Cultural Boundaries: Feedback to Producers Cultural patterns form boundaries within which both producers and

audiences for television make choices. Compare the United States, United Kingdom, and Brazil, for example. American television producers inherited from radio a set of political-economic boundaries, such as a commercial pat tern of broadcasting, private ownership of stations, groups of stations formed into three dominant commercial networks, not to mention factors outside radio, such as private commercial film studios that were poised to provide television programming. U.S. producers also inherited a set of genres from both radio and film that occupied a middle ground between the political

14 2 Chapter 6 economy of television, which favored certain kinds of entertainment and

information, and U.S. culture, which had favored themes, issues, and forms.

In general, as time elapses and television systems develop further, the relevance to local culture may give many kinds of local or national pro gramming an advantage. In a study of television in Brazil, Kottak ( 1 990)

observed,

Common to all mass culture successes, no matter what the country, the first requirement is that they fit the existing culture. They must be preadapted to their culture by virtue of cultural appropria teness [italics in the original] ). If

a product is to be a mass culture success, it must be immediately acceptable, understandable, familiar, and conducive to mass participation. (p. 43)

Two key theoretical approaches to the cultural boundaries placed on pro duction, export, and flow of television are the cultural discount and cultural proximity, which were developed in Chapter 4. Cultural discounts create a

barrier or boundary that may protect national, local, or regional program ming as it develops (Hoskins et al., 1 989). The idea of cultural proximity

(Straubhaar, 1 99 1 ), building on Pool ( 1977), is that audiences tend to pre fer programming that is closest or most proximate to their own culture. Understanding cultural proximity is crucial for understanding television pro

ducers. Moragas Spa et al. ( 1999) noted that proximity for television has to do with "a scene of shared experiences" between producers and recipients. It also provides a boundary that gives incentives to local producers to create local productions.

It is clear that the expectations of audiences form boundaries within which producers work. Audiences also provide specific feedback to specific pro ductions. Most countries have some kind of system for providing audience feedback to producers. The importance of such feedback is reinforced by the increasing redefinition of broadcast worldwide as a commercial enterprise. For commercial media markets to work, advertisers require evidence of how many people are reached by their ' ads. In response ratings research firms have developed, and commercial broadcasters have come to rely on ratings, both to sell their programming to advertisers and, internally, to guide their pro ducers to create programming that is easiest to sell to advertisers. This kind of feedback powerfully reinforces the constraints on producers placed by the structure and nature of commercial broadcasting, per se.

Audience expectations are a strong part of genre formation (Feuer, 1 992), as will be discussed more in Chapter 7. Audience preferences for local, national, or regional production can be a resource for would-be producers, creating a space in the programming marketplace for them. These preferences

Producing National Television, Glocal and Local 1 43

draw ratings that put advertising or other resources at a producer's disposal, as shown in the case study of Brazil later in this chapter. However, audience expectations of a genre production can also act as a limit on the producer, discouraging topics that break the mold of the genre. The Brazilian case of the telenovela, The Cattle King, cited below and in Chapter 8, provides a clear example of that; even when commercial production circumstances permitted

a scriptwriter to insert a strong political message, parts of the audience felt the strong political theme was too much at odds with their expectations of the melodramatic basics of a telenovela. Perhaps conditioned by earlier, more commercially melodramatic telenovela productions, some of the audience found the new piece too didactic and not melodramatic enough.

Cultural Boundaries: Feedback to Producers Cultural patterns form boundaries within which both producers and