, the first TV shows followed roughly the same model. But rather than the current tendency to allow banner ads to pop up in the side screen when you try to watch free TV episodes online,most early TV shows had a single mega sponsor.
The idea behind this was that the best way to plug into the wallets of the nation was to feature a single product (a modern equivalent would be things like "The Miller-Lite Half-time Show") from a single company. Popular 1950's shows included the Kraft Television Theater, Coke Time, and the Colgate Comedy Hour.
As the number of eyes watching grew, a more effective advertising strategy was needed. NBC executive Sylvester L. "Pat" Weaver developed the "magazine concept." Rather than own entire shows, sponsors could purchase blocks of time in which they could advertise their products. Like a magazine, the viewer would be exposed to these messages along with the program. Advertising boomed.
Early sit-coms
When TV began to gain popularity, producers started to adapt popular programs from radio to TV. The most popular show to make the transition from radio was the Chicago-based show Amos and Andy (CBS, 1920)—a show that still brings a tear of now racially inappropriate laughter to my grandmother's eye every time she remembers a gag or two.
Amos and Andy was filled with situational humor, but the actual term "sit-com" wasn't termed until 1951. In that year, Lucille Ball, known then as a moderately famous comedy actress, teamed up with her husband Desi Arnas to launch a TV comedy series called I Love Lucy. Although other successful comedy shows had run on TV before, I Love Lucy set the standard for future sit-coms.
While innovative in several respects (for one, the show was the first to tape its shows rather than broadcast live, preparing the way for the re-run), I Love Lucy still incorporated perhaps the most recognizable feature of sit-coms: one or more humorous story lines that centered around a common environment such as a living room or kitchen.
This decision, however, was technical problem-solving not creative inspiration. Early television cameras were huge, stationary pieces of equipment. They couldn't easily be moved outdoors, and so the easiest and cheapest solution was to shoot on a single stage. Yet even with the development of better, more movable equipment, producers still continue to place some familial or work environment at the center of most sit-coms (the coffee shop in Friends, Seinfeld's apartment, or the office in, well, The Office).
Predictable plots and profits
By using these gathering places (kitchen tables, living rooms, work environments), characters in sit-coms had good enough reason to be there, and narrative action could come to them via the front door. Like the front door buzzer in Seinfeld—a signal to the audience a new character will soon arrive to get the episode rolling.
Another feature modern sit-coms share with their early counterparts is that the plot will typically present a conflict resolved by the end of the episode. The conflict might involve learning a moral life lesson (Will Smith learned a few on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) or it might just be a comedic situation (such as Kramer and Newman facing eviction for reversing their peep-holes).
This format also served an enormous commercial advantage. By reverting back to a narrative stasis each time, audiences didn't have to worry about missing an episode. This ensured a steady number of viewers, allowing show producers to sell ad space for enormous profits based on the predictability of their audience showing up night after night.
Part 3. The age of virtual persuasion
The sit-com helped to make TV, and its advertisements, a permanent cultural and economic center in American life. But as we make the transition from TV based entertainment technology to web-based, it remains unclear what future advertising and entertainment might look like.
In 1957, Variety reportedthat each week, viewers encountered around 420 commercials totaling 5 hours, 8 minutes. That's not too bad. Today, the average viewer is exposed to about 3000 selling messages a day. No wonder Billy Mayes shouts.
In the conservative perspective, advertising must be checked by government regulation. But why? A better option is to let the industry exhaust itself. We are in a media storm of selling messages because the traditional avenues simply aren't effective. Our brains have to be pummeled with sales messages because, simply, we've learned how to tune them out. Long gone are the days when you can create a jingle, air it on the radio a few times, and sell out your warehouse.
In fact, we are so used to receiving advertising that we don't even notice most of these messages. If you regularly download software or a watch free TV online, chances are you have learned to tune out the offers floating in your side-screen for teeth whiteners, horny local singles, or weight loss programs.
If the masses are to watch TV episodes online, there will follow changes in the structure of advertising. Skeptics who think that everything will always stay the same are never the ones writing the checks.
Consider Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the self-proclaimed creative geniuses of new wave advertising, and their online "Subservient Chicken" campaign for Burger King. The campaign involved a man, a creepy apartment, and a chicken suit. The chicken hung out in front of his Webcam all day (or so the creators want you think) and encouraged users to type in commands.
An old twist on Burger-King's tagline, "Chicken the way you like it." Yeah, it was a creative gimmick. But a flash of the new that got more than 385 million hits. Visitors spent an average of six minutes on the site, apparently amused with the novel approach.
From Burger-King's perspective, a 30 second spot at the Super Bowl will cost you 3 million and reach an audience of 133 million. Or you could buy a chicken suit and alchemize a low-budget aesthetic into a new viral image.
When Burger-King is willing to let a top ad agency webcast a man in a chicken-suit as a way to sell product, you know that traditional sales messages are being lost in the noise of a dying media.
Advertising has often been blamed for causing our attention spans to shrink. Maybe. Or maybe the media doesn't cast the same spell it once did. After all, six minutes of a day spent watching a man in a chicken suit . . . that doesn't suggest inattention, but desperate boredom with mainstream entertainment options.
User-fee TV
As more and more entertainment seekers begin to take advantage of an already vast amount of freeTV episodes on the internet, the web will become the next dominant entertainment medium. But like the early history of TV, in order for this change to take hold a secure advertising model will have to be decided.
One possibility is to move away from the current "magazine concept" of TV advertising. Rather than advertising directly in the shows themselves, website providers (on behalf of studios) could charge a user fee to access TV on the internet.
The greedy mega-corporations might argue that a loss of advertising revenue will lead to a loss of quality programming. Sure. It's possible. But these are the same suits who brought you that wonderful hair-gel and frappuccino filled sit-com called Friends—a show that started out as mildly amusing and then degenerated over its ten seasons into some strange Seventies swinger party (minus any of the good stuff).
Consider that HBO, as the most successful form of commercial-free TV to date, has produced some of the best shows in recent memory such as The Sopranos, Deadwood, and (for those who can stomach the stench of martini-soaked designer clothes) Sex and the City.
The success of HBO alone proves that television could make a shift from a commercial-based economy to a paid user-base. I'd gladly cancel my network cable and shell out 10 or 15 dollars a month to access quality, commercial free TV episodes online.
In fact, just compare the intricate plot texture of shows like Deadwood with the rather formulaic time frames that even the best recent sit-coms such as 30-Rock and The Office have to tip-toe around. Escaping the current magazine format of inserting commercials between programs might just be the shot of newness needed in the entertainment business. That is, after the revolving door of reality TV finally snaps shut.
Walking TV heads
This would allow for a range of different ways for the media to expand from that box in your living room to TV on the internet, including free streaming TV episodes, watching TV episodes online, and loads of other free online TV content. In fact, within a few short years we could see TV producers launch law suits against internet providers as they catch on to the growing number of those who a watch TV episodes online for free. In the mean time websites like and will continue to be the leading contributors.
Future of Internet
This new media landscape, though, would require also a different way of inhabiting a new-plugged in world. In an interview on the Stanford talk-show Entitled Opinions, Vinton Cerf, the so-called father of the internet and vice president of Google, predicts that in the next year the biggest change to take place will be increased internet access—both in the devices we hold and environments around us.
The virtual world is not yet fully born. In fact, the internet, and entertainment that flies around in it, is about to get a whole lot more mobile.
Part Four. Can watching TV online implode capitalism?
Just as TV helped propel an economy of desire for more stuff into the consciousness of every brain on the planet, maybe watching TV online will make it crumble. Viewers will no longer have that stable center, that monolith broadcasting station—instead, they can tune at their own will into a TV wasteland of overlapping micro-brands and viral events.
As I am Canadian, my government requires every article on TV to mention Marshall McLuhan, Canada's most famous media prophet. This article series is almost finished, and I don't want to be dragged away during the night, so here it is.
McLuhan pointed out that every technology is an extension of some human quality (the shovel extends the hand; the microphone the voice and so on). If the stationary television set is an extension of our human need to congregate (around the primordial fire, the nuclear family living room), what will TV look like as the internet becomes more and more omnipresent, allowing us to plug in and watch streaming TV episodes online not only at home but everywhere? And if this new trend alters how TV advertising works, will it propel us towards a different type of economy?
After all, the mega-corporations depend on their nightly platform to peddle their glossy products to the masses. What will become of the evil mega-corporations such as Shell, Nike, and Oprah if the next generation doesn't even know who they are let alone the product they sell?
Will they die along with television? Maybe. Or, maybe the battle for your head will continue in a new arena: the web. Maybe the next great challenge will be to find a way to charge you for watching free TV episodes online. The battle continues.
Epilogist assault: how to win your head back.
My intent isn't to lament the decline of our culture into a giant feedback loop of attention grabs at our heads. We are being inundated with meaningless information, but no action needs to be taken. The medium will kill itself—the old ways of bombardment are already slowly dying. Each outdated method of communication feeding itself into a tired frenzy.
Media, technology, and other devices that often serve the interests of power will never command your attention—they ask for it and depend on your response for survival. To deprive something of its power, ignore it.