Prime Time
By Richard Zoglin
A group of TV executives from Eastern Europe confessed at a CNN conference last month that the newly freed TV channels in their countries have left viewers bored. The problem: too much news and not enough entertainment. Just another case where the former Soviet empire has a lot of catching up to do & with the West. In the jaded U.S., viewers are bored with entertainment and can't seem to get enough news.
At least, they can't get enough of the networks' prime-time news programs. CBS's venerable 60 Minutes, the closest thing to a perpetual-motion machine yet developed by network TV, is riding higher than ever as the most watched show on television. ABC's PrimeTime Live, after a rocky shakedown period, has emerged as a solid ratings success, while its older sibling, 20/20, is still going strong after 13 seasons. Back at CBS, 48 Hours (which departs from the newsmagazine format by focusing on one subject for an hour in cinema-verite fashion) has become a sleeper hit and has even generated a spin-off: Street Stories, which did well enough in four outings last month to win a renewal through the summer.
These shows are increasingly the forum of choice for headlinemakers. Democratic presidential contender Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary went on 60 Minutes to respond to charges of marital infidelity -- breaking their plans to appear on other news interview shows in order to ensure a bigger audience. Patricia Bowman, the woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of rape, shed her anonymity with Diane Sawyer on PrimeTime Live. Anita Hill appeared last week on 60 Minutes for her first TV interview since the Clarence Thomas hearings.
The boom shows no signs of slackening. NBC, the one network conspicuously left off the prime-time news bandwagon, will try again in late March with a new show, Dateline NBC, co-anchored by Jane Pauley and Stone Phillips. And ABC is currently assembling the staff for yet another news hour, which will compete head-to-head with 60 Minutes on Sunday nights, perhaps as early as this summer.
From the networks' standpoint, the shows make economic sense: they cost only half as much to produce as entertainment programs, and a successful one can run virtually forever. Viewers, for their part, may be turning to news out of exasperation with the sameness of network entertainment fare. Andrew Heyward, executive producer of 48 Hours, theorizes that short newsmagazine segments suit the habits of zap-happy viewers. "Unlike a drama show," he says, "you don't have to watch the whole hour to get something out of it." PrimeTime Live executive producer Richard Kaplan contends that people are "hungry for information," possibly because of the hard economic times. "Maybe there's a correlation between people's interest in what's going on and their own economic situation," he says.
But if viewers are starved for news, the prime-time fare provides a limited diet. Competing for an audience against shows like L.A. Law and Quantum Leap, these programs face demands that the nightly newscasts do not. A prime-time newsmagazine has no obligation to cover the "important" news; its goal is simply to win enough viewers to survive. Thus, these shows gravitate toward the same crowd-pleasing subjects: sex, crime, consumer rip-offs, health news, human-interest weepers. Important but more remote issues -- the budget deficit, education policy, the workings of Congress -- are either ignored or reduced to small-scale "people" stories. Only 60 Minutes pays much attention to foreign news.
More important for these shows is the "great get": that exclusive interview with the tabloid-press star of the week, from Marla Maples to Mike Tyson (rest assured, he'll turn up on one show or another once his rape trial is over). These shows compete fiercely for such interviews -- not just with one another but also with the daytime talk shows and syndicated magazine shows like A Current Affair. The journalistic result, however, is often skimpy. Ed Bradley's 60 Minutes interview with Anita Hill, for example, was surprisingly bland; he probed little into her personal life, and she said little that was new.
The producers of these shows deny any tilt toward tabloid subjects. "These are not sensational stories; these are stories in the headlines," says Victor Neufeld, executive producer of 20/20. Heyward admits there are some topics that the prime-time shows have a hard time doing. "But that's one reason the networks still need documentary units," he says. "There are some subjects that need to be done, damn the ratings, full speed ahead."
The rise of the magazine shows, of course, is a major reason why the full- length network documentary has all but disappeared. Yet their formats are flexible enough to accommodate the big stories on occasion. PrimeTime Live gave a full hour in December to a Ted Koppel report on Gorbachev's final hours in power, and 48 Hours last week ran a highly rated special report on the Kennedy assassination. It may not be the budget deficit, but it's a long jump from Quantum Leap.
With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York