First, as it did in the 1990s (and will likely do again in the 2030s), television has “discovered” that black people watch television and that white people will watch some television when there are black and brown bodies on the screen. Call it the Scandal/Empire effect. With the television industry scrambling to blacken/brown their landscapes for the 2015-2016 season, The Wiz largely follows this trend to help diversify NBC’s screen – a network that lags behind ABC and Fox with respect to the representation of black and brown actors in leading roles. This also marks a departure from NBC’s previous broadcasts The Sound of Music and Peter Pan, which featured largely white casts. Audra McDonald was the only major black/brown actor in The Sound of Music – and even she received criticism in some circles for being cast despite her credentials as a then-five-time Tony Award Winner. In this (re)turn to blackness, The Wiz at turns lets NBC have it both ways: it can broadcast a musical that will feature a predominantly black cast, thus jumping on the “diversity” bandwagon, while at the same time, The Wiz is one of the few Broadway texts (or at least soundtracks) that multicultural audiences embrace, without the lure of “stars” to make it attractive. The potential for a cross-section of multicultural viewers likely proved far too attractive for NBC to resist. Which brings me to my second point…

The Wiz, like NBC’s previous live musicals, is family-friendly fare. It continues to be a go-to musical for elementary and middle/junior high schools across the country (even ill-advised all-white schools have been known to tackle productions of The Wiz). I was in two productions while in junior high school (shout out to Mrs. Rowe and Mr. Nelson!). In this way, NBC is likely banking on a segment of the audience who can draw on the nostalgia of performing (or preparing to perform) The Wiz. In addition, unlike Empire, Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder, The Wiz does not delve into “adult content” that might make it touch and go for parents wanting to watch the broadcast with their children. Much like NBC’s The Voice, The Wiz presents the potential to be a cross-racial, cross-generational television-watching experience.

This version of The Wiz also has to serve two gods. First, it has to serve the ratings machine, as any television show does. But, second, and more importantly, it has to serve the more fickle Broadway god. In this way, in an attempt to make The Wiz relevant, the production team will attempt to use the success of the recent Broadway revival of Pippin as its template. Pippin, like The Wiz, is a period piece. Pippin got around that “problem” by turning the production into a Cirque de Soleil-style event. The score remains fundamentally 1970s, as does The Wiz‘s score, but this novelty worked for Pippin (it ran for almost two years, won four Tony Awards and recouped its $8.5 million investment in eight months). Presumably, the conflation of an industrial interest in black viewers/audiences and the circus theme is expected to deliver on both fronts for NBC and Broadway producers.

However, the reasons The Wiz looks good on paper also could present problems for NBC. Importantly, the Broadway and film adaptations of The Wiz are often conflated. Many/most of the stories I read on NBC’s version of The Wiz talked about the 1975 Broadway adaptation, but used imagery from the 1978 film version. While that may seem like a nit pick on its face, the two versions are different. The Broadway iteration maintains much of what we know from the 1939 film adaptation starring Judy Garland – Dorothy is still a little girl from Kansas – while it updates the language to hew closer to 1970s black cultural dialect. But most importantly in its Broadway iteration, The Wiz used a completely new score, which gave us the beloved “Ease on Down the Road.” The film adaptation “ages” Dorothy to a 24-year old kindergarten school teacher (likely because of casting Diana Ross as Dorothy) and moves her to Harlem in an attempt to make it something that “might pass for a ghetto fairy tale” as The New York Times’ Vincent Canby suggested. But the film version also plays with the score a bit, adding the Scarecrow song “You Can’t Win,” which replaces “I Was Born on the Day Before Yesterday.” In addition, because the DVD (and television syndication) functions as what Paul Grainge calls “markets of memory” (10-11), the preserved and re-circulated version of The Wiz will likely be vastly different than what NBC presents. Aside from the ways that the Broadway version (which NBC is presumably presenting) and film version are fundamentally different, this version of The Wiz will add “new material” provided by Harvey Weinstein. In this way, making this new version of The Wiz is akin to a person who has had one too many facelifts – there’s something familiar, but also fundamentally different.

Of course, the jury is still out with respect to how this new The Wiz will perform, but I predict that it will deliver the ratings NBC needs to continue its engagement with live, televised Broadway musicals (particularly because hate-watchers are gonna hate). But as the industrial infatuation with black viewers undoubtedly wanes, don’t hold your breath for NBC’s next musical to be Sophisticated Ladies, Ain’t Misbehavin’, Dreamgirls or any other black-cast musical. NBC selecting The Wiz as its next musical, I suggest, is not about its blackness per se, but about what televisual blackness means at this socio-historical moment.

Now television, struggling in the era of multiple platform viewing and increased time-shifting, is turning to the clay feet of the musical for a wallop of financial and “special event” adrenaline. After 18 million Americans (hate) watched NBC’s live airing of The Sound of Music, it took less than five months for both NBC and Fox to announce their upcoming live musical projects, Peter Pan and Grease respectively. Of course this practice of airing live musicals has precedent. The New York-based 1950s live television era was bejeweled with live musical events. NBC’s 1955 airing of Peter Pan with Mary Martin garnered 64 million viewers. (Take that Carrie Underwood!) For the first time, television was bringing Middle America (and everyone else) the elusive sights and sounds of Broadway.

Today, the networks are struggling to find some way—other than awards shows—to draw a 21^st century, distracted, i-device obsessed audience to their living rooms. The ratings success of The Sound of Music seems to have been just the encouragement needed to reproduce the tele-theatrical disaster that was Underwood’s performance. The selection of Grease by Fox seems to ignore a string of warning signs.

(1) As was the case with The Sound of Music, Grease is an iconic text. Just as most Americans can only imagine Julie Andrews descending the Alps, John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John are Grease to most. As many of the press announcements note, Grease is the highest grossing movie musical of all time. Casting is going to be a bear. (2) The Broadway version—even the latest incarnation that hybridized the Broadway and film versions—is not the 1978 Paramount film. The energy is different. The songs are different. This means something when one is trying to capitalize on an audience’s existing emotional attachment to a property. It is nearly impossible to deliver on such a promise when millions are saddled with memories of specific choreography, inflections, phrasing, etc. Overcoming this is no easy feat. (3) Television viewers have already chimed in on Grease and they did not emit a rousing “we go together.” NBC’s 2006 reality show Grease: You’re the One That I Want served as a televised audition for the 2007 Broadway revival’s Danny and Sandy and ranked 75^th in annual Nielsens, garnering about a quarter the number of American Idol’s “hopelessly devoted” viewers. Fox’s Glee also took a shot at the musical with its own “Glease,” one of the lowest rated episodes of its drooping fourth season. (And let’s not even get started on Smash.)

As a devoted fan and scholar of the musical, I always try to root for the genre’s triumph over the jaded sensibilities of contemporary audiences, producers, and ticket buyers. (Although the lasting wounds from viewing 7^th Heaven’s musical episode may never heal.) That said, I often find myself disappointed by the nasty effects a network’s or producer’s hope for commercial appeal has on the musical product itself. Although Paramount TV President Amy Powell sounds like a latter day Sylvester “Pat” Weaver (NBC 1950’s head of programming/chairman of the board and cheerleader for the “spectacular”) as she states, “Fox’s passion for engaging audiences with bold storytelling and live musical formats make it a perfect home for this special broadcast,” perhaps NBC’s current chairman Bob Greenblatt was a bit more honest and on point in his response to the Sound of Music, “We own it so we can repeat it every year for the next 10 years…Even if it does just a small fraction of what it did, it’s free to repeat it.” Who knows, maybe this new trend will catch fire and save the networks and produce a whole new generation of musical fans, or just maybe we’ll all get a real treat and Stockard Channing—high on Good Wife street cred—will reprise her role of Rizzo, only slightly more age inappropriate now than in 1978.

To be sure, Kristen Wiig, Andy Samberg, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney are not (all?) “Gangnam Style”-irrelevant over a year later, but few could have predicted how much more turbulent the new 2013 season would be for the show. In addition to the above-mentioned, gone are reliable everymen Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Jason Sudeikis. And when “Weekend Update” co-anchor Seth Meyers takes over Late Night early next year, as Splitsider notes, the remaining cast members will all have been born after SNL’s halcyon premiere year of 1975.

But you know the old saying: the more things change, the more they ObamacareshutdownDrunkUncleMileytwerk. Few television shows are as simultaneously resistant to and reliant upon rapid changes in casting, news cycles, and zeitgeists as Saturday Night Live, an ontological ebb and flow that owes largely to its liveness.  The first two episodes of the show’s new season capture this dynamic perfectly.

The season premiere began with a cold open addressing the political theme of the week, a routine the program began at roughly the same time Jon Stewart proved the demographic utility of mixing comedy and news.  Host Tina Fey’s subsequent monologue lightly hazed the five new cast members in order to set up that most SNL-iest of sketches, the gameshow whose premise wears thin right after its title card.  “New Cast Member or Arcade Fire?,” however, seemed less about further embarrassing freshmen cast members than it was about reminding them (and viewers) of the show’s proud place in the American television heritage.

If SNL’s season premiere re-asserted its right to self-importantly navel gaze, last week’s Miley Cyrus-hosted follow up found the show manically reaching outside its comfort zone for relevance.  With more familiar faces behind the impersonations, sketches like the “50 Shades of Grey Auditions” or the Piers Morgan Live parody might have felt a little less slapdash. Instead, the episode struggled to turn its instantly dated cultural references into a proper showcase for both the veteran and new performers.

Certainly, given the dearth of competition at the timeslot combined with the growing size of its cultural footprint, SNL isn’t going anywhere despite a pretty forgettable start to the season.  What is clear from the early returns, though, is that this season marks one of those once-a-decade changings of the guard.  The show will additionally have to find an original way to engage with digital media culture, and it cannot continue to ignore its absurdly high quotient of white dude-ness.  Yet for all these changes, SNL will return this weekend, putting forth an effort very different from, and yet somehow fundamentally similar to, what it has offered for almost 40 years.  Doing so–even in today’s time-shifted, cross-platform, demo-obsessed media milieu–continues to make it a key case for understanding American television culture.

Jerry "The King" Lawler

During the September 27, 2007 episode of WWE’s Smackdown, the show’s general manger Teddy Long suffered a heart attack during his planned in-ring wedding. This was part of a storyline. Five years later, on the September 10, 2012 edition of WWE’s Monday Night Raw, ringside and television commentator Jerry Lawler collapsed off-camera and would later be reported as having suffered a heart attack. This, unfortunately, was not a storyline. While both of these events ‘happened,’ only the latter was real – as real as anything could possibly get.

The real heart attack that took place on September 10 of this year left the WWE in a position no other television broadcaster ever has to face. This media production had to not only tell its audience on live broadcast television that a man just had a heart attack, but also convince their audience that a man actually had a heart attack. Before we get into what this all means, let’s take a look at what happened that night.

Jerry Lawler had been at the announce table with fellow commentator Michael Cole as he is almost every episode. These two men ‘call the action’ in the ring, narrating the events to give context and background information to the viewer. During a match, Lawler collapsed at ringside (off-camera) and the announcers went silent. All the home audience could hear was the ambient noise from the arena. After several minutes, Cole began calling the match on his own with no acknowledgement for Lawler’s absence. It was not until two segments later that Cole addressed the audience about the incident:

Professional wrestling has always had a unique relationship with reality, as the fictionalized nature of the performance is tacitly understood by the audience, leading to the assumption that whatever is seen is planned or ‘part of the act.’ How, then, is the audience supposed to react to this news, given the WWE’s constant reification of the idea that everything one sees is a story? The live broadcast gives them little time and resources to not only acknowledge the event, but to clarify its legitimacy. So they state (via Cole): “This is not part of tonight’s entertainment. This has happened… This is a real life situation.” This mantra was restated throughout the remaining 3-hour broadcast, with new details on the situation given each time.

Here one can begin to see the type of situation WWE found itself in. This is a company that operates on the assumption that whatever is seen on their broadcasts is part of a larger performance, a fictitious storyline. However, this unique convention has led to problems in the past. Take, for instance, when real life chairman of WWE Vince McMahon appeared as his ‘character’ Vince McMahon (think Stephen Colbert and ‘Stephen Colbert’) on a Raw broadcast and ‘died’ in a fiery limousine explosion.

While this was meant to be a ‘kayfabe’ event (meaning existing within the fiction of the program), there were possible real life consequences. As a publically traded company, WWE answers not only to their paying customers and fans, but to their stockholders as well. During the ‘McMahon death’ angle, CNBC reporter Darren Rovell questioned if purporting the head of your company has ‘died’ on your company’s official press release and website could be grounds for misleading stockholders. The company’s response:

“It is well known to our shareholders and our viewers that “Mr. McMahon” is a character portrayed by Vincent Kennedy McMahon, the founder and Chairman of World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc.”

Here we see a fascinating example of the WWE acknowledging the artifice of their promotion, citing ‘character’ and ‘story’ as reasons why such an event should not have real world consequences. Examples like this show that for WWE, the scripted segment is the norm, and reality is the exception to the rule, not the other way around. WWE expects viewers to know the fictive nature of the events on-screen, despite constant attempts to undermine their own artifice. Instead of just showing the limo explode on-screen, the storyline crept into all other forms of their media empire: website, press releases, WWE Magazine, and recap shows. Vince McMahon did not make public appearances for weeks during the angle. This is like if an Emmy-nominated actor whose character was killed off the show couldn’t go to the ceremony because the writers wanted to ‘keep the fiction alive.’

Teddy Long's "Storyline" Heart Attack

Returning to Jerry Lawler’s heart attack, what makes this event so fascinating is how no other television broadcast has to deal with such issues of reality/fiction. Part of this is due to the live nature of the performance, but Saturday Night Live, as an example of another live performance show, would rarely face this problem because they follow certain conventions in terms of content and portrayal. SNL rarely challenges standard expectations and so their audience is trained to easily tell what is a written sketch and what is not. However, WWE’s long history of bucking convention makes this negotiation more difficult, as can be seen with its past use of a heart attack in a storyline mentioned in this article’s opening. When little is off-limits in terms of storytelling fodder and anything can be expected, how can the audience tell when something truly unexpected happens?

Overall, the live fiction program is a rare part of the contemporary television landscape, and this special nature raises particular challenges and negotiations, particularly when it comes to the nature of fiction and reality, the planned and the spontaneous. Professional wrestling not only lives in this tenuous environment, it thrives upon it. However, existing within such a state of tension brings unique challenges with unique solutions.

Many of the popular contemporary radio shows that boast a live studio audience—such as American Public Media’s Prairie Home Companion or NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me—are prerecorded with a live studio audience and distributed through syndication, and therefore the actual broadcast schedule is very much detached from the live performance. Nevertheless, listeners get what I would consider to be constructed sense of liveness in hearing the clapping, laughing, breathing, and gaffes that are sonic markers of liveness, and contrast with the edited recordings we hear on shows like Radiolab or even Nights with Alice Cooper—to use a commercial example—that have clear traces of post-production in their polished sound.

Additionally, all of our recordings of old radio drama performances exist because they were transcribed on phonographs, the new media of the time. The laughter we hear from the audience on an episode of The Jack Benny Show is very much imbued with liveness, though we listen to it now eighty or so years after its production. These old radio recordings remind us of radio’s most unique trait as a medium: its ability for simultaneity, which is often held up as its most useful attribute. Whether or not this is true is debatable, but culturally the immediacy radio affords is reinforced by its direct address to the listener and its continuous flow, and our expectations for the medium are shaped by our experience with this liveness.

I return now to live radio performances, which I want to consider in this post along textual, industrial, and cultural lines. Let us go back to Nashville and the Grand Ole Opry. This radio show broadcasts two and a half hours of country music every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Tuesday (with two performances on Saturday night). The presence of a live audience functions in several ways to shape the meaning of the performance. For performers, the audience acts as a surrogate for the listeners at home, a group they can play to and address. The audience also models the ideal listener to those tuning in at home (or in the car, or through the Opry app, which you can download through iTunes), whose engagement and enthusiasm is signaled through clapping and other audible elements (whooping, cheering, etc.). Yet these live performances are also the product of the Grand Ole Opry‘s profit imperatives, as ticket prices bring in an additional revenue stream (the hall seats 4,400), selling for between $24 – $55. And the live audience aspect of the program also physically brings in a captive audience to sell back stage tours to, as well as items in its expansive gift shop, which offer the trademarked Grand Ole Opry line of clothing, the Grand Ole Opry line of perfume, packaged recordings of classic Grand Ole Opry shows, and much more.

Country western garb for baby in the Opry Shop!

On another level, these performances become a physical site of country music heritage and pilgrimage. It is one of Music City’s top tourist attractions, and these profit imperatives would mean nothing if this live radio show did not offer its audience something worth paying for, worth commemorating with a tee-shirt or bottle of perfume. Additionally, the show offers an immediate connection with the legacy of the Grand Ole Opry. The foyer of the Grand Ole Opry building is lined with history, including photos and information from its 87 years of broadcasting. This colludes with its old-timey name, the cozy and informal style performers use to address the audience, and, of course, the live music variety show format, which in itself connotes an old-fashioned style. This format showcases a live, aural history of country music, playing everything from fiddle and blue grass music to contemporary hat rock country and gospel.

The Grand Ole Opry’s mythic position in country music is epitomized in the pilot of ABC’s new television show Nashville, and the show begins with a performance at the Opry by Rayna James, the fictional central character in this drama about the country music industry. The Opry is a recognizable character throughout the episode, and it should be no surprise that Nashville is produced, in part, by Steve Buchanan, President of the Grand Ole Opry Group. Both programs are similar in their strategic promotion of country music. Like Glee and other television musicals, Nashville‘s music is available for purchase on iTunes. And the Grand Ole Opry similarly acts as a launching pad for country music artists currently on tour who often come on stage to perform their new single. We cannot divorce live radio from the production culture that shapes it, and here we see how the Grand Ole Opry acts as part of a larger brand that offers radio producers several opportunities for additional revenue streams, cultural engagement and a brand whose unique edge or difference is, in the case of the Grand Ole Opry,  built around its primary cultural position as a live radio performance.

One of the primary characteristics of television is its liveness, the ways in which the medium constructs a sense of presence and immediacy. McPherson adapts this idea for web environments by calling it “liveness with a difference,” highlighting how the web “structures a sense of causality in relation to liveness, [making it one where] we navigate and move through, often structuring a feeling that our own desire drives the moment” (462). She underlines the “volitional mobility” afforded by the Internet, the ways in which user experiences destabilize the orthodoxy of linearity and narrative that attend the consumption of other moving image media. That said, my experience streaming television feels more like “liveness with a lag.” Not only do I have to wait for clips to load before I can watch anything, but I am almost always watching dated content. And I can’t watch many of the things I want to because they are simply unavailable with the Roku technology—to say nothing of the frequency with which the device “freezes” when moving between channels. I am constantly rebooting it in an effort to get it to work properly and then waiting for the content to restart again.

Using Roku, it becomes clear that the liveness afforded by streaming television is hemmed in by the political economy of the medium. The industry practices that structure the experiences of streaming television are still in a state of “becoming.” Not everything streams, and when it does, it’s often older content re-circulated for this new platform. Moreover, devices that sync existing television sets with the Internet are imperfect technologies. The protocols for streaming television are tremendously in flux and seem to change with every corporate quarterly announcement and marketplace product launch. Nevertheless, the facts remains: there’s simply less contemporary television programming available via this new mode of distribution. In addition, it can involve the tricky enterprise of syncing an analog technology—my old, beloved TV set—with a digital stream. These two entities are not always a perfect match.

The moral of this particular story: be careful what you wish for. I saved money by cord-cutting and using Roku is, in many ways, similar to watching television as I always have. But it is different enough that I want to go back. I recently moved into a new apartment in a new state. Calling the cable company to set up service was at the very top of my “to-do” list. Of course, I need to wait nearly three weeks for installation. This seems especially cruel after a year that often felt like I was watching television on delay.

Mission accomplished? Kind of. This isn’t a story that can be boiled down to dollars and cents, though. Streaming television over the Internet involves many continuities with how I’d consumed TV for decades prior. But it also precipitated important changes in my consumption habits that warrant mention here. These continuities and differences are imbricated in developing industry practices related to the release of television content online, as well as technological developments in the convergence of television and the Internet via digital devices.

I follow Tara McPherson’s lead in “Reload: Liveness, Mobility, and the Web” where she describes the experience of consuming media in digital environments. In that essay, McPherson is interested in “exploring the specificity of the experience of using the web, of the web as mediator between human and machine, of the web as a technology of experience” so that she may describe the phenomenology of using the Internet to screen moving image media (460). My focus is on one iteration of the activities she describes: watching television over the Internet via a Roku box. Like McPherson, I am interested in the ways that “new” technology both continue and confound the experience of “old” media: what feels different and what changes, but also what feels similar and what remains the same. More pointedly, I want to use McPherson’s thoughts to explicate the feelings of liveness that attend streaming television online.

Receiving a television signal over the Internet via Roku involves several residual elements of television practice. With a Roku box, the consumer browses from a menu, selecting which services to add: Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, Crackle, and so on. This feels similar to picking service packages from a cable company: premium vs. basic, etc. Once these “channels” are chosen, Roku users can browse within them for content. This too is reminiscent of more traditional modes of television viewing; it’s like “zapping” until you find something you like—Roku even provides an “old school” remote. After a program is selected, the television screen goes blank and loads the program like an Internet clip, complete with a “Loading, Please Wait…” message. When this would happen, I felt as though I was waiting for commercials to end and “the real program” to start. Thus, protocols for TV distribution and reception developed in earlier contexts continue to shape viewers’ experiences with the medium in the instance of streaming TV online. Well-established paradigms for television spectatorship—changing channels, browsing for programs, waiting for a narrative to begin—still shape the practice of viewing television with a Roku box.

Yet for all of the continuities with prior modes of consuming television, my viewing experiences changed dramatically upon installing my Roku. By nature, I am a television grazer. I typically turn on the set and “zap” until I find something I like. But with the Roku, such grazing is more difficult. The technology’s design prevents users from simply turning on the television and finding programming already in progress. With Roku, every time you turn on the TV, you need to select content, wait for it to load, and only then can you actually watch anything. McPherson calls this the “scan and search” nature of web environments, the ways in which users can call up content at will. While this is characteristic of the ways that many people consume moving image media on the Internet, it isn’t characteristic of the way that I typically watch television. If “convergence” is often the term used to describe television practice in the contemporary moment, using a Roku box pointed to the divergence in the ways that I consume television vs. the ways I use the Internet. In part two, I will directly address issues related to available content and liveness.

Self-referentiality is a staple of 30 Rock‘s satire. Yet, I almost needed a “drop” and a spinning top to resurface from this live episode’s multi-layered meta-humor. The levels of satire unique to this live episode are not neutral self-referential gags. This play with 30 Rock‘s bounded structure is predicated, mainly, on gendered and racial dimensions. The show’s season-high level of viewers implicates the material cultural significance of 30 Rock‘s live episode.

30 Rock is certainly not the first scripted prime-time show to employ the “live-show” stunt (remember those live episodes of ER and Will & Grace?). However, critics have suggested that 30 Rock is comparatively a more appropriate show for a live episode. This notes Tina Fey’s background as a former SNL headwriter and 30 Rock‘s show-within-a-show premise and visual organization, although I would argue that 30 Rock constructs a skit comedy structure by editing in tangential scenes, a tactic made possible by the very fact that it is not a live show. Nevertheless, 30 Rock‘s integral relationship with live skit comedy cannot be overlooked.

The idea for this live episode originated during the 2007 Writer’s Guild Strike while the cast of 30 Rock performed live shows at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade theater. Two and a half years later, NBC announced on July 30th, 2010 that the upcoming fifth season would include a live episode, with a telecast of two versions: one for the East Coast and one for the West Coast. 30 Rock is usually shot on film, with one camera on a stage in Long Island City, Queens; however, sets and equipment were transported to 30 Rock‘s titular address at NBC Studios and the episode was filmed in typical live 3-camera set-up at SNL‘s home, Studio 8H.

Both real-time telecasts last Thursday employed several of 30 Rock‘s reoccurring themes to point to the show’s liveness. The live episode disciplines Liz’s errant femininity as it uses Julia Louis Dreyfus as a “hot-Liz-double” in tangential scenes Fey was unable to get to, and then references this as Jack tells Liz she looks better in her memory. Dreyfus’s performance of Liz employs racialized jokes about Jack’s male Indian-American secretary as she calls him a “Chai-boy” for the East Coast and “Aladdin” for the West. These performances are funny precisely because they point to the show’s liveness, and Dreyfus’s almost unreal and absurd exaggeration of Liz’s (racist) character.

30 Rock‘s altered live structure edits the diegetic FOX News skits and fake commercials into the show’s visual narrative, which showcases Tracy Jordan’s hyperbolic blackness through his “break” from a performance of Obama. This is visually emphasized as each version has a different FOX News caption under Tracy’s Obama that points both to the blackness of Obama Tracy and the liveness of the episode. The diegetic commercials undermine hegemonic masculinity through centralizing erectile dysfunction in Dr. Spacemen’s ad and the mutilation of ideal masculinity in Jon Hamm’s ad. The content of each commercial changes in 30 Rock‘ s two real-time episodes and colludes with “Technical Difficulty” interruptions to point to the liveness of the show, but the overall presentation of diminished manhood is the same. Jenna’s hyper-sexuality is racialized as she threatens to “slip-a-nip” live on TGS, clearly referencing both 30 Rock‘s liveness and Janet Jackson’s live Superbowl wardrobe malfunction.

There are certainly other significant points to be made about 30 Rock‘s live episode, such as NBC’s entire web page of “Live Episode” paratexts (you can take the trivia game on past live television or guess the differences between East and West Coast versions here). However, the most poignant moment of this episode was the insider reference to Rachel Dratch’s long absence on 30 Rock as Liz tells Dratch’s cleaning lady character Edwiga, “Haven’t seen you in a while.” This not only nods to Dratch’s 12 cameos in season one, but to her initial role on the pilot as Jenna DeCarlo – a character loosely based upon her history and friendship with Fey at Chicago’s Second City and SNL. The role was later changed to Jenna Maroney and cast with Jane Krakowski, suggesting that Dratch was replaced in favor of a more sexually appealing (less Jewish looking) actress. This contrasts with Dreyfus’s appropriate and even hot Jewishness,  which ultimately points to the limits of subversive satire amid 30 Rock‘s ambivalent hyperbolic racism and sexism.

The first Monday Night War began on September 4, 1995, when rival company World Championship Wrestling (WCW), having acquired the sport’s biggest draw, Hulk Hogan, launched the live show Monday Nitro on TNT.  For the first time in television history, two companies ran pay-per-view quality programming head-to-head every week at 9pm. Underwritten by Ted Turner, WCW aggressively challenged WWE’s flagship program Raw on USA (and then Spike).  WCW used the fact that Raw aired ‘live’ only once a month to gain an edge. WCW started airing at 8:57pm—before Raw—whereupon WCW president Eric Bischoff would reveal Raw’s results for that night, reminding viewers that WWE was ‘taped’ while Nitro was fresh and new and anything could happen.  Nitro defeated Raw for 84 consecutive weeks in cable ratings in 1996-8.

While WCW led during a crucial phase of this war, direct competition eventually drove up pay-per-view buyrates and television ratings for both leagues, and the quality of matches and angles was at an all-time high.  But it didn’t last.  In 2001, WCW, mired in financial woes and managerial incompetence, closed its doors and sold its assets to WWE, thus giving McMahon a monopoly over the market.  Since then, many have hoped that a new rival would emerge.

Total Nonstop Action (TNA) may be as just that.  Since TNA owner Dixie Carter hired Hulk Hogan to run creative operations in October 2009, the Nashville-based firm has been preparing for battle.  Recently, it has declared a second Monday Night War, and last Monday, March 8, TNA’s Impact aired on Spike head-to-head with Raw on USA.

But what are the prospects for this second Monday Night War?

Crucial to the enthusiasm that fans felt during the Monday Night Wars was pressing the ‘recall’ button on the remote, and watching WCW and WWE react to one another’s programming on the fly.  A nimble channel-flipping viewer emerged for wrestling in the late 1990s, and these shows appealed to this habit by creating what Jeremy Butler calls “liveness” in his recent book, Television Style.  Raw and Nitro often burst into orchestrated bedlam—as when anti-hero “Stone Cold” Steve Austin stormed the ring on a zamboni during one episode of Raw live from Detroit.  The zamboni temporarily took out the show’s audio while Austin dove over security and hammered the villainous Mr. McMahon.

Over the last decade, such eruptions of ‘live’ pandemonium have become increasingly rare.  If Impact can recreate this feel, it may be able to compete with Raw.

But if there is one constant in WWE’s history, it is the blind eye it turns to all competition until it can benefit from acknowledging it.  The problem for TNA is that WWE has no reason to do so in its case.  TNA currently lacks the mainstream visibly needed to encourage Raw viewers to channel flip.  Last Monday’s ratings seem to reflect this: Impact scored a 1.0 cable rating (1.4 million viewers) while Raw’s rating remained consistent with current trends: 3.4 (5.1 million viewers).  Unfortunately for TNA brass, Impact’s performance shows no improvement over its previous Thursday slot, suggesting that the show simply drew its committed viewers.

If the Monday Night Wars are to resume, TNA must recreate the ‘liveness’ that Raw shows only intermittently these days, and draw away enough viewers so that WWE is forced to break its blind eye principle, and react to TNA’s programming.

Let the die be cast!