Word: networks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...thrill of victory. Critics complained that the coverage was uninspired, viewers groused about commercial overload, and ratings were a major disappointment. The prime- time audience averaged 16.9% of total households (compared with 23.2% for the 1984 Los Angeles Games), falling far short of projections and virtually wiping out the network's expected profits. So it came as a surprise last week when NBC took an Olympic high dive once again, spending a record $401 million for the TV rights to the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona...
With the audience for big network events dwindling, such lavish spending might seem foolhardy. But NBC executives were upbeat. The Games will begin in late July, they point out, when TV competition should be relatively light. (Because of the time difference, however, most events will be shown on tape rather than live.) What's more, NBC will recoup part of its investment by selling the rights for some events to cable. "We didn't go into this to lose money," said NBC president Robert Wright. Increasingly, in the high-stakes world of network TV, it just seems to work...
Explicit sex! Full frontal nudity! Rampant blood and gore! No, network TV still does not allow such things into the American home. But ABC, CBS and NBC have grabbed viewers' attention this fall with a surprising amount of racy material and have prompted new questions about whether network standards of "good taste" are starting to crumble...
This upsurge in openness has been linked by some critics to cutbacks in the network departments of standards and practices -- the censors who review shows and commercials for offensive (and potentially litigious) material. During the networks' recent wave of cost cutting, the ranks of these watchdogs were drastically reduced: from a peak of 75 to 80 per network during the 1970s to 35 to 40 today at ABC and fewer than 30 each...
...Network executives deny any cause-and-effect relationship between the staff cutbacks and greater permissiveness. True, standards-and-practices people no longer read every script or attend every taping. But shows are still vetted by program executives, who alert the censors to potential problems. "We changed the mechanism, but we did not change the standards," says Alan Gerson, who heads the remnants of NBC's standards division. Indeed, most of this fall's bolder shows were written and reviewed before most of the recent cutbacks...