Billion-Dollar Kiss

by Jeffrey Stepakoff

  But I was also upset because the very day that Joe had been let go was the same day that my second episode of the show started production. Episode #9, entitled “The Rope,” featured an A-story in which the protagonist, Dennis, donates money to his old school only to find out that his gift will be used to build a new gym named after his nemesis, the gym teacher who tormented him throughout high school. The B-story was a love story that culminated in two of our characters kissing for the first time. People seemed to love the script. Mark-Paul, the show’s star, called me at home the night my script was published and thanked me. He was extremely complimentary, saying that he had spoken to all the actors and this was their favorite episode of the series. I’d never gotten a phone call like that before. I beamed, until I found out that my episode would not be shot as written. This was the beginning of the overhaul by the network. Several scenes were to be cut, and I was instructed to write one full day’s shooting worth of new material. Most of the A-story was thankfully left intact. The primary change was to be the removal of the penultimate moment of the entire episode, the kiss.

  The kiss I wrote was between our blond ingenue, Trudy, played by Cassidy Rae, and our dark, handsome, new series regular, Marcus, played by Chaka Forman. Cassidy was white. Chaka was black.

  African Americans were not exactly a new phenomenon on the WB. It must be remembered that the network began by exclusively programming black sitcoms. On Wednesday, January 11, 1995, the network offered its first night of television shows, with The Wayans Bros., The Parent ’Hood, Unhappily Ever After, and Muscle. WB CEO Jamie Kellner had previously worked with many of the actors and producers associated with these first shows when he was an executive at Fox, and he knew he could use this talent to find a niche market for the new netlet. But it wasn’t long before the network began branching out from its original audience. In August 1996 the network started programming Monday nights with 7th Heaven. But the real success would come a few months later on March 10, 1997, with Buffy. Although the network had captured a strong African American market with its ethnic sitcoms, and despite the relatively strong ratings (especially with families) for 7th Heaven, it would be Buffy that would define the network. After Buffy, the network’s identity came into clear focus. After Buffy, development would no longer be like the broadly targeted, diverse, hit-or-miss strategies over at ABC. The WB now knew exactly who it was, and it programmed accordingly. So when Dawson’s came its way during this pivotal time, the decision to pick it up was an easy one. When Dawson’s premiered, more than 6.8 million people watched, the network’s largest numbers yet, and the vast majority of them were the lucrative teen audience. Nine months later, in October 1998, Felicity aired and it was the same story, 7.1 million viewers. Although ABC won the night in overall viewers, Felicity ranked number one in its time period among teens 12 to 17, with a 20-share, and was through the roof among teenage girls, with a 33-share. By this point, the network’s brand image was a done deal. While Kellner’s former employers at Fox tried to expand their base beyond the 90210 and Melrose audiences with shows like Ally McBeal, the WB consolidated the teenage audience and by 1998 became the number-one network with that valuable hard-to-reach market.

  Although ABC and the other big nets continued to beat the WB in overall ratings, because the network was able to deliver the young audience most desired by marketers, the reality was that advertising rates on the WB were often higher than top-rated but older-skewing shows, like CBS’s 60 Minutes. The teen audience, along with the 18-to 34-year-old audience—the 12 to 34s—is prized by advertisers because they have disposable income and they try new products—actually, they want to try new products. They eat fast food, go to the movies, listen to music, consume soft drinks, and focus on the latest fashion. This is who most television is made for, quite simply because this is who most advertisers want. So even though 60 Minutes may have gotten great numbers, they were numbers of people who were spending the bulk of their money on gas bills, a mortgage, and expenses not paid for by Medicare—not a particularly useful group for most marketers. In 1999, during Dawson’s third season, NBC lost 16 percent of its female 18 to 34 audience, whereas the WB was up almost 20 percent in that same demographic. In 1996, the netlet took in about $100 million at upfronts. By 1999, it took in well over half a billion dollars, about $600 million, in ad revenues. Clearly, the network was on to something.

  Anyone surfing their TV at this time knew without a doubt when they landed on the WB. You could watch a WB show and know within seconds what network was broadcasting it. No other broadcast network had been able to create such a strong brand. Unlike ABC, WB shows had a very specific look, sound, and sensibility. While the big three all went for images that emphasized their broad appeal to the American public at large, Kellner chose a frog as the network’s logo. Based on the 1955 Warner Brothers cartoon, Michigan J. Frog, it was fun, lighthearted, and most important, youthful. And unlike ABC, which was unable to live up to the promise of its hip image, the “Frog” shows did. Unlike the major networks who were clumsily defined by the shows they picked up, the WB exclusively picked up shows that fit its own definition. Unlike the big nets that really were nothing more than the sum of their parts, the WB had a rock-solid brand that actually meant something to its audience. You see, the WB had really become very much like what MTM once was, a producer with a clear vision for its own unique brand of programming—only the WB was a network, not a production company.

  By this time, all the networks were growing increasingly involved not just in programming but in the hands-on production of the shows in which they now had an interest. But the WB was often even more involved. And as the network became clearer about their brand, they became even more proactive in making sure their products conformed. By the time Hyperion rolled around, the WB was very clear about this. From music to story to casting, the WB made sure their flagship shows all had a consistent image. From vampires on Angel to aliens on Roswell to the nerds on Popular, everyone was young, fashionable, and hot. Even extras had to have a “WB-brand look.” Computer geek day-players on Hyperion who looked too authentically geeky or “too cool for the room” (the politically correct way to say “not good-looking enough”) were let go and replaced with WB-brand geeks, models wearing glasses and ill-fitting clothing. And attractiveness was not the only desirable trait of the brand look. Race was a significant factor as well.

  Although the actual slices of audience shares were much smaller than the major nets, the demographics on nearly all the WB shows were among those most sought by ad buyers. Mind you, I’m not talking about individual shows produced by a specialty shop like MTM, I’m talking about all the shows on an entire network. If there was one thing that was crystal clear about the entertainment and media industry at the start of the millennium, it was that diverse mass-appeal broadcasting was dead and “narrowcasting” was the wave of the future. The new model for television that the WB mastered became not just creating a good show that everyone will like, but creating a certain kind of show for a certain kind of audience and then letting that audience know precisely where they can find that show and others just like it.

  Probably the best way to fully understand how this manifests itself in TV is to look at the people who were hired to write it. If there is a dirty little secret in the TV business, this is it. It may not surprise most people to learn that TV writers are young, white males. But let me spell it out. According to the Hollywood Writers Report, the season right after Hyperion, 1998–99, the people who wrote television were 93 percent white, 74 percent male, and (in 1996–97) 83 percent younger than fifty.

  This has remained a stunningly consistent story since then. In the 2004–2005 season, the small group of people who created most of the content that drives the global media machine were 91 percent white, 73 percent male, and 82 percent younger than fifty. Of the 3,015 writers who worked in television that season, only 822 were women and only 287 were minorities, 5 percent African American, 2 percent Latino, 2 percent Asian
.

  But to really understand the true story, you have to look even deeper. Of those women and minorities who do work, most work at the bottom of the ladder. Of the 288 showrunners, only 17 percent were women and only 9 percent were minorities. The vast majority are staff writers and story editors.

  And if you dig even deeper, you will see that many, if not most, of these women and minorities who are working are not working on major broadcast network shows, but cable shows. They are not working on popular mainstream shows, but specialty programs placed in certain segregated timeslots. Women worked on female-themed shows with small audiences like Strong Medicine on Lifetime or Eve on UPN.

  The minorities who worked did so almost exclusively on minority-themed UPN shows like One on One, Second Time Around, and Cuts. In fact, seven of the top ten shows that employed the most minorities were UPN minority-themed sitcoms. Nearly half of all TV shows, 44.2 percent, did not employ any minority writers.

  How many black, Latino, or Asian writers were employed on WB shows during the 2004–2005 season?

  By 2004, after the WB’s original African American sitcoms were canceled, as far as I can tell, the network employed just one minority writer.

  And if you look at the 1999 season, when the minority-themed sitcoms were still on the air, Buffy; Angel; Felicity; Roswell; Popular; Jack and Jill; Zoe, Duncan, Jack & Jane; Young Americans; and Dawson’s Creek—the shows that the network vigilantly made sure conformed to their brand—employed exactly zero minority writers. The entire writing staffs on all of those shows were white.

  But the few remaining minority-themed sitcoms that were consolidated and programmed in blocks on Friday nights that season—The Steve Harvey Show, For Your Love, and The Jamie Foxx Show, employed twenty-two minorities. The staff of the latter was 100 percent minorities.

  When I was in high school, on several occasions, my friends and I drove from Atlanta to Charleston, South Carolina. There is a stretch of I-20 before you get to Augusta that takes you through some rural sections of Georgia where time pretty much stands still. I will never forget the experience of eating lunch in some of the establishments one finds along this corridor. Although racial segregation in public places was legally abolished in Georgia in 1964, the white folks and the black folks still sat in completely different sections of the restaurants in these places. I do not know why. My best guess is simply habit. As a customer, coming into one of these places, it was as clear as the color of your skin where you were to sit. For me, the image of those two groups, eating together but separately under the same roof, reminds me very much of the television business since the end of Fin-Syn. Women write women’s shows. Blacks write black shows. Broadcasters place these products where their targeted customers will find them, branding their shelf space accordingly.

  The more I worked in Hollywood the more I saw that the disparity between the general population and the people I worked with was nothing short of stunning. Fifty-one percent of Americans are female, but only 27 percent of TV writers are female. More than 30 percent of Americans are nonwhite, but only 9 percent of TV writers are nonwhite. Spanish is the second most popular language in this country. The number-one network evening news program in America—often ahead of ABC, CBS, and NBC—is Noticiero Univision, which is on the fifth-largest American network, Univision. More than 12 percent of Americans speak Spanish, yet only 2 percent of the people who write TV are Latinos. Although small L.A. communities, like Brentwood and Westwood and Malibu, which are heavily populated by above-the-line entertainment industry professionals, may look pretty white, the reality is that L.A.’s population is nearly half Hispanic. Even if you are riding in the back of a limo, you can’t get from Santa Monica Canyon to any of the major studios without noticing this. Yet the stories we tell are white stories written by white people and cast with white people.

  Now, while it’s tempting to accuse Hollywood of racism, in the generally agreed-upon sense of the word, this just isn’t the case. In fact, from my experience, nothing could be further from the truth.

  Despite the ongoing prevalence of white boys on staffs, the TV writers and executives I met, as a rule, are fervently liberal. Despite being in the top 1 percent of this country’s income bracket, these people militantly support the democratic agenda, including tax increases on the wealthy and especially expanded social programs. TV writers in particular are extremely vocal about their liberal causes. In fact, in one story room, I happen to know for a fact that one of the writers was actually a registered Republican. Gasp! Actually, this writer was a closet Republican who was nothing short of paranoid about keeping it that way. And I have to tell you, from what I saw, this was not a bad career decision. Perhaps with the notable exception of Donald Bellisario’s staffs, the Fox News–watching gentlemen who wrote JAG and such, nearly every TV writer and executive that I met was on mailing lists from Move On to Farm Aid, Greenpeace to the American Black Film Festival Awards. I can’t tell you how many times I agreed to sponsor someone running ten kilometers in support of something involving the breast. No, the more I worked on TV staffs the more it became perfectly clear to me that racism has nothing to do with how TV gets made. Quite simply, it’s all about money.

  No one likes to talk openly about this in Hollywood. But privately, they do. I participated in heated conversations about this topic around the story table, in commissaries, at dinner parties. I heard it discussed with great conviction, season after season, but nothing changes. The audience blames the networks. The networks blame the advertisers. The advertisers blame the audience. And in the middle of this endless cycle, writers just try to write shows that will get picked up and stay on the air.

  One of the reasons no one likes to talk about it openly is because it is such an emotionally charged topic. At a seminar for TV writers in 1994, David Milch explained that he felt it was hard for African Americans to write TV dramas because “when they wrote out of the complexities of their own experience…the result might be powerful and compelling as art but not commercially successful.” Although he was strictly trying to give an honest assessment of the situation for purely instructive purposes, The Washington Post ran an article, essentially accusing him of racism.

  Here’s the deal. The distasteful truth is that white audiences are worth more money than black audiences to advertisers. Even though racial minorities are clearly growing in size and affluence in this country, they are still not as desired by mainstream television networks. The average white person is believed to earn more money than the average black person (the NAACP supports this statistic), so the white person is more desired by an advertiser in the same way that a young person is more desired than an old person. Thus, a network that can deliver the more affluent viewer can charge a higher rate for his or her attention.

  “Market segmentation,” “narrowcasting,” and “branding” are all fashionable buzz words that essentially mean “find the money.” Thirty seconds of a seventeen-year-old white girl’s attention is worth more money than her mother’s, her father’s, her grandmother’s, her grandfather’s, and nearly all African Americans’. If a shampoo company can get that girl to try their product, they could very well have a customer for life. She is gold to them, and they will pay accordingly for access to her. For the corporations that control our media to put anything—social consciousness, public interest, producing quality TV simply for quality’s sake—above the pursuit of profit, would run counter to their clearly mandated, even legally required, charter.

  But here’s where it gets more complicated. Despite the fact that blacks earn less money as a rule and so therefore are worth less money to Madison Avenue, they also watch a lot more television. This means that they should be easier to entice to other types of programs, more diverse shows on more diverse networks. This would lead one to believe that more shows would be developed that would be inclusive to these loyal viewers. But instead, the opposite occurs. Blacks are directed to the handful of black shows. They are herded to black blocks of programmin
g. The same is done with older audiences, to a certain extent with women, and with other subsets of the market as well. And as television is no longer experienced in familial groups or watched with friends but increasingly downloaded onto a very personal two-inch screen, TV shows are increasingly being tailor-made for the highly specific audiences that buy it and the specialized hardware on which it can be watched. Ironically, in the post-McLuhan world, television seems to be destroying the very “global village” it not so long ago created. Instead of a “retribalization,” we are experiencing a detribalization.

  Whether it is the nature of human beings to huddle together with their own kind to hear stories exclusively about their own experiences, or whether network programmers are culpable for the phenomenon, I don’t know. But one thing’s for sure. As offensive as executives may find the situation on a personal, moral, and even creative level, it is not in the interest of an entertainment conglomerate to desegregate television. Knowing precisely where a certain audience is located is the defining principle, the defining achievement, really, of modern media buying. Programming effectively branded entertainment is the machinery that accomplishes this.

  When I was growing up in the seventies, blacks and whites watched the same shows. Programs like The Jeffersons, Diff’rent Strokes, Good Times, and Amen were not only popular hits, they were broadly popular. When black kids and white kids talked about last night’s TV shows at school, we had a shared experience. Not so long ago, we all drank from the same water cooler. A decade or so ago, black sitcoms written by black writers and airing strictly with other black sitcoms on a single night on an otherwise white network did not exist. Instead, we had shows like Cosby and A Different World, which were lead-ins for Cheers, the anchors of TV’s most popular night of programming. Where did these shows come from? Independent producers. In 2004–2005, 18 percent of the writers employed by Carsey-Werner, producer of Cosby and A Different World, as well as Roseanne, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Cybill, Grace Under Fire, Grounded for Life, and That ’70s Show, were minorities. Carsey-Werner was the last fully independent production company, squeezed out of the business in July 2005. Scott Collins of the Los Angeles Times said it perfectly: “Carsey-Werner basically became the equivalent of a mom-and-pop grocer in a Wal-Mart world.”