Cultural Industry Producers To understand the most fundamental levels of resources and restraints, I

begin by reconsidering the political-economic structures within which both television producers and audiences work, watch, understand, and act. That structural context starts with the cultural industries in which television pro grams are created, programmed, and transmitted. The political economy of the cultural industries, described in detail in Chapter 3, also provides an

1 36 Chapter 6

essential critical basis for examining the process. However, specific produc ers create specific television programs within subtle structures of work. Also, both producers and viewers create and interpret programs within a common cultural context. Furthermore, people express themselves with unique sub jectivity or ideas.

Early cultural industry theorists, such as Horkheimer and Adorno (2001 ) did not think much about the specific actions o f the professional produc ers within television or other cultural industries. Implicitly, at least, they thought the particular producers had little autonomy. The perception was that the logic of the capitalist industrial system essentially predetermined what producers could do. In classic Marxist terms, they were part of an ide ological superstructure whose production or content reflects the ideological

interests of those who own and control the overall means of production (Williams, 1980).

In early versions of dependency theory, almost all national elites, whether in the economy, politics, or cultural industry, were seen as strongly linked to the economic interests of the core countries (dos Santos, 1 973). However,

people began to observe that media producers in developing countries had their own agency and interests, even though the structures they worked in could constrain and guide what they were able to do. For example, looking at Latin America, Salinas and Paldan ( 1 979) observed that cultural pro ducers developed their own interests, including conflicts of interest and ide ology, and did not necessarily follow the directions of those who owned or managed media or cultural industries.

Economic Boundaries on Television Genre and Program Development

Commercial broadcasting is subject to pressure from advertisers, as discussed in earlier chapters. So a principal question for assessing the rela

tive independence of television producers is the location and nature of the advertisers and commercially minded managers within the producers' own

company or network, who will push to make programming maximally advertisement-friendly and appealing to the demographics advertisers desire (Gitlin, 1 990).

In television, like film before it, demands for commercial success lead to the emergence and standardization of certain successful formulas. Schatz ( 1988) noted that early Hollywood experimentation soon settled into a pattern of standard formulas or genres for producing on an industrial scale

films that had the most predictable success with the audience. If both the

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production companies and the genre formulas are viewed as social struc tures, then Giddens ( 1984) would point out that structures both bound and enable the agency of those who act within them. More specifically, com mercial film studios and commercial television networks essentially require cultural producers to work within the boundaries of certain successful genres or formulas. However, within those structural boundaries, producers find not only constraints but resources (Giddens, 1984). Contrasting U.S. film studio formulas with the French notion of the film auteur as an artist, Andre Bazin ( 1 968) observed that "the (American) tradition of genres is a base of operations for creative freedom" (p. 1 54). The sense of his argument is that within the seemingly strict commercial formula imposed by studios, creative directors could manipulate the resources placed at their disposal by the studios' commercial success to achieve substantial artistic creativity. Clearly, however, the history of both American film studios and of other subsequent commercial producers of culture is full of cases in which artists or producers were hamstrung by imposed limits, along with cases in which great and memorable cultural pieces of film, television, and music have been produced within strict commercial boundaries of both industry and formula (Schatz, 1988).

Commercial television systems follow an institutional imperative to buy or create programming that can attract a certain size or type of audience the advertiser desires (Sinclair, 1 995 ) . As I will argue later, this can be best explained in complexity theory terms: these factors constitute a system of attractors (Urry, 2003 ) around commercial television, which tend to (re)pro duce certain kinds of television programming, both imports such as Dallas or Baywatch, and local adaptations of successful commercial formulas or genres such as soap operas, variety shows, action shows, and game shows (Cooper-Chen, 1 994; Oliveira, 1 993 ) . In this chapter, the enormous flow of genre ideas is discussed, and in Chapter 7, the more formalized flow of licensed television formats is described.

Economic considerations drive part of the key decision whether to import television programs or produce them locally. Moran ( 1998) asked, for exam ple, why some countries produce their own version of Wheel of Fortune whereas others import and dub the U.S. production? He observed that for some broadcasters, financial considerations are overwhelming, and they will tend to import U.S. programs, which are usually sold quite cheaply. However, this dubbed version remains foreign-it has American contestants, draws on American cultural knowledge, gives American prizes, and so on. It will also probably not do as well in the ratings as a local version would, so if producers can afford a local version, it will probably make more money

(Moran, 1 998 ) .

1 38 Chapter 6 Commercial genres tend to carry a strong systemic bias toward promoting

consumption of goods, both in general and in specific. One of the first major critical analyses of an imported commercial genre, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (Dorfman & Mattelart,

1975), pointed out that the contents were inclined toward teaching Disney comics' readers a consumer view of the world. Television game shows across

a number of countries usually emphasize prizes, another way to promote desire for prized objects (Cooper-Chen, 1 994). In Brazil, television networks early on decided to insert product placements, known in Brazil as merchan dizing, within the plots of programs (La Pastina, 2001 ; Ramos, 1 987). As a

result, prime-time programming showed poor immigrants in cities not only ways to use electronic banking but also the virtues of a specific bank where the lesson just happened to take place, as in the 1 990 Brazilian telenovela,

Tieta. This reflects both a general promotion of a certain kind of activity and the specific promotion of a certain bank for that activity.

Genres carry patterns or boundaries of restraint on certain kinds of themes. The pattern, the relatively consistent system and logic of commercial television, tends to place boundaries around its television production so that other kinds of programming, such as education, high culture, and extensive documentary production, are less likely to be produced than under non commercial systems, where other kinds of economic foundations may focus on other kinds of patterns. Oliveira ( 1 993) argued that in Brazil, for exam ple, the telenovela adaptation of the soap opera genre pattern did not raise issues that were discomfiting to the government, the station owners, or major advertisers. This corresponded to the criticism by Herman and McChesney ( 1 997) that commercial systems (and genres) often severely limit what can be debated in the public sphere, at least that aspect of the public sphere represented by the commercial media. Such limits, however, while real, are not complete or determinant. Brazilian telenovelas, to pick up that example, have criticized both local and national political bosses, raised eco logical concerns, and discussed issues of homelessness and landlessness

(La Pastina, 2004a). They did this within commercial constraints, clearly, and in some cases, specific themes, such as criticism of multinational com pany abuses, have been censored by broadcast firms under pressure from advertisers {Straubhaar, 1 9 8 8 ).

Do imported genres consistently determine or limit messages? Does the insertion of local content into a genre form that is (re)produced locally balance this determinism, and if so, how? I argue that imported genre forms impose fairly effective boundary limits on certain kinds of content and that certain kinds of patterns, such as underlying consumption messages, are

often replicated in local production. In a way, this may represent a form of

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media imperialism via genre, or genre imperialism, but it operates through the replication of patterns and boundaries, not with linear control or even predictability from the center of the global system to its edges in places like Brazil, or from one center of the system, such as the United States, to another, say Italy. To understand that process demands an awareness of the complex emergence of cultural patterns and boundaries, as well as the long, continuing process of the hybridization of imported genres or patterns with local cultures.

The global creation and flow of television genres and formats should be thought of as a complexly articulated, fluid process of hybridity whose inte grative effects do not simply eliminate cultural difference and diversity but rather provide the context for the production of new cultural forms marked by local specificity. In this respect, Ang ( 1 996) observed,

What becomes increasingly "globalized" is not so much concrete cultural contents, but, more importantly and more structurally, the parameters and infrastructure which determine the conditions of existence for local cultures. It can be understood, for example, as the dissemination of a limited set of eco nomic, political, ideological and pragmatic conventions and principles which govern and mould the accepted ways in which media production, circulation and consumption are organized throughout the modern world. (pp. 1 5 3-154)

I argue that genres are one of the principal sets of "pragmatic conventions and principles" of this flow of forms in television. I discuss their application

to local and national production in this chapter and to global and cultural linguistic or geocultural markets and spaces in the next chapter.

Material Versus Symbolic Boundaries

In the discussion of cultural boundaries on phenomena such as genre development, one is forced to address the relationship between the material and the symbolic. Complexity theory transcends this question by arguing that culture has both symbolic and material aspects, which are both impor tant. Complexity economist Brian Arthur ( 1990) drew a useful distinction between limits or boundaries that are resource based and those that are knowledge based.

Resource limits are somewhat more fixed by physical resource factors and wealth. Knowledge limits or factors are more open to increasing returns, and the number of people who can be included eventually is almost unlimited. However, patterns of knowledge limits become real-"this is the way we do things around here"-and can be become stable and hard to change.

1 40 Chapter 6 Genre forms are an interesting example of the binding power of a form

that is both cultural and material. Genres develop within material condi tions defined by political economy, network structures, work routines, and so on. They also are bounded and shaped by cultural parameters that develop from older genres in other media; for example, melodramatic tra

ditions in China versus Spain or England shape television soap operas that develop within those cultures. The idea of boundary conditions that limit the range of possibilities within nonlinear cultures helps us understand the

role of genre patterns as bounding and limiting but not as determinant.

A new imported television genre may bring powerful new patterns and mes sages into a culture but almost necessarily hybridizes with that which is local, even as it seems to impose new cultural patterns. Put another way,

a global pattern must be performed or produced locally (Moran, 2004), so it is theoretically fruitful to put complexity together with hybridity theory, which argues for the persistence of local cultural content even as it hybridizes with imported genre forms, changed institutional forms, and content elements.

Cultural Industry Producers To understand the most fundamental levels of resources and restraints, I