The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (premiered September 8 @ 11.35/10.35) advance clips here

Dave Letterman retired, Stephen Colbert left The Colbert Report, and though no longer playing the role of Stephen Colbert, Stephen Colbert will now host (albeit without the Colbeard).

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see Antenna’s roundtable discussion here.

Life in Pieces (premiered September 21 @ 8.30/7.30) trailer here

At this point in the American family sitcom’s history, what new spin could one give it? CBS is banking on telling four independent stories from the same extended family each episode, with cast Dianne Wiest, James Brolin, Colin Hanks, Thomas Sadowski, and more.

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With Life in Pieces, CBS’s new vignette-based family comedy, I was hoping for Rashomon or Boomtown with a sense of humor: a family comedy with narrative overlap and distinct subjectivities through a sustained bit of storytelling. Instead creator Justin Adler gives something seemingly tailored to the assumed short attention spans of contemporary viewers. The 30-minute pilot includes 4 short, self-contained stories, three of which introduce the three adult children and the family matriarch and patriarch, and one that brought everyone together at a faux funeral/70^th birthday party. At 6 minutes per bit, the writers and actors have very little time to get anything moving or make us care. Sure, by the episode’s end we have a good idea of the who, what, and where, but the 4 parts pass so quickly, the viewer neither learns much about the individuals (who pretty much appear as gross stereotypes because of their lack of time to develop), nor has a reason to care about them. It reads a little bit as if Adler said, “hmm, I’ve done amnesia (Samantha Who?) and I’ve broken the 4^th wall (Better Off Ted), but I need a gimmick. Ooh, ooh, parallel stories!” The show could well pull together. It has strength in its cast: two-time Oscar winner Diane Wiest (Bullets Over Broadway, Hannah and Her Sisters) as the matriarch, James Brolin as the patriarch, and Colin Hanks (Orange County, Dexter, Fargo), Betsy Brandt (The Michael J. Fox Show, Breaking Bad), and Thomas Sadowski (The Newsroom, The Slap) as the grown kids. The pilot has some funny bits and ends with Brolin being rushed to a Jiffy Lube while locked in a casket. If it can figure out how to create cohesion between the bits, it might have some staying power. I mean, I give it points just for saying Jiffy Lube.

Kelly Kessler (DePaul University)’s work primarily engages with gender and genre in the American television and film, often as it relates to the musical.

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In the quest to replicate the success of ABC’s Modern Family, few attempts have felt as strained as CBS’ Life in Pieces. While copying much of the fabric of that series–an extended family of adult parents, siblings, spouses, lovers, and kids, albeit all thoroughly white and heterosexual this time–episodes are divided into four parts. While this could have been an interesting programming tactic, distilling plots to five-minute chunks between ad breaks, this show also airs earlier, yet goes raunchier. By halfway through the pilot we’d already endured painful riffs on post-birth vaginas and adolescent penises. It’s not that the ABC show doesn’t also go into that territory; it’s just that they do it much better, as winking farce, rather than as Seth MacFarlane on a bulldozer.

Some might be surprised that this is on CBS. But this material is squarely in the comfort zone of the network that’s relied on Two and a Half Men, Mike & Molly, The Big Bang Theory, The Rules of Engagement, and Two Broke Girls. A wrinkle this time is that the raunchy yuks are produced single-camera style, rather than via the usual multi-cam laugh-track machine. More shockingly, there’s formidable comic talent in front of that single camera: James Brolin, Dianne Weist, Colin Hanks, Betsy Brandt, Dan Bakkedahl, Zoe Lister Jones, and Jordan Peele. That’s a hell of a lineup, and it almost actually redeems it. The material is full of typical pilot shrillness and flop sweat, but the cast, pros all, gives it their best shot.

In an alternate universe, the same cast might have worked in a quieter, slyer, darker comedy. But since that’s not the flavor in Lorre-land, we’re stuck with this. And while it won’t grace my screen again, I won’t be surprised if it actually works exactly as it was designed.

Derek Kompare (Southern Methodist University) is the author of Rerun Nation (2005), CSI (2010), and many articles on television form and history.

Limitless (premiered September 22 @ 10/9) trailer here

Jake McDorman gets a pill from Bradley Cooper, reprising his role from the film of the same name, that gives him super intelligence (cause that’s Bradley Cooper’s gift to give, apparently) and perfect memory. Jennifer Carpenter plays the cop who tries to reel him in to help her and boss Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.

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Everyone wants something. But is there something everyone wants? There’s a whole lot of theory and a fair amount of experience that suggests not really. But, what the hell, it’s pilot season so Limitless is going to give it a shot.

NZT is a pill that makes you very smart. Apparently, being smart can get you things you want: money, women, a human liver.

Fair enough. But watching a chemically enhanced fictional character get the fictional things it fictionally wants is neither the stuff of great entertainment nor that of passable ratings. Imagine if Superman spent his time thinking up brilliant plans so that he didn’t have to fly.

Fortunately, that’s not what Limitless is about. It’s about a fantasy far bigger and more relatable. It dramatizes the same attraction that drives popular infatuations with big data and convinces young men to attend Pick Up seminars instead of just joining a gym or learning how to have a civil conversation.

It’s the tantalizing delusion that there really are answers to the messiest, most complex problems of human existence. That love only looks like an impossible Escher staircase because we haven’t seen it from all the angles. That getting rich is about plugging in the right variables in the right equations, not popping into existence at the right time in the right place. Hell, Bradley Cooper even shows up to remind us that death is the one puzzle that we can never truly solve, the one game we can never truly beat. Unless, of course, it isn’t.

Take the clear pill and find out. It’s what we all want.

Matt Sienkiewicz (Boston College) teaches and writes about global media, politics, and comedy.

Code Black (premieres September 30 @ 10/9) trailer here

Starring Marcia Gay Harden and Luiz Guzman lead the cast of this medical drama focusing on an overcrowded and understaffed ER in LA, and based on the 2013 documentary of the same name.

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My interest in Code Black has more to do with its production history than its logline—after the show’s table read, Maggie Grace (who is 31) left the series, and producers replaced her with the already-cast-in-another-role Marcia Gay Harden (who is 56). It makes for a fun counterfactual: how different would the show be if the residency director bossing around the new residents was much closer to them in age, and without the same sense of presence that Harden brings to the part?

It’s admittedly more interesting than the show itself, which is rarely bad—the exception being the d-bag male resident who seems drawn from a d-bag male resident catalog—but is operating in some very familiar spaces. While based on a documentary, the show feels closer to ER, distinctive primarily in the fact that it resists any single point-of-view in its pilot: we get various backstories (grieving mother starting a new career [Harden’s original role], golden boy, etc.) but the various residents end up all blurring together. And while the sheer volume of patients-of-the-week fits the show’s focus on the chaos of a “Code Black,” there comes a point where no single character or story or even moment feels like it sticks with you.

There’s nothing wrong with the storytelling engine in place here, and the casting switch has given the show a solidness that feels comforting in its own way (especially if you take this as a stealth spinoff of Harden’s character on Trophy Wife. But the “So what?” of the whole affair makes it difficult to recommend the show beyond a case study in how the ups and downs of TV development can dramatically reshape a series’ identity.

Myles McNutt (Old Dominion University) studies media industries and definitely paid more attention to the pilot’s casual violation of IRB protocol than your average viewer.

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Code Black, a term meaning an influx of patients without enough resources to treat them, is aptly named, for it was just as overcrowded with problems.* The first and most distracting was The Good Wife’s new wig, which we saw early in a tease for the premiere, that poor dear. Give back Johnny Depp’s toupee, CBS.

Unlike Grey’s Anatomy, there’s nothing glamorous about Angels Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles, a place so afflicted even its blue fluorescent lights cast a jaundice-yellow glow. The set is dirty, the walls all scuffed up, and the action plays on a constant background of dying people of color waiting hours for treatment while a troop of doctors fuss over a young white girl and her feelings. But before you write me off as a queen with a heart raisin, though normally an accurate assessment, hear me out: Weren’t we supposed to translate all these gritty aesthetics and the show’s own premise into a cultural criticism about race, class, gender, and the injustices of this country’s healthcare system? Because if so, what happened in the script, and why was it so hyperfocused instead on the female resident’s age?

There was remarkably little plot in this episode, and the patients moved in and out of importance so quickly, I failed to grasp onto someone to actually care about. It really did feel like video footage of an ER rather than a TV show, and yes, that could be simply symptomatic of it being a sweaty pilot, but it could also mean it will never explicitly address issues of race and class. Will they ever mention why this hospital is always in a code black? Maybe. Or maybe we’re just supposed to infer from it looking vaguely “inner-city.”

Of course an implied cultural critique is not helped here by centerpiece Marcia Gay Harden, a woman who plays roles so typically Hollywood glam and posh, she actually gets away with the name Gay. Look, I am normally all in for MGH, but I’m not here for another white savior show, and I feel some confidence she’s about to be blindsided, Sandra Bullock style. That’s if Code Black succeeds ratings-wise, which it might since Madam Secretary is somehow still a thing.

*I did enjoy the joke about the IRB, though. That was satisfying.

Taylor Cole Miller (University of Wisconsin-Madison) studies syndication and queer television.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (The CW, October 12 @ 8/7) trailer here

Because stalking is always an endearing premise for romance (?!), and because crazy women are the bread and butter of many a comedy (?!), this musical rom-com focuses on a woman who ten years after being dumped decides to move across the country to pursue her ex.

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From its opening scene, a flashback to the end of a short-lived romance at summer camp, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s humor relies upon gender disparities. While Rebecca imagines her first romantic and sexual relationship as a meaningful one, Josh does not. He suggests they “take a break,” to which Rebecca responds, “What? But I love you!” “And thanks for that,” Josh says, unmoved by thoughts of emotional attachment and long-term commitment.

With such an introduction, I settled in for a tedious rehash of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Set to music.

Thankfully, however, CEG quickly moves to problematize the differences between men and women. Rather than simply assuming an inherent binary gender division, it considers why women experience the world differently from men and sympathetically explores painful experiences common to many women.

By the end of the opening scene, the show has introduced viewers to anger at divorced and unloving parents, suicidal behavior, and talk of abortion. By the episode’s end, the show has expressed a host of feminist critiques. The sexist double-standard of beauty culture is depicted in a manner both humorous (woman struggles to put on Spanx) and graphic (full bikini wax results in blood splatters on the bathroom wall). The exploitation of women is figured through sex work and unfulfilling pink collar office work. And, perhaps most significantly, a woman’s unwavering romantic attachment to a man—the very premise of the show—is found to be untenable. When confronted with the accusation that she moved across the country for Josh, Rebecca counters with the absurdity of such a decision. “So you’re saying that I moved here from New York, and I left behind a job that would have paid me $545,000 a year for a guy who still skateboards?” she asks sarcastically, only to realize that she actually has. For a woman to sacrifice so much for a man is “crazy”—not as in a Beyoncé lyric celebrating the overwhelming effects of love but as in an actual mental health issue.

I may be taking it too easy on CEG. It puts racism and anti-Semitism on display but, at times, only to produce an uncomfortable situation. Mental illness is played for laughs, perhaps too uncritically. The show’s tone can be confusing, and musical interludes outlast their purpose. In spite of these problems, I’m curious to see how dark the show will get, how unappealing yet sympathetic (particularly to women viewers, I suspect) the main characters will get, and how many feminist-inflected jokes will make it to air. For these reasons, this strange and potentially disappointing show is worth watching.

Jennifer Clark (Fordham University)’s work in television studies tends to gender concerns both historical (women’s labor and role in production) and contemporary (representations of masculinity and anxiety).

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I want to like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend because it’s created and written by women, Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna, and directed by a woman, Joanna Kerns. I’d hoped that meant the series would engage a feminist sensibility in its humor (especially given Bloom’s history producing funny yet thoughtful videos). Raising my hopes, Entertainment Weekly compares the series to Portlandia and Flight of the Conchords, and calls it “an empowerment fantasy.” Going a step further, Time asserts that the show flips “the Bechdel Test on its head.”

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a great example of how passing the Bechdel Test doesn’t mean a media text is feminist. Bloom’s character, Rebecca Bunch, has spent much of her life miserably cramming down her own feelings, yet it’s hard to watch her leave her job as a respected lawyer to relocate to West Covina, California, chasing an ex-boyfriend she dated for two months at summer camp as a teenager. Rebecca needn’t become Alicia Florrick, but I wish she hadn’t spent the remainder of the pilot chasing after her long lost beau Josh to the exclusion of anything else. The one great moment in the episode is the musical number “Sexy Getting Ready Song.” Rebecca’s song describing her preparations to see Josh that evening is humorously interrupted when a rapper, who (presumably) enters the song to objectify the women dancing in Rebecca’s fantasy, expresses horror at what it takes women to get ready for men. He apologizes and walks off set, reemerging at the end of the episode to apologize to a list of women he had previously disrespected.

I loved these moments in the pilot, but believe that this humor is at odds (at least so far) with Rebecca’s character. At the end of the episode when I’d hoped she’d give up on Josh and move on, her co-worker Paula pledges to help her get Josh just as he texts to ask her to dinner. These two are going to have to talk about more than Josh to keep me watching!

Melissa A. Click (University of Missouri) studies media audiences and loves the fall TV season!

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When I first heard the premise of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, I immediately thought of Felicity, in which Keri Russell’s character moved to New York because a guy she’d had a crush on, but never spoken to, was attending college there. It was presented as only slightly crazy.

For Felicity, though, the choice was Stanford or the similarly prestigious University of New York. For Rebecca, it’s between $545,000 dollars a year in New York City vs. a bigoted boss in West Covina, where “People dine at Chez Applebee’s” and the beach is four hours away. She comes off deranged.

It’s the most original show this season—star Rachel Bloom parlayed YouTube videos into a co-writing gig—and yet still seems derivative. It’s like Glee, in the sense that the lead is a Jewish overachiever who sings and dances. Or maybe it’s more like Smash, because of the original songs, and the Broadway stars. Some songs had funny lyrics, but I never laughed out loud, except at the Simone de Beauvoir- referencing rapper.

Rebecca does not seem all that rootable so far, although she got more so when teamed up with the similarly crazy Paula. The notion that the last time she was happy was when she was 16, at summer camp, and that she’s trying to recapture that through the seemingly boring, aimless, Josh, is sad. So are allusions to a past suicide attempt. I get that we are in the age of anti-heroes, but this seems like it’s supposed to be a straight-up comedy, not even a dramedy like Orange is the New Black or Nurse Jackie are supposed to be. It’s hard to imagine how this holds up long term.

Cindy Conaway (SUNY Empire State College) writes about girls on teen dramas and dramedies.

Stephen Colbert’s Colbert Report is one of the more critically acclaimed shows in American television history, earning Colbert praise and awards for his satiric right-wing narcissist pundit character. So what happens when Stephen Colbert the person rests that character to take over The Late Show after years of David Letterman ruling late night? Antenna asked several experts on satiric and comic television to comment on his first week at the Ed Sullivan Theater in semi-roundtable fashion.

First, some quick introductions:

• Chuck Tryon (Fayateville State University) wrote for many years at his blog The Chutry Experiment on political television, and is author of the forthcoming Political TV.
• Dannagal Goldthwaite Young (University of Delaware) has published a humongous amount (yes, that’s the official term) on satire and political entertainment, and performs with ComedySportz Philly.
• Amber Day (Bryant University) is author of Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate.
• Nick Marx (Colorado State University) is co-editor of Saturday Night Live and American TV and is currently editing a reader on comedy studies.
• Geoffrey Baym (Temple University) is Professor Colbert himself, having written many of the canonical treatments of Colbert, and is author of From Cronkite to Colbert: The Evolution of Broadcast News.

Chuck Tryon:

For many of us who have spent the last decade relishing the sharply subversive political satire of The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert’s shift to Late Night with Stephen Colbert has prompted a wide array of questions: How would Colbert adapt his sly political commentary to the larger stage of a network show? How might he conduct interviews now that he is not playing a narcissistic pundit? And finally, how might his show rework the tropes of the late-night talk show for the YouTube age?

Many of these questions were answered almost immediately. Colbert’s debut sketch, in which he likened Trump jokes to eating Oreos was an inspired bit of political comedy, one that would have been at home—with slight tweaking—on The Colbert Report. But the segment also signaled a slight willingness to play with the form of late-night comedy. The sketch functioned much like a “cold-open” on Saturday Night Live and tapped into Colbert’s considerable skills as a comedic performer. Colbert has also made an effort to include guests outside of the Celebrity A-list, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, and in both cases, Colbert acknowledged the disruptiveness of their technological and business innovations, even while testing the limits of some of their business practices.

But the most noteworthy moment for me during the show’s first week was Colbert’s heartfelt interview with Vice President Joe Biden, in which Biden offered a disarming account of his grief for late son, Beau, while also explaining how his despair was making his decision about whether or not to run for President an even more difficult choice. Because we are accustomed to seeing Colbert playing his superficial persona, the sincere interactions between these two public figures was especially striking. It was—for me at least—a strikingly humane moment, one that used the late-night format to powerful effect by offering us a remarkably frank conversation not just about the grieving process but also about how his life experiences have affected his politics. It’s also the kind of interview that Colbert’s persona might have prevented him from doing in the past.

I know that some critics have complained that Colbert is not pushing the boundaries of the late-night format enough, that the show has not been more subversive. But many of these complaints focus too much on the broader generic formulae—the monologue, the sketch, and the interview—without looking at how Colbert is using these features to carve out a valuable niche that mixes political satire with thoughtful interviews. If Colbert’s satirical pundit was the political voice we needed in the Bush era, his sincere humorist may be the perspective we need in a post-Obama political climate, one that is dominated by the undeniable fakery and buffoonishness of Trumpism.

Dannagal Goldthwaite Young:  

For people only familiar with Colbert, the self-described “narcissistic conservative pundit,” from the persona he had adopted for 9 years on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, the Stephen Colbert who we met last week on The Late Show might seem like an entirely new person. Oddly enough, this person, this “new” person, the one who does a clown-like jig and a disco spin to the music of his house band; the one who lets his guests shine while he listens and heartily laughs at their stories; the one who takes off his comic mask to talk to the Vice President of the United States about death, grief, and suffering… this is the real Stephen Colbert.

Colbert was initially trained as a long-form improviser. He’s not a stand-up comedian. And while he is known for his work with Second City in Chicago, his introduction to improv goes beyond Second City style short-form, to long-form, truth-seeking improvisation. As an undergraduate, he performed at iO (ImprovOlympic) at the Annoyance Theater in Chicago under the great Del Close, with a focus on long-form improvisation that emphasized “Truth in Comedy” (a philosophy of improv that Close expanded upon in a co-authored text by the same name).

Long-form improvisation involves the construction of a new reality within a set structure, often, The Harold structure. The Harold facilitates the development of characters and relationships onstage, and encourages players to think beyond his or her own character or scene. The Harold involves 1) a group “opening,” 2) three separate scenes, 3) a group game, unrelated to the scenes, 4) a second set of scenes offered to heighten the first set of three, 5) another group game, and 6) a final set of scenes to unify and resolve plot points from the earlier scenes. Within that structure, relationships emerge, narratives are constructed, characters are heightened and secrets are often revealed. But the beautiful – almost magical – element of the Harold is the third set of scenes that unite the characters and plots from the initial seemingly unrelated scenes.

To do this requires emotional honesty onstage. It also requires patience, listening, and a true spirit of “yes, and…,” which, in the world of improv simply means accepting your scene-partner’s offer and building upon it to further the scene and heighten the reality that you jointly construct. Stand-up comedy – the genre of comedy from which many late-night hosts emerge (Jay Leno and Dave Letterman, specifically) is focused mostly on the self – and the audience, to the extent that the audience furthers the energy of the comic.

Short-form improv comedy, the genre performed by ComedySportz and TheatreSports (and used by Second City in the brainstorming and development of sketches), involves improvisation, often within the context of a game structure with a gimmick that shapes the nature of the comic sensibilities that result. This shorter, game-based genre of improv taps into some of the same philosophies as long-form, but the gimmicks and time constraints can encourage more self-focused play, and can limit the kind of “collaborative discoveries” that happen through long-form.

It is the honesty – the truth in comedy – that I think are striking in the way that Colbert is approaching his new show. In the monologue of his second show, when he told the story of how the premier had gone so over time that CBS wasn’t sure if it would make it to the air – you got the sense that Colbert was sharing an honest moment of performer panic with us – the audience at home. Even in the way he interacts with his house band, John Batiste and Stay Human, it is with the spirit of deference and collaboration so typical of improv work.

And in no place can we see his improv roots more clearly than in how Colbert conducts his guest interviews. While some late-night hosts might mug for the camera or be focused on the next question while the guest answers the first, Colbert is present in the moment, responding to the “offer” given by the guest, and heightening the “scene” either emotionally or comically. It is not an accident that Biden opened up to Colbert as he did.

Just as is true of the comic structure of The Harold, Colbert’s show can be thought of as a new long-form comic structure in which “relationships emerge, narratives are constructed, characters are heightened and secrets are revealed.” I can’t wait to see what unfolds in the next scene.

Amber Day:

I will admit that I have never been a fan of traditional late-night shows, so when Colbert announced his impending move to the CBS slot, I worried that he and I might be parting ways. I am happy to report, however, that I have been buoyed by much of the material emerging from these early episodes and I anticipate that the program will hold onto its real estate on my DVR. My relief does not stem from Colbert’s intervention in the form. As Chuck points out, he hews to the well-established formula for late-night programs fairly closely. But what he brings to the format are all of the prodigious strengths he spent years honing on The Colbert Report.

In fact, I would argue that his persona as host of The Late Show is remarkably similar to that of The Colbert Report. This is because, even when playing a blowhard conservative pundit, Colbert was always able to winkingly allow his real self to shine through. It was never difficult to discern what his own opinion was on a particular issue, as he used his character to either tear open inconsistencies and hypocrisies, or to allow a guest he respected to put her best foot forward. His giddy exuberance was also never far from the surface. And, as Danna explains, it is his training in improvisation which allowed him to hold it all together, expertly responding to an interviewee’s statements while maintaining his character.

Thus far on The Late Show, the strongest segments have been the monologues in which Colbert made use of his keen satirist’s voice and the interviews in which he has drawn on his own interest and engagement with the guest’s work. The least interesting bits, in my opinion, have been those that were scripted to appear spontaneous – such as some forced repartee with the band, or pre-scripted goofy interludes like the one in which a tennis champion lobbed balls at the host (which just looked like it hurt). On the other hand, when Colbert seemed to be enjoying the moment, eagerly collaborating with Stephen King on a hypothetical horror plot involving thinly veiled references to Donald Trump, or dancing wildly to a Paul Simon song, it was hard not to get vicariously caught in the enthusiasm.

Ultimately, it is the personality of the host that sets the tone for individual late night programs and is likely the element that most strongly attracts or repels viewers. My enjoyment in the show is partially determined by the fact that when Colbert makes lewd jokes, they don’t come in the form of a “va va voom” directed at female guests (a la David Letterman). Rather, they consist of self-deprecating humor about his lack of underwear, or veer toward gentle gross-out jibes directed at figures like Donald Trump (whose carpet presumably does not match the drapes).  Colbert’ s personality as someone who is intellectually curious, quick-witted, open-hearted, and hyper-sensitive to hypocrisies is what carried the last show and likewise what will carry this one.

Nick Marx:

I’ll temper the hotness of this take by saying that it’s early, and although the Colbert Late Show hasn’t been great in its first two weeks, I’m certain it will be eventually. The Colbert Report was our most important satirical documentation of Bush-era economic and cultural policy, so I’m hopeful The Late Show can rekindle some of that critical edge, if only to counterbalance Fallon’s pandering. Colbert the Late Show host is much more Ernie Kovacs than David Letterman, though, so he’s unlikely to hold up the same cracked mirror to celebrity culture that Dave did. Instead, early episodes indicate that his primary target will be television itself, whatever we all disagree that is nowadays.

The Late Show is mercifully light on monologue and quickly moves Colbert behind a desk so that he can talk politics. These segments have been funny (e.g. the Oreo bit), if a little transparent in their network-notey-ness to keep it up with the Trump talk. Colbert’s real venue for innovation seems like it could come in the interview segments, where (as Danna notes), Colbert’s improv training looms large, an approach the comedian mentioned many times in the run up to this fall. If the explosion of interview-based comedy podcasts is any indication, there remains an appetite for inventive and unpredictable exchanges between two humans talking to one another. Colbert highlighted one end of his emotional range in last week’s Biden appearance, and one has to wonder where else he can go with game guests who discard their promotional boilerplate and follow Colbert down the “yes, and” rabbit hole.

There are no shortage of challenges facing The Late Show, but of all the men (and only men, as Vanity Fair reminds us) recently with skin in the late night game, Colbert has to be the odds-on favorite to be both funny on a nightly basis and memorable in the long run.

Geoffrey Baym:

Over the first two weeks of Colbert’s Late Show, the underlying theme, or ethos, of the program has become increasingly clear. There were several hints, even on the first night. They were more subtle than the thesis statement Colbert offered on “truthiness” on that first Colbert Report a decade ago (“anyone can read the news to you,” he proclaimed. “I promise to feel the news at you”). On the Late Show, however, the clues have come in bits and pieces. Take the house band’s name, for example: “Stay Human.” Or the musical act the first night, a star-studded performance of the old Sly and the Family Stone hymn “Everyday People.” Or the provocative question Colbert asked Jeb Bush about whether he had any real political differences with his elder brother George, a question that began as an ode to the bonds of family and a proclamation for Colbert’s love for his own brother (who was there in the audience and mouthed “I love you” in reply).

We saw it again two nights later in the remarkable interview with Joe Biden, which, as my colleagues here have noted, offered an unprecedented kind of emotional authenticity – a deep, tender, and serious exploration of tragedy, loss, and perseverance. Before the conversation turned to the recent death of Biden’s son, however, Colbert introduced Biden by proclaiming: “You’re not a politician who has created some sort of facade to get something out of us, or triangulate your political position or emotional state to try to make us feel a certain way.  … How did you maintain your soul,” he asked, “in a city that is so full of people that are trying to lie to us in subtle ways?” Later, as Biden openly pondered his own emotional strength in the face of a possible presidential run, the band (Stay Human) broke again into a riff from “Everyday People.”

And we’ve seen it on every show since then. We saw it in the interview with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who discussed the hardship of his childhood in war-ravaged South Korea. We saw it in the less emotional, but powerfully authentic conversation with Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who spoke quite honestly about the actual workings of the Supreme Court – the unguarded moments never available to public view when the nine justices sit together and discuss the case at hand. Despite the ideological differences, Breyer explains, there is “never a voice raised in anger” and no one is ever “insulting, not even as a joke.”

We saw it in Colbert’s praise for Bernie Sanders as “incredibly authentic,” because no “focus group in the world” would ask for a candidate like him. We’ve seen it throughout the first two weeks in Colbert’s recurrent digs at Donald Trump, which return continually to Trump’s hollow performance of politics (what Chuck here calls his “undeniable fakery”), his self-evident nastiness, and his deep lack of reasonableness. Finally, we saw it in Colbert’s set up for his bit with Carol Burnett, in which he explains that he usually appears on stage before taping begins to take questions from the audience. That, he ironically suggests (and irony most certainly remains a core device for this iteration of Colbert), is intended to “humanize” him, and “it is important to maintain the illusion that I am human.”

I’m not certain that any of this is the “real” Colbert. Or rather, I’m not sure it matters. What does matter is that Colbert is constructing a deeply humane televisual space. It may lack the cutting sharpness of his ironic interrogation of political spectacle, but it no less provides a momentary antidote to a political landscape and media environment so deeply scarred by simulacrum and spin.

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Post by Lauren Bratslavsky, Illinois State University

“You’re early. There’s an episode… houseguest arrives early and I’m unprepared.” Peg Lynch’s voice trailed off as she opened the door to let me in. At the time, she was 94 and still mentally composing episode plots for the long-ago radio and television program she created, Ethel and Albert. It was a show about nothing really: a miswritten phone message, a broken light bulb, a failed dinner party, and so on. I stumbled across her show when I was poking around my university’s special collections. I read some Ethel and Albert scripts and was amused. I researched what I could about the show, but was disappointed at the overall lack of information. I learned from the archivist that Lynch was still alive. I nervously called her up and asked her some questions about what it was like to work in radio and television, especially as a woman. Lynch didn’t think it was that special, or why anyone would care about her experience in the business, but she invited me to her home to meet her. I later learned this was one of her endearing attributes – that is, inviting people to her home and treating them lovingly as long lost relatives.

I was a bit stunned to see Peg Lynch’s obituary more than a week ago in The New York Times. I knew that her health had taken a turn for the worse and that this may have been the 98-year-old woman’s last leg. What surprised me was the fact of the obituary itself, which led to obituaries in Variety, LA Times, and elsewhere. It was not that Lynch didn’t deserve the lengthy write-ups and accolades of her work in radio and television; she was long over due for such recognition. I was amazed that her little-known career was finally gaining notice. For a few years now, I’ve queried radio fans and television historians whether they’ve heard of Ethel and Albert, which gained a nation-wide audience in 1944 to 1950, then a television audience from 1950 to 1956, and back to radio until the 1970s. For some, the characters rang a bell, but very few clearly recognized the show or Peg Lynch.

To be fair, there are many radio and early television programs that are obscure, and indeed unmemorable. What makes Ethel and Albert, and the later radio incarnation, The Couple Next Door, remarkable is that Peg Lynch created the show and wrote every single episode by herself and starred in both the radio and television versions. The only analog to Lynch’s creator-writer-actor career was Gertrude Berg. Berg’s career is well documented in the history books and broadcasting lore, most likely in part due to the notoriety associated with the blacklist as well as awards, as noted in her obituary. Lynch’s work, never touched by controversy or industry awards, became just one of the thousands of entries in program encyclopedias. Without mechanisms such as television syndication or lasting celebrity status, like that of Lucille Ball or Betty White, Lynch fell further into obscurity. Had it not been for an email sent by Astrid King, Lynch’s daughter, the New York Times most likely would not have picked up on the news of her passing. And then, write-ups of Peg Lynch, “a pioneering woman in broadcast entertainment,” would not have circulated as it did.

A page from Peg Lynch’s scrapbook, posted to her Facebook page.

Why is Peg Lynch’s career significant for radio and television history? While obituaries frame her as a pioneer, I think a more apt description is that she persevered in an industry that was constantly changing and predominately male. As outlined in her obituary and in far greater detail on her website, Peg started in radio as a copywriter in the early 1930s at a local, small-town radio station in Minnesota. When she asked for a raise that reflected her many responsibilities, which included such tasks as writing ad copy and a daily women’s program, she was denied. She quit and continued to work in different radio stations, making her way out of the Midwest and to New York City. All the while, she held on to her creation, Ethel and Albert, a middle-aged married couple who were known for their gentle and realistic bickering. She first pitched Ethel and Albert to NBC in 1944, who made her an offer but wanted 50/50 ownership over the rights of the show. Lynch walked way. Instead, Lynch secured a network deal around the time NBC-Blue turned into the ABC network. Someone at WJZ (NBC-Blue/ABC’s flagship station) got a hold of Lynch, offered her an evening slot and allowed her to retain full ownership. Ethel and Albert was not sponsored by one company, but rather was part of the co-op model of radio sponsorship. In 1946, Ethel and Albert was a short-lived test case for television at WRGB, GE’s experimental studio. Ethel and Albert remained on the radio until 1950, when Lynch was offered a real television opportunity: a ten-minute recurring segment on NBC’s The Kate Smith Hour. First, in 1953, NBC had Lynch turn her popular ten-minute segment into a half-hour network sitcom, sponsored by Sunbeam. Sunbeam dropped the live sitcom in favor of a different genre, the spectacular (as chronicled in Variety). CBS then picked up Ethel and Albert, sponsored by Maxwell House, as a summer replacement for December Bride in 1955 (an awkward promo for the switch over is on YouTube).

Despite decent ratings, CBS did not continue working with Lynch. I suspect this decision had something to do with I Love Lucy and CBS not wanting to have two programs featuring bickering couples, even if Ethel and Albert were far more subdued and realistic than Lucy and Desi. ABC aired Ethel and Albert’s final television run, which was sponsored by Ralston Purina (Chex cereal and dog food). The show ended in 1956, at another transition moment when sitcom production moved from New York to Hollywood and from live to film. As Lynch recounted in her oral history (available through the University of Oregon’s Special Collections), there was talk of moving the show to Hollywood, but she preferred to stay on the East Coast. And really, she was tired of the weekly pressures to write new episodes while rehearsing and performing live. After television, she did some commercial work. Oddly enough, Lynch went back to radio, penning a near-copy of her original creation but under the title, The Couple Next Door for CBS Radio. Lynch had a couple more runs on the radio in the 1960s and 1970s, specifically on NBC’s Monitor and then NPR’s Earplay. With the last radio show in 1976, titled The Little Things in Life, Lynch’s long broadcast career ended.

The story of Peg Lynch can serve as a sort of public service announcement to those of us who toil in archives and seek out broadcast history’s margins. Two points in particular come to mind: the materiality of broadcast’s forgotten histories and the active role we play in shaping the use and availability of the material record. First, echoing Laura LaPlaca’s recent Antenna post, if we focus on all that is gone (and resign to the fact of this lack), then we overlook “the broadcast archive’s extraordinarily expansive physicality.” Lynch’s creative output is indeed physically available, even if mentions and critiques of her work are largely absent from our histories. The initial radio and television broadcasts were ephemeral in the sense that they were live broadcasts, moments of popular culture that began and ended in their programmed time slots. But there is a whole swath of materiality that exists in various forms and locations. There are the paper materials that Lynch saved throughout her career: scripts, letters, and a few other paper materials. Lynch’s mother compiled news clippings, photos, and various correspondence into scrapbooks. Decades after the height of her career, Lynch received an invitation to establish an archival collection at the University of Oregon in 1969 (how and why that happened is a whole other story), so all those scripts, scrapbooks, and paperwork are open for research (and soon, there will be more).

Throughout the 1970s and well into the 2000s, the physical meetings and tape-swapping of old time radio fans sustained the memory and the audio record of Ethel and Albert and The Couple Next Door. The fan conventions seem especially crucial in the age before the internet, as in, a time before old time radio websites posted shows and interviews. The conventions, and later on, the fan websites, fostered networks of old and new fans (Lynch loved her fans and her fans loved her). Even more material records exist now that we can search databases of digitized trade publications (like this article in Radio and TV Monitor, written by Lynch about the benefits of marital bickering, that is available on Lantern). References to the production side of Ethel and Albert certainly exist in the vast NBC corporate archives. The audio tapes exist in physical form and circulate digitally on the web. And the live television program? Those exists, too. Nearly every episode was filmed on a kinescope, which Lynch owned and now safely reside at the University of Oregon.

Which brings me to my second point: As radio and television scholars, we participate in recirculating the canon as well as seeking out new examples that corroborate or challenge existing histories. Just the very act of taking an interest in a little-known program or writer can help broaden the scope of broadcast histories or refine particular stories, such as the case of a little-known woman who was among the very few people to create, write, and star in her own show. The Peg Lynch Papers at the University of Oregon had been mostly dormant since they arrived decades ago. The archivists had various priorities in their immediate purview – the limited resources in such an institution necessarily limits which donors to follow up with in their twilight years. Thus, active interest from a faculty member or a researcher can help call greater attention to little-used or little-known collections, especially those collections whose creators are still alive. Those kinescopes of every episode? Up until two years ago, those were under Lynch’s couch and in cabinets in her home. After my first visit to Lynch’s home, I told the archivists about my visit, including the films and the fact that Lynch was still relatively lucid and had stories to tell. I’m sure that those kinescopes, as well as more papers, audio tapes, and ephemera would have made it to Oregon, thus joining the rest of Lynch’s collection. But the oral history? The personal relationships? The chance to participate in a collective nudge to ensure the preservation of a so-called ephemeral broadcast history? That probably would not have happened without some active participation and good old phone calls.

We can celebrate all that has survived, while prodding to discover what else exists. And we can continue to draw from the canon, while interrogating the wealth of materials that exists in the hopes of broadening and refining our histories. So long, Peg.

Post by Bradley Schauer, University of Arizona

Much of the press coverage of David Letterman’s retirement has framed it as the end of an era. According to this account, the traditional late night talk show – pioneered by Steve Allen in the ’50s, brought to its classical peak by Johnny Carson, and reaching its creative apex with Letterman’s baroque, ironic approach beginning in 1982 – has been rendered obsolete by a new emphasis on social media and viral videos. Even Letterman himself recently admitted that his show’s failure to embrace YouTube and Twitter was a problem: “What I’m doing is not what you want at 11:30 anymore… I hear about things going viral, and I think, ‘How do you do that?’”

Letterman in a suit of velcro, 1984.

On one hand, the differences between Letterman’s show and those of his youthful competitors are overstated. Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, and the rest still adhere closely to the traditional late night formula: monologue, desk piece, two guests and a musical act. And Letterman, particularly in the first 2/3 of his career, specialized in short remote videos (Dave works the Burger King drive-thru) and spectacle (Dave wears a Velcro suit) that would have lent themselves to online distribution. Much of Letterman’s declining ratings with young viewers can be simply attributed to his age: a 68-year-old who makes jokes about the Andrews Sisters and Lorne Greene is never going to win the 18-49 demo.

On the other hand, Fallon’s YouTube clips do receive exponentially greater hits than Letterman’s, and it is due to more than Fallon’s aw-shucks charm. Letterman’s inability to go viral is a byproduct of his unique approach to the talk show format, one rooted in traditional modes of viewership. Whereas the newer shows’ short, self-contained segments are constructed for easy accessibility and viral distribution, Letterman rewarded the dedicated viewer. It was not only funnier if you watched the entire program, it was funnier if you watched every night. Strange jokes that were barely funny on their own became hilarious as they were repeated, out of context, across an episode and for weeks afterwards. In this way, Letterman’s show was truly cult television, creating an insular community of viewers that prided themselves on their separation from the mainstream. It was no surprise (except apparently to Letterman) when the more accessible Jay Leno began beating him in the ratings after the honeymoon period of the mid-‘90s.

Along the same lines, Letterman’s funniest moments were rarely as funny when decontextualized from the show’s offbeat comic sensibility. More than anti-comedy, Letterman’s humor is typically a blend of two contradictory impulses: irony and sincere pleasure in the mundane. The purest example is “Will It Float?”, the recurring segment in which Letterman and Paul Shaffer would earnestly debate whether or not an item would float before two models threw it into a tank of water. The audience enjoys the overblown, ironic trappings associated with the skit (including a theme song and a hula-hoop dancer), but is also encouraged to take genuine pleasure in the question of whether or not the item will, in fact, float. Letterman satirizes the entertainment industry by valorizing the trivial. But the mundane does not make for effective YouTube clips – Stupid Pet Tricks can’t possibly compete when put up against the entire internet.

The newer shows’ heightened emphasis on celebrity guests is another important distinction. The usual observations about Fallon’s obsequiousness vs. Letterman’s disdain for modern Hollywood celebrity culture seem roughly accurate. The key difference, though, was that Letterman was the undisputed star of his show, his personality and sense of humor dominating and permeating every aspect. Fallon and the rest follow Leno’s example, acting as genial emcees who each night willingly take a backseat to their guests. And while Letterman was rarely as severe to guests as his reputation would indicate, it was usually clear whether or not he was interested in what they had to say. If he was, the interview had the potential to become a genuine conversation that revealed more of the guest than the faux-spontaneity of Fallon’s parlor games or James Corden’s skits.

On the set of NBC’s “Late Night with David Letterman,” 1982.

Letterman’s show at its best had a loose, improvisational quality that hearkened back to Steve Allen more than to Carson. Especially during the low production values of the NBC years, it was as though Letterman were hosting the funniest public access show of all time. He was unafraid to use a sense of duration as comic fodder: for instance, cold-calling a CBS executive and then waiting over a minute in awkward silence for the secretary to see if he was available. As the years went by, and Letterman stopped attending rehearsal, the spontaneity only increased, with the host showcasing his gift for language in rambling shaggy dog stories told at his desk. (In his excellent show, Craig Ferguson would take these qualities to their extreme, ensuring that he would never be considered for the 11:30 slot.) Again, this type of humor does not work when reduced to internet clips where viewers demand instant gratification.

The outlook for late night talk shows is grim, with ratings only about half of what they were 15 years ago. I remember my students in 2010 vehemently supporting “Team Coco” during Conan O’Brien’s ouster from The Tonight Show, only to admit that none of them actually watched the show, but knew O’Brien entirely from YouTube clips and Twitter. Networks seem to value YouTube hits, but it has never been clear exactly how they are monetized in any substantial way. Taking into account the fragmentation of the post-network era, and the relative interchangeability of this new generation of late night hosts, it seems as though David Letterman’s legacy will be as the last real star of late night television, and, in all likelihood, as one of the last great American broadcasters. If there is a new David Letterman out there, his or her type of comedy will not find a welcome home on network television.

MADAM SECRETARY [Premiered Sept 21, 2014]

Tea Leoni stars as a CIA Analyst turned university professor who’s called into service following the tragic death of the previous Secretary of State.

*

Taylor Cole Miller, University of Wisconsin-Madison

There’s an interesting dynamic happening on television right now where representations of “female empowerment” are becoming ever-tied to politics and to place. Not since the days of Wonder Woman and Murphy Brown have shows with female leads been so discursively tied to Washington, D.C.: Homeland, Veep, The Blacklist, House of Cards, and Scandal (maybe even The Americans?). If one believes “the trolls,” then optimistically, this trend suggests Hollywood wants more women in politics and more women in positions of power, mostly, trolls argue, because of Hillary Clinton. Indeed, in a cursory “study” online, many commenters suggest Madam Secretary is oozing with deference to Clinton, but is it? With the exception of The Americans, most of these protagonists’ actual political views are clouded, or purposefully eliminated from the shows’ premise and we are left wondering, “Republican? Or Democrat?”

Pessimistically, Madam Secretary is a “lean-in” drama where powerful women learn to “juggle it all” and a corrective to female politicians who got it wrong. It actually seems diametrically opposed to a Clinton reading, given how often the show does intentionally evacuate Elizabeth McCord’s (Téa Leoni) political views (PhD/professors of history are usually pretty apolitical, right?). Meanwhile, a lot of the cultural politics the show allows Leoni to perform are heavily normed for a CBS audience, meaning there are some not-great moments with regard to race and gender.

Political criticisms aside, it’s hard for me not to love Leoni, generally. And I think she’s smartly cast in the role. Mostly, it’s that Leoni doesn’t overdo it. McCord is confident and cool; she’s a professor; there’s potential for a long and dark history as an agent; she points out gender a lot; and I’m pretty sure she has a gay male secretary, and an anarchist gay son. I do cringe at the thought that they’re going to Clinton-ify McCord’s husband though, to keep the family portion of the show equally dramatic (“Why no more weeknight sex? Am I too masculine?” she asks). Whether it’s that he’ll become a cheater or a foreign spy, OR GAY, he already gives me anxiety. Either way, if CBS would stop messing with its schedule for the sake of football, I absolutely think Madam Secretary will be picked up, and I’m game to keep watching.

As an aside, I wish shows like The Talk would stop selling their appearances to fictional series, given how they always get thrown under the bus as “media [women] focusing on the wrong thing” – in this case, fashion.

*

Matt Sienkiewicz, Boston College

It is night in Damascus.  Well, dusk.  The point is that it is dark.  Not so dark that the scene must be lit, but pretty dark.  Dark enough to make it clear that Damascus is Dark.

And it is day in Virginia.  Actually, it’s better than just day.  It’s the best part of the day.  The part after work and after class but before it gets dark.  The part when responsibilities have been addressed but before possibilities have been retired.  When it’s still light.

This is the opening crosscut of Madam Secretary and, given time zone differences, there is some narrative plausibility to it.  However, the show’s shorthand is meant to portray much more than temporal relations.

Damascus is a mosque and a cell where two Americans have been kidnapped— idealistic boys on a vacation gone bad, entrapped by vicious Arabs.  This makes sense.  How else would American teens find themselves caught up in a Middle Eastern war?

Virginia is a college campus and the White House, where a professor teaches religion but isn’t religious (Tim Daly) and where a woman decides when to shoot and when to pay off the bad, Dark guys (Tea Leone).  She’s a hawk with heart, a flattering idealization of our last Secretary of State and the candidate she plans on being in a few months.

It’s really not so different from the story you’ll see on the news.  Except in this one, the captive Americans make it home.

*

Chuck Tyron, Fayetteville State University

Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord, as played by Téa Leoni in the new CBS series, Madam Secretary, is a blunt outsider unwilling to conform to the Washington status quo. As President Conrad (Keith Carradine) tells her twice during the pilot (in case we missed it the first time), McCord is so far outside the box, she doesn’t even know it’s there. McCord’s outsider status—she is a political science professor who is literally shoveling shit, mucking her horse stable, when she gets a call from the White House—has been used to disavow the idea that the show is based on former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. But, given that the show was reportedly conceived when showrunner Barbara Hall was watching the Benghazi hearings, such denials are not fully convincing. Still, it’s worth asking how the show is engaging with the idea of Washington and the political culture it embodies.

Some answers: First, the show offers a geopolitics-lite, crisis-of-the-week exploration of foreign policy, in this case, a hostage crisis in Syria, in which two idealistic brothers are kidnapped while attempting to combat global terrorism. Second, Madam Secretary tacks toward West Wing territory in its attempt to craft a workplace drama that just so happens to be set in the nation’s capital. Finally, McCord, who has three children, is tasked with the challenge of balancing motherhood with her demanding job. In the pilot, her status as a mother actually informs her ability to empathize with the parents of the hostages. It’s a delicate balancing act, and Madam Secretary still seems to be finding its footing, but in bringing together so many complex questions, it’s a show that will no doubt keep my attention.

~~~~~

SCORPION [Premiered Sept 22, 2014]

Based on a real-life genius who has done work with the government, it’s a high-octane—seriously, there’s a big car setpiece—procedural about a gang of anti-social geniuses who work alongside Homeland Security to solve high-tech problems while learning how to survive when life stops being high-tech and starts being real.

*

Eleanor Patterson, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Scorpion is a show about an Irish genius named Walter O’Brien we first meet when he hacks NASA as an 8 year old. Somehow he grows up to be an ethnically ambiguous American without an Irish accent, played by the talented Elyes Gabal. Gabal himself has been publicly ambiguous about his own ethnicity, and successful leveraging the malleability of his looks to play characters across a wide range of racial identities. Which makes me think he could do an Irish accent if the producers cared at all about continuity. But they do not. So just be impressed by the fact that Walter O’Brien is one of the five smartest people alive. He actually just programmed your brain from two miles away. This show has everything a ridiculously contrived cyber-action show should have. Fast cars. Computer programming. Nerds who engage in a constant barrage of witty (or is it annoying?) banter. Robert Patrick as a menacing federal agent, so let the antagonistic pissing fights between two manly men commence. O’Brien may be a nerd genius, but he is still a tough-talking, know-it-all driven by masculine values, such as saving people, and protecting single mothers. Like the one played by Katherine McPhee and her permanent smirk. Is that Ernie Hudson? Ok, maybe watching this pilot was worth it to see him for five seconds. Or maybe not… If I learned anything from Person of Interest, it is that narrative implausibility, bad acting, and contrived dialogue never stopped CBS’ from ordering a full season. 

*

Kristina Busse, Independent Scholar

Everyone has their own nitpicks about accuracy and where they can’t suspend their disbelief: many lawyers dislike law shows just like many doctors refuse to watch medical shows. For some weird reason, I have issues with genius depictions. One part is that we’ve had an overdose of slightly socially awkward leads with high IQ; another is that the writers tend to be much dumber than the people they depict, which can be a problem. Seriously, my teen can answer the question as to how many months have 28 days!

Scorpion has that problem times four. And the fact that main character Walter O’Brien (why yes, he’s Irish!) feels the need to tell us their combined IQ tells us more about the showrunners and their idea of intelligence than about very smart people or how their minds work. Add to that the hardass military figure (even though I never get tired of seeing Robert Patrick play THAT GUY), and you have the making of nothing but cliches. Oh, let’s not forget the genius ASD kid (and that may be another axe to grind, but I really wish we’d get to see one without the other some times) and his brilliant gentle and kind soul of a single waitressing mom. I guess they needed to fill the women’s quota and a female math genius might be too much to ask for.

Which brings me to my last petty complaint: I know there are many mathematicians who love numbers and do math quickly in their head. But, frankly, neither are those skills synonymous nor is the latter all that important these days unless we run out of computers and calculators and phones. Math is so much more, so much more interesting and beautiful and challenging than calculating, and to restrict Sylvester Dodd to that is just sad to me.

Having said that, even though the plot was ludicrous, there was enough in the show to make me wanna give it a couple of episodes to possibly get a sense of itself beyond procedural paint by numbers. The four geniuses have different skills, and while we didn’t get to see them distinguish themselves much beyond Walter, I hope that will happen soon. The dynamics among the team have the potential to be interesting as does the weird parental vibe between Gallo and O’Brien. The visuals and pacing of the pilot were fun, and you can definitely tell the Fast and Furious pedigree here. But the show needs to shape up quickly or it’ll either be cancelled or linger in procedural purgatory—then again, it is CBS!

~~~~~

NCIS: NEW ORLEANS [Premiered Sept 23, 2014 @ 9/8]

In this second spinoff from the highest-rated drama on television, and the first to be shot outside of Los Angeles, Scott Bakula stars as yet another specialist in Navy-related crimes, this time in the Big Easy: The Land of Mardi Gras and generous filming incentives.

*

Kristina Busse, Independent Scholar 

I should start with two caveats. First, I am a fan of NCIS and watched the first five or six seasons fairly religiously. I like the familiarity of procedural with their recognizable characters and their repetitive plot lines with small twists. Second, I went to school in New Orleans and have been living on the gulf coast for more than two decades now. That makes me both an eager viewer of shows set in NOLA and hypercritical of every small detail. When I signed up for reviewing the show, I caught up on the two episodes that introduced the New Orleans field office on the original NCIS last spring, and I pretty much hated all of it. Bakula’s accent was dreadful, and the constant name dropping of restaurants and foods was annoying. Luckily the producers must have heard and understood that criticism, because both issues have been addressed. Bakula sounds much better, and the Southern and New Orleans references are fewer and more muted.

Personally, I loved the apartment search and what location can say about a person in the city. Likewise, the Abita beer sign and the Andouille sausage are a tad less in your face than the lecture Monday Red Beans and Rice was. I’m hoping this trend will continue as the show writers get more embedded in New Orleans and don’t feel the need to try so hard. The constant refrain of how NOLA is special and does things its own way could become bothersome but it’s justified both by the fact that many New Orleanians do indeed feel that way and that Brody as the outsider/ newcomer trying to get a feel for the city. We’ll have to see how it’ll fare in the long run. The racial dynamics in this city are unusual and really important, and the all too obvious red herring of gang banger territory wars was weak, but political corruption may certainly become an interesting throughline—and Steven Weber was sufficiently smarmy, and I wouldn’t mind seeing him pop up again.

As for the show itself, you have to like this type of show. But if you do, you will probably enjoy NCIS: NOLA quite a bit. I did and am looking forward to getting to know these characters, not because I expect hidden depth but because they seem like good people. I’m looking forward to familiar locations and interesting murders, all nicely packaged and solved in an hour, or two. I could say my standards are pretty low if that’s all it takes, but I fear out of the four new procedurals I’m looking at for Antenna, this may be the only one to stay on my viewing schedule. And that may be due to Bakula and CCH Pounder, or it may be due to the slick and experienced (and familiar) NCIS franchise, or it may just be because I get back to NOLA much too rarely and miss it something fierce.

*

Mary Beth Haralovich, University of Arizona

NCIS: Los Angeles took the hyperbolic road wherein a team led by a Cold War-era spy deals with catastrophic threats to the nation. NCIS: NOLA stays closer to the original formula – a team of investigators investigating localized murder. Efforts to signify the iconic location are strained: southern drawls, casual attire, descriptions of NOLA neighborhoods, pressure from local politics. This NCIS is so laid back that the office has a full kitchen where the chief rustles up breakfast. The team leader is so NOLA that he sits in with a band on the piano.

Even for a pilot, character introductions were awkward at best and annoying at worst (the M.E.’s lab assistant, really?). And how is it that NCIS in NOLA is an all white office with African American victims, thugs, gangbangers, and … oh yes, the medical examiner. Who doesn’t love CCH Pounder? On The Shield, she brought gravitas and a moral center to the high testosterone precinct. On NCIS: New Orleans, she appears to be doing the same, but more softly feminine. Her M.E. has some style. She wears large earrings with her scrubs and expansive caps (one blue with a pattern of night sky of stars and nebulae, one golden) cover the hair piled high on her head. Her wardrobe is the highlight of the show. I wish she were the team leader.

*

Kyra Hunting, University of Kentucky 

NCIS: New Orleans is an interesting exercise in formula, if not altogether interesting in and of itself. It’s patterns and rhythms are close enough to the original NCIS that at times I forgot I was watching a “new” show. This could be considered a strength, after all NCIS is pleasurable for a great number of viewers, and its comfortable rhythms in a new context could certainly serve those viewers well. However, the series lacked the original’s distinctness of characters. Characters like Abby and Tony were so dramatically specific that they were in danger of being cartoons. NCIS: New Orleans’ characters are very much the opposite. Bakula played his character well but his character was all too close to Gibbs, swap in cooking for boat making and you are halfway there. His team members, Christopher and Merri, were even less distinct. Christopher was essentially an accent in search of a character and Merri’s defining feature of wanting privacy left her largely a question mark. Even the generally engaging CCH Pounder’s character, Dr. Wade, was mostly legible as a well-worn “type” – which only served to underline the series’ problem with race. The majority of African American characters were associated with crime, with the exception of Ms. Pounder and the very much underused James McDaniel (who I found myself wishing was a permanent part of the cast).  It seemed like the episode was positing New Orleans as the strongest character, making the race problem even more problematic, with an excess of “specific” geographic and culinary references. And while New Orleans may well be my favorite place in the country, it simply did not work. Instead of seeming location specific it was like we were playing a game of New Orleans references bingo. By the time Merri finally dropped a reference to beignets it had become a parody of location specificity. Nonetheless, this is a formula that has proven successful in the past and if the writers begin to understand that specificity is best achieved through detail and not lists, and the characters become more fully formed over time, there is no good reason to believe that the well-established audience for the franchise won’t sign on.

~~~~~

STALKER [Premiered Oct 1, 2014 @ 10/9]

Maggie Q and Dylan McDermott star in this sensationalist drama from Kevin Williamson (Dawson’s Creek, The Following), which focused on a stalking prevention unit of the LAPD where each member of the team has their own history—either as victim or perpetrator—with the crime in question.

*

Kristina Busse, Independent Scholar

The opening scene of Stalker shows us a young woman coming home in the dark on a mostly deserted street. The phone rings, and she visibly recoils when she realizes who is calling her. The camera focuses on her face, her fears and anxieties. As she hurries toward her apartment, she is caught by a masked man who assaults her and covers her in gasoline. She escapes into her car but ultimately we see the flaming car rolling backwards down the hill and, just as she thinks she may have survived, the car explodes. These first 2½ minutes of the show were frankly enough to make me turn it off. Many crime shows begin with a nameless victim, but the detailed suffering, the lovingly lingering camera shots on her scared face, gave me the first indication that this show wasn’t for me.

Nominally, Stalker is about a Special Threat Assessment Unit, run by the wonderful Maggie Q, that tries to track stalkers and prevent escalation. And yet the show can’t seem to make up its mind what side it wants to be on: half the stalkers in this episode are constituted by our heroes, and the camera seems more invested in doing the stalking than in exposing its horrors. Of the four cases of stalking we encounter, two are clearly criminal and the stalkers meant to be scary and deranged. But the other two cases of stalking seem to try for moral ambiguity. Maggie Q scares off a stalker by stalking him in return and threatening him. Much more unsettling, new guy Dylan McDermott stalks his ex-partner and their child in two scenes that all but bookend the show. And while he is not necessarily portrayed as a likable character, we (1) get to know him throughout the episode, (2) he clearly is the point of view character in the two stalking scenes, and (3) the episode ends with him staring at an image of his child (which he clearly obtained through a telephoto lens).

I wasn’t too excited about the premise, but it might have been different enough from the run of the mill procedural to keep my interest. Instead, it felt like I was watching the opening moves of a slasher film pretending to square up to a cautionary and moralistic tale. Just like the scene after the credits, what is said and what is done don’t coincide: while Maggie Q describes the horrors and dangers of stalking to a university class, McDermott performs said stalking. The sound tells us to be appalled yet the images ask us to stalk with McDermott and, later, to feel with him. When Williamson wrote and produced voyeuristic sexualized murder in the Scream trilogy, he did so with self-awareness and irony. Here, it felt more like just another entry of gendered exploitation in a long line of film and television cases that use the camera as their main tool. Or, as my student described it this morning, “Stalker was, like, the perfect example of the male gaze!”

*

Mary Beth Haralovich, University of Arizona 

Lt. Beth Davis (Maggie Q) explains to a sparsely populated lecture hall that over six million people are stalked.  This should provide fodder for seasons of episodic drama.  In Stalker’s long-form arcs, character backstories and serial storylines will unfold.

With some structure and style, Stalker demonstrates that no one is safe anywhere.  The episode has torture porn bookends.  At the beginning, a woman is screaming, burnt alive.  At the end, a woman is screaming, nearly set afire.  In between, detectives profile stalkers and their social (media) and psychological motivations.

References about stalking in popular culture relieve the dark storyline:  Detective Jack Larsen (Dylan McDermott) recites a list of stalker movies.  Beth fakes her backstory by recounting the plot of Fatal Attraction (1987).  Jack wisecracks that he joined the team hoping to meet Scarlett Johansson.

To develop the relationship between Beth and Jack, the episode riffs on the male gaze and feminism.  Jack’s male gaze is motivated by the cut of Beth’s blouses (which are casual rather than deliberately seductive).  Later he wonders, “Why do you wear sexy things if you don’t want men to notice.”  Beth’s response:  “For how I feel in them.  I dress for myself.”  She is comfortable in her body.  He is trying to figure out his masculinity against her femininity.

By episode end, it is confirmed that Jack is a stalker and Beth has a stalker.  Will sympathy be generated for Jack’s stalking?  His yearning for his son is presented with an edginess that is not entirely comforting.  Maggie Q, overlooked for Emmy adulation as Nikita (CW, 2010-2013), engages her martial artistry to suppress a creepy stalker.  Apparently entranced with her domination, he switches victims to become Beth’s stalker as the soundtrack sings, “I don’t belong here I don’t belong here.”

As the posts go up, we’ll add links to them here, should you wish for this page to be your gateway to all the reviews to ABC’s new shows, CBS’, The CW’s, FOX’s, NBC’s, and those on cable and at other venues.

In the meantime, we invite you to watch along with us. Towards that end, below are short descriptions (penned by our own inimitable Myles McNutt) of what’s coming your way, along with premiere times.

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Comic Book Drama

THE FLASH (The CW, Tues Oct 7 @ 8/7) – In this spinoff of Arrow, the DC Comics universe expands to Barry Gordon, who gains unexpected powers following a tragic explosion and wakes up with a new, motion-blurred view of the world, one that sheds light on tragic details from his childhood.

GOTHAM (FOX, Mon Sept 22 @ 8/7) – It’s a basic police corruption procedural starring Ben McKenzie and Donal Logue, but the city they’re patrolling will grow up to be Batman’s Gotham. In the meantime, your favorite caped crusader and his villain buddies—Penguin! Riddler! Catwoman! The gang’s all here!—are still living through what will eventually become their origin stories.

Crime Drama

FOREVER (ABC, Mon Sept 22 @ 10/9) – Ioan Gruffodd stars as an immortal medical examiner who knows death more intimately than anyone who’s alive, but whose inability to truly know the meaning of death continues to haunt him.

GRACEPOINT (FOX, Thurs Oct 2 @ 9/8) – If you haven’t seen Broadchurch, this tells the story of a Northern California town racked with tragedy following a young boy’s death, and the detectives and family members caught up in the pursuing investigation. For those who have seen Broadchurch, it’s an often shot-for-shot adaptation of that U.K. series, although they’re promising a different ending.

NCIS: NEW ORLEANS (CBS, Tues Sept 23 @ 9/8) – In this second spinoff from the highest-rated drama on television, and the first to be shot outside of Los Angeles, Scott Bakula stars as yet another specialist in Navy-related crimes, this time in the Big Easy: The Land of Mardi Gras and generous filming incentives.

SCORPION (CBS, Mon Sept 22 @ 9/8) – Based on a real-life genius who has done work with the government, it’s a high-octane—seriously, there’s a big car setpiece—procedural about a gang of anti-social geniuses who work alongside Homeland Security to solve high-tech problems while learning how to survive when life stops being high-tech and starts being real.

STALKER (CBS, Wed Oct 1 @ 10/9) – Maggie Q and Dylan McDermott star in this sensationalist drama from Kevin Williamson (Dawson’s Creek, The Following), which focused on a stalking prevention unit of the LAPD where each member of the team has their own history—either as victim or perpetrator—with the crime in question.

Crime Dramedy

THE MYSTERIES OF LAURA (NBC, Wed Sept 17 @ 8/7) – Debra Messing stars in an hour-long comedy procedural about a mother of twin six-year old hellions who just also happens to be a great detective—the mystery is how she keeps it all together. Alternate title, per NPR’s Linda Holmes: MomCop, CopMom.

Family Drama

THE AFFAIR (Showtime, Sun Oct 12 @ 10/9) – Starring Dominic West and Ruth Wilson, it’s the story of an extramarital affair during a summer in Montauk, but told through a distinct structure that explores issues of class and gender intersecting with the affair itself.

KINGDOM (DirecTV, Wed Oct 8 @ 9/7) – A multi-generational family drama set in the world of Mixed Martial Arts, the series stars Frank Grillo as a the patriarch of a family on the wrong side of the law who work out their issues in and out of the ring in southern California.

Family Sitcom

BLACK-ISH (ABC, Wed Sept 24 @ 9:30/8:30) – Anthony Anderson, Tracee Ellis-Ross, and Laurence Fishburne star in this exploration of how race and identity are understood in the context of a 21^st century, upper middle class, multi-generational African American household. If this description made even the faint image of the word “Cosby” form in your brain, ABC has won.

CRISTELA (ABC, Fri Oct 10 @ 8:30/7:30) – A multi-camera family sitcom from Cristela Alonzo, the series focuses on a young law student struggling to get her life started, and her multi-generational Latin American Texas family whose love doesn’t always offer the kind of support she’s hoping for.

Family Dramedy

JANE THE VIRGIN (The CW, Mon Oct 13 @ 9/8) – What would happen if a twenty-something virgin was accidentally artificially inseminated? And what would happen if the sperm involved was attached to an absurdly contrived set of circumstances that create legitimate tension over whether or not the pregnancy should be terminated? Jane the Virgin is here to tell this story.

TRANSPARENT (Amazon, available Fri Sept 26) – The Jill Soloway-created family comedy focuses on Maura (Jeffrey Tambor), a transgendered patriarch beginning his transition from a man to a woman while his children confront their own identity crises and their changing relationship with their father.

Horror

AMERICAN HORROR STORY: FREAK SHOW (FX, Wed Oct 8 @ 10/9) – Pushing further into people’s most-common nightmares, Ryan Murphy and his collaborators return to explore the clown-riddled terror of the freak show in the series’ fourth installment of its seasonal anthology model.

Hospital Drama

RED BAND SOCIETY (FOX, Wed Sept 17 @ 9/8) – Octavia Spencer leads an ensemble cast of those who live and work in an extended youth hospital wing, where the diagnosis is hormones, pathos, and self-discovery as chronic illness mixes with adolescence.

Legal Comedy

BAD JUDGE (NBC, Thurs Oct 2 @ 9/8) Kate Walsh stars as a party-loving judge who lives the contradiction of being bad at living a healthy life but great at punishing those who break the law—I would tell you more, but it’s on its third showrunner, so other than this your guess is as good as anyone’s.

Legal Drama

HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER (ABC, Thurs Sept 25 @ 10/9) – Viola Davis stars in the latest Shonda Rhimes-produced series, this one focused on a first year law school class that doubles as an internship competition for a prestigious law firm, and which may or may not have students exploring the series’ title by the time they earn their credits.

Other Sitcom

MULANEY (FOX, Sun Oct 5 @ 9:30/8:30) – Based on the standup of star/producer John Mulaney, it’s a throwback multi-camera sitcom about a comedy writer working for a difficult boss (Martin Short) and living life with his roommates.

Political Drama

MADAM SECRETARY (CBS, Sun Sept 21 @ 8/7) – Tea Leoni stars as a CIA Analyst turned university professor who’s called into service following the tragic death of the previous Secretary of State.

Reality

UTOPIA (FOX, already started) – What happens when Fox sends 15 strangers to live on their own without rules? What kind of society will they form? What kind of lives will they lead? What role with religion or government play? And will anyone actually be interested in the answers to these questions? Only time will tell.

Romantic Comedy

A To Z (NBC, Thurs Oct 2 @ 9:30/8:30) – Ben Feldman and Cristin Miloti play a couple who unexpectedly stumble into a relationship that might well be the product of fate, which the series’ frame narrative reveals may be more complicated than its alphabetical title would suggest.

MANHATTAN LOVE STORY (ABC, Tues Sept 30 @ 8:30/7:30) – The story of two young and attractive New Yorkers whose relationship gets off to a rough start, the show works to differentiate itself by having two internal voiceovers from both male and female leads. The results will surprise you (if you’re surprised by essentialist depictions of gender, which seems unlikely).

MARRY ME (NBC, Tues Oct 14 @ 9/8) – Happy Endings creator David Caspe returns with another irreverent comedy, this one focused on a couple (Casey Wilson, Ken Marino) whose delayed engagement creates tension between them and their friends and family following a proposal mishap.

SELFIE (ABC, Tues Sept 30 @ 8/7) – Karen Gillan and John Cho star in this social media-age Pygmalion riff, as Eliza must detox from her Instagrammed existence to confront her sense of identity with the help of an uptight but successful Henry.

Teen Dramedy

HAPPYLAND (MTV, Tues Sept 30 @ 11/10) – Set in a low rent Disneyland-style theme park, it follows a young woman who grew up in the park with her employee mother whose own time working at the park brings laughs, romance, and an episode-ending revelation that may or may not involve a Les Cousins Dangereux-esque situation.

1) WWE announced during CES this week the upcoming launch of WWE Network for February 24th, a first of its kind over-the-top 24/7 streaming channel with on-demand access to a vast library of content. The move comes after years of speculation as to the form the previously announced WWE Network would take, with WWE attempting deals with both cable and satellite providers for a more traditional system WWE Network will be accessible on nearly all digital platforms like Android, iOS, Kindle Fire, Roku, Playstation, XBox, smart TVs, and more all through a single subscription fee of $9.99 a month with a six month commitment. The fact that the content (both new originals and archival) will include WWE’s monthly Pay-Per-Views at no additional cost has ruffled some traditional outlet’s feathers, as DirecTV has threatened to stop offering PPVs since the WWE Network will essentially compete against them. With WWE about to enter renegotiations with cable channels for airing rights to its television shows, the Network’s upcoming launch will certainly play a factor.

2) Following up on rumors of a deal for Time Warner Cable, John Malone’s Liberty Media Corp has said it plans to buyout SiriusXM, putting Malone in a clearer position in consolidation with Time Warner Cable due to Liberty’s controlling stake in competitor Charter Communications. It is a very complicated plan, involving the creation of a new class of stock for the company, but the bottom line is it makes for even more consolidation and puts Liberty in a better position to acquire Time Warner Cable through its Charter holdings. There are those who object, notably shareholder Ralph Nader, but Liberty defends the plan as leading to a more rational structure.

3) A big week for online television service Aereo, as the Supreme Court has announced it plans to hear the case between the startup and four major broadcasters. The case is an appeal made by CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox and others after they were denied an injunction over whether Aereo’s system that captures their broadcast signals and reroutes them to customers Internet devices violates performance rights. This is a massive case, ABC Television Stations vs. Aereo for those playing at home, as the future of network television and its relationship to Internet platforms hangs in check. The news of the high court taking the case came just days after Aereo had closed on $34 million in additional financing, putting them at $97 million raised to date. How much that is really worth will be decided by the Supreme Court in their upcoming docket.

4) If you plan on watching CBS’s The Good Wife on Sunday night (and why wouldn’t you be!?), you can look forward to three songs from Bruce Springsteen’s upcoming new album High Hopes, part of a larger partnership between Springsteen and CBS to promote the upcoming album’s release. The albums is currently streaming on CBS.com as a sneak preview, a move promoted after last week’s episode of The Good Wife. This is a rare move for a network to host an album debut on its website, something more traditional online and music retailers are sure to dislike.

5) Speaking of online music retailers, they have more bad news this year as 2013 marks the first time digital music sales have decreased. The drops come in the form of both individual track sales as well as album bundles, despite the latter starting the year strong. The main culprit being blamed is the increase in popularity of ad-based and subscription-based music streaming services like Pandora and Spotify, though streaming numbers for 2013 have yet to be released.

6) Not to fear, as 2013 was also a year of massive rises in media company stocks. Most major media conglomerates closed out 2013 at 52-week highs, with Disney being a big winner with their stock gaining over 51% this past year. When you expand to look at the entire market, Netflix had an astonishing year growing 296%, placing it as the second-highest performing stock of 2013 behind only Tesla, the up-and-coming luxury electric car manufacturer. When it comes to films, Lionsgate did well off the back of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, rising 99.2%. For television, AMC did quite well closing 2013 up 34%.

7) Perhaps bolstered by its stock’s performance, Netflix raised the salary of CEO Reed Hastings by 50%, bringing it to $6 million for 2014. This is the man who just two years ago helped announce Qwikster, which almost signaled the end for the video-streaming service that is now outpacing every prediction.

8) The Parents Television Council is pushing for an overhaul of film and TV ratings, claiming the current system is inaccurate. PTC president Tim Winter criticized the systems by saying, “content ratings much be accurate, consistent, transparent and publicly accountable. The current system is none of that.” While the MPAA has yet to comment, industry-supporting organization TV Watch has pushed back, arguing the PTC uses flawed methodology and false claims to push their agenda.

9) Mostly because I wanted to include a picture of that suit, controversial Chinese tycoon Chen Guangbiao has intentions to buy the New York Times Co., what he deems the most influential news outlet in the world. Making millions in waste management, Chen claimed to have set up a meeting with the company, which is an odd choice since the NYT’s website is currently blocked in China. After this meeting was rebuffed, Chen admitted it would be a difficult acquisition, but insured others his intentions were genuine.

10) Staying with China the country has temporarily lifted a 14-year ban on video game consoles. The ban started in 2000 with the Chinese government claiming they were dangerous to one’s health. This opens the door for foreign console manufacturers like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo to begin manufacturing in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone.

Schwartz, who co-wrote the recent PBS special on the “War of the Worlds” panic, argues that echoes of the Holmes stories can be heard throughout Welles’s radio work, including his performance as the ethereal crime-fighter The Shadow. It was partly by learning from Conan Doyle’s example of great storytelling, Schwartz claims, that Welles reshaped the rules of radio drama.

Click here to read A. Brad Schwartz’s full post over on Sounding Out!.

This post is the tenth in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. Stay tuned for Antenna’s next installment from Jennifer Hyland Wang on Monday, January 20th.

Miss any of the previous posts in the series? Click here for links to all of the earlier entries.

Smith argues that “Hell On Ice” stands out as a proto-environmental critique. It contemplates the catastrophic collapse of human society, not unlike the Mercury Theatre’s famous “War of the Worlds.” But whereas the “War of the Worlds” broadcast was a science fiction thriller that tapped into anxiety about the looming war in Europe, the “Hell On Ice” show (which aired three weeks earlier) used historical fiction to dramatize the error of human attempts to master the globe. Smith writes, “That makes it perhaps the best companion to ‘War of the Worlds,’ a play in which the thwarted invader is no alien – it’s us. Listening to the play today, ‘Hell on Ice’ is not only a masterpiece of audio theater (among fans, the most beloved of all Welles’s radio works) but a powerful ‘eco-sonic’ critique as well.”

Click here to read Jacob Smith’s full post over on Sounding Out!.

This post is the eighth in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. Stay tuned for Antenna’s next installment on Monday, December 16th.

Miss any of the previous posts in the series? Click here for links to all of the earlier entries.

Sociologist and public opinion researcher Hadley Cantril.

“One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention…” – H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds (1898)

Hadley Cantril, Educational Radio, and The Princeton Radio Research Project

What was the effect of The Mercury Theatre on the Air’s 1938 “War of the Worlds” (WOTW) broadcast on Communication and Media Studies? Besides being one of the seminal works of Mass Media history, WOTW turns out to be the subject of the first major commissioned analysis of audience reception that helped to legitimate the reliability of public policy research. The name of that influential study was The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic, written by Hadley Cantril and first published by Princeton University Press in 1940. How Cantril’s book came to be commissioned is almost as central to the history of media research as the program itself.

The back story actually begins with the problems faced by educational broadcasters in the 1930s, the forerunner to public broadcasting in the U.S. Before 1934 there was a robust experiment in public pedagogy run out of universities and school districts, but the Communications Act of 1934 privatized the use of radio so extensively that only about two-dozen stations remained. One of the reasons this happened was because there was no evidence that educational radio was in fact educational. But after 1934, FCC commissioners E.O. Sykes and Anning Prall were interested in classroom extension services via radio, if research could show that educational technology was a viable use of frequency allocations.

In 1935 the FCC formed an exploratory commission with the Office of Education to examine this question, called the Federal Radio Education Committee (FREC). Princeton psychologist Hadley Cantril was designated by the FREC to supervise a special study on audience reception. He obtained funds from the Rockefeller Foundation and received support from William Paley of CBS through the appointment of a young CBS researcher named Frank Stanton. Cantril also recruited a young Austrian immigrant named Paul Lazarsfeld, and his wife Herta Herzog, completing the core of what became known as the Princeton Radio Research Project (PRP).

Between 1936 and 1939 the trio of Cantril, Lazarsfeld, and Stanton streamlined the methods of “media effects” research, which notably became the primary approach taken by Mass Communication departments after WWII. Lazarsfeld has received many accolades for his methodological contributions, and deservedly so, but it seems to have been forgotten that it was Hadley Cantril who directed the project. And not only was he the director, but he innovated the first model of effects research as early as 1936 by combining the survey research methods of the commercial networks with social psychology. The synthesis of these two methods permitted researchers to account for trends in social opinion with a very high degree of accuracy. Further, results were reproducible even in disparate studies. The key to their success came from the capacity of the “technique,” as Cantril called it, to divide and subdivide demographic characteristics of listeners into specified social profiles.

Though first developed to evaluate the effectiveness of educational broadcasting, the PRP began to turn their attention to the question of how radio aesthetics influenced social opinion. They found that if slight adjustments were made to content, that patterns of reception would palpably change among different demographic groups. Further, listeners had developed tacit anticipation about how they should respond to the ordering of content in a broadcast.

Excerpt from Hadley Cantril’s personal letters.

October 31, 1938

The day after the “War of the Worlds” broadcast, a request came from Frank Stanton’s employer – the Columbia Broadcast System (CBS) – for an opportunity to test their new “technique.” Cantril wrote in one personal letter: “when the broadcast of October 30 occurred, with its responses in mass hysteria over a wide area, the Princeton researchers recognized that here was a perfect opportunity for their inquiry.” On the Wednesday following the broadcast two field workers began the first Mass Communications research canvass—in Orange, New Jersey. They visited the homes of 30 persons who were known to have listened to the broadcast, while other researchers began to tabulate statistics from other sites.

Interviewees reported that they had not been listening very closely, but disruptions to the familiarity of the broadcast in the form of news flashes made them so terrified that they forgot what they had heard just a few minutes before. The play purported to present an invasion by armed beings from Mars, but only four of 30 listeners actually had understood this storyline. Four thought the invasion was by animal monsters, another four thought it was a natural catastrophe, eight thought that it was an attack by the Germans, and one Jewish woman had interpreted the broadcast as an uprising against the Jews.

When asked what made it so realistic, the overwhelming response was that the program’s introduction of well-known government officials and prominent scientists was persuasive. And more so the technical features of the broadcast, its appearance as an interruption of a dance program, the shifting of the news flashes from place to place, the gasping voice of the announcer, his muffled scream when he was about to break down, all contributed powerfully to the illusion. One woman reported that she saw people literally running down the street screaming. Another reported that her town was immediately deserted. However, these instances were often exaggerated.

Title page from first printing of The Invasion from Mars.

The “Effects” of WOTW upon Presumptions and Practices of Media

As Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow have written, Cantril found that there were only a small percentage of “panic” responses to the program, significantly lower than popular folklore has led us to believe. So why is WOTW such a key text for Mass Media history?

The important outcome, as far as the researchers themselves were concerned, was that for the first time a statistically notable sampling of receptions to a media event had been measured. The PRP was able to paint a realistic and thorough picture of the types of responses that occurred, including sub-divided categories of which demographic groups responded in what way.

Among famous legacies of the study: WOTW accidentally indicated just how powerful Mass Media might be as a tool for propaganda. With the aid of Harold Lasswell and Gilbert Seldes, the PRP began to develop propaganda research by the early 1940s. Another less known outcome is that Frank Stanton realized that the demographic analysis he helped to invent could predict likely audience reception in advance, instead of measuring responses after broadcast. Whenever we talk about broad audience appeal or “niche audiences,” we are in part talking about Stanton’s post-PRP/WOTW research and development legacy.

This is the seventh post in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. A special thanks to everyone who participated in the #WOTW75 collective listening experiment on October 30th. Stay tuned for more blog posts in the From Mercury to Mars series during December and January.

Miss any of the previous posts in the series? Click here for links to all of the earlier entries.