By the time Les Brown published his first Encyclopedia of Television in 1978, he was already worthy of an entry of his own.

Brown, who died Nov. 4 at the age of 84, was still an editor at Variety, the show business daily, when he published Televi$ion: The Business Behind the Box in 1971. Coverage of TV at that time was largely a matter of day-after reviews, programming announcements and celebrity puff pieces. Television was treated as something magical and mysterious, as if those “free” programs just appeared out of thin air like electronic manna.

Expanding on his nearly two decades covering radio and TV for the trade publication, Brown lifted the veil on network television, using a watershed year in the life of CBS’s programming division to illuminate the scheduling chess game and the astounding amounts of money involved.

“The business of television,” Brown wrote, “is to deliver audiences to advertisers.”

The observation may seem obvious today, but at the time the notion that programs weren’t television’s products but rather its lures, was a revelation to the millions watching the “big three” networks every day.

Along with Horace Newcomb’s 1974 TV: The Most Popular Art, which dared to take entertainment programming seriously, The Business Behind the Box became an inspiration and essential guide for a new generation of television critics and reporters that asked tougher questions about the medium’s impact and social responsibility.

Brown’s encyclopedias provided succinct, clear explanations of the networks’ histories, key players, technical terms and slang, and became a crucial reference for reporters covering the TV beat, for scholars and for any couch potato who was curious about how and why the television industry worked as it did.

Ron Simon, a curator at the Paley Center for Media in New York, called Brown a pioneering television scholar.

“The several editions of his Encyclopedia of Television were essential reading to understand the sweep of media history,” Simon said. “His Channels magazine charted the impact of the cable revolution, showing all the forces at work creating a new type of TV. Les Brown, as well as any media historian, documented all the forces at work that resulted in our TV programming: creative, business, and regulatory. He shared his wisdom at many conferences around the world, especially the Paley Center.”

In 1982, Brown launched the magazine Channels of Communication (later just Channels). Unlike TV Guide, which served mainly as a program guide, and Broadcasting, which was more concerned with hirings, firings and bottom lines, Channels took an analytical approach to broadcast television’s strategies, trends, profitability and ethics.

Brown served as a Peabody Awards board member from 1982 to 1988. Newcomb, whose board tenure overlapped Brown’s by a year, recalled that he “made everyone think twice — or more — about their judgments of the media, and Peabody was strengthened by his own strong arguments.”

Newcomb, who retired last summer as Peabody director, also called Brown “a giant among television commentators in the formative years of the medium.  He was a fierce critic in the best sense of the term, always concerned with what television meant for the society at large.”

In later years, Brown taught at Yale, Columbia and Fordham universities. But his lasting legacy is the approach to reporting and critiquing television that his books exemplified.

As Variety co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton tweeted upon hearing of Brown’s passing, Televi$ion: The Business Behind the Box “remains required reading.”

More recently, as ABC has signed Katie Couric to a syndicated talk show deal, the network’s only remaining soap, General Hospital, appears all the more vulnerable. (Couric’s show is scheduled to air in GH’s current time slot on ABC’s owned & operated stations.)  ABC president Anne Sweeney declared a survival of the fittest competition between GH, The Chew, The Revolution, and Couric, a contest GH seems poised to lose.  While president of ABC Daytime Brian Frons has pitched the cancellations and replacement series as responses to audience demands, there is no question that the main motivation is that the binge-and-purge “lifestyle” pairing can be produced much more cheaply than a soap, and thus can draw a smaller audience and still allow the network to come out ahead.

Yet these developments have been accompanied by some promising high points, steps that offer fascinating illustrations of new industry/fan interactions.  These shifts have exposed and magnified the tensions between network management, the soaps’ creative talent, and audiences, and have suggested that management might be taking viewers’ perspectives into account in a way they have not for many years.  ABC is clearly allowing AMC and OLTL some budgetary leeway in wrapping up their shows, as every day brings announcements of former cast members returning to the screen as the programs conclude.  Here, at least, fans and the soaps’ creative teams are being afforded the chance to have a proper send-off.

Even more intriguing are the behind-the-scenes developments at General Hospital.  Perhaps because there is nothing left to lose, soon after the cancelation announcement, ABC fired GH’s long-running head writer, Bob Guza, a man that fans perpetually blame for the serial’s decline in quality over the past fifteen years.  These complaints are not centered around unpopular couplings or preposterous plot twists; instead they are protests against the program’s male-centered, even misogynist, storytelling, with male mobster characters and their ever-faithful female love interests skewing the program’s moral compass in disturbing directions.  Replacing Guza is a staff writer, Garin Wolf, who wrote the show during the 2007-2008 Writers Guild strike in ways that met with fan approval (along with many other soap writers, Wolf worked under the Guild’s fi-core status).  Among Wolf’s many admirable qualities, in the eyes of fans and former fans, is his respect for and investment in the history of the on-screen world, as well as his privileging of female characters and commitment to romance-centered storylines.

At a time when the future of the show is in grave doubt, ABC finally seems willing to attend to audience complaints. (NBC’s Days of Our Lives is also making major changes behind the scenes, so this may be an industry-wide trend.) Almost none of the discourse on the end of the soaps has considered the content of the shows themselves, seeing such developments as the expanding media universe, the fragmentation of audiences, and the rising numbers of women in the workplace as explanation enough.  Yet many viewers (and former viewers) insist that the problem with the soaps is that they are just not as good as they used to be, and that they would gladly watch more, or return to watching, with some different kinds of storytelling.  To see the networks and production companies giving some credence to that theory as they make these backstage changes is quite remarkable.  The recent wave of cancellations has no one optimistic about the big picture future of the genre.  However, the industry’s newfound investment in heeding viewer concerns may help to make whatever time is left truer to fans’ desires for classic soap storytelling.

In pursuit of this goal, Antenna will be clearing its schedule for the next week in order to cover all of the new network shows. Starting tomorrow, our contributors will be posting their first impressions and responses to the new shows, sorted into separate posts for each network. Two days following the premiere of each subsequent show, a set of posts responding to it will be added to its respective network post. These will be updated throughout the week, and into next week, until all the premiere week shows have been covered! Tomorrow will also include posts on the shows that have already premiered on the CW and NBC.

Please join us for this very special Antenna event and put in your two cents on the new shows that are vying for our attention in an ever-crowded media landscape. Let us know what you love, what you hate, and what you are secretly ashamed to want to watch. Place your bets on what will or will not be successful in the year to come. Tell us what you think is showing us something truly new, reviving old tropes, and that media scholars should really care about. Tune in to premiere week with Antenna, and we hope you enjoy this very special time of year.

The paragon of this model is Leo Laporte’s TWiT network (named for its flagship program This Week in Tech), which takes a basic area (new media) and spins out variations including This Week in Law (tech news from a legal perspective), This Week in Fun (tech-related human interest stories) and MacBreak Weekly (Mac news).  From his cottage in Petaluma, Laporte produces programming for around $800 an hour, compared to minimum $10,000 for cable news networks, enabling profits with just one or two sponsors (paying higher CPMs than most “real” television could ever charge).

As a future for network television, this model has obvious limits.  TWiT, TechCrunch, Revision3 and similar operations won’t be doing scripted or reality television anytime soon:  it’s mostly commentary, interviews, and news (e.g. CNET TV, which leverages the newsgathering resources of CNET News).

Nonetheless, some distinctive features of the cottage network model make it interesting, such as:

• The apotheosis of simulcasting:  Most of TWiT’s or CNET’s shows work equally well in audio as video, allowing them to exploit a range of distribution methods, technologies, and audience preferences.  This isn’t a 1950s network trying to overcome legacy hardware (i.e. radio); it’s a 2010 network practicing hardware agnosticism.  (Thanks in part to Audible.com‘s advertising strategy, audio is also where a lot of the money currently is, just as radio financed the transition to television.)
• The fully-integrated audience:  Because most shows are streamed live, audience discussion isn’t just a post hoc backchannel–the Chat Room is a fully developed character, showing up at important moments to supply information, move discussion forward, or provide comic relief.  “The chat room will know,” say hosts when unsure of a fact, and sure enough, the Chat Room always does.  Hosts read the audience’s wittiest jokes and smartest comments in real time, and use the Chat Room’s questions to monitor their clarity.  Lost fans—heck, Talk of the Nation fans—can only dream of being so important to the moment of production.
• The high-tech videolow: Cottage networks boast of their distance from older media:  techno-mammals running circles around TV dinosaurs.  It’s an old trope, of course, which makes it even curiouser that it is invoked so often.  You won’t listen long to the TWiT network before Laporte tweaks his slow and greedy former bosses at TechTV.  Similarly, The Sound of Young America‘s Jesse Thorn, a talented interviewer who parlayed his college radio show into a cottage mini-network, frequently mocks (and thereby highlights) his lowly position in the mediascape. More is at stake here, obviously, than pride; in a reputation economy, chastising big media firms that “don’t get it” helps establish credibility and independence.  Thus Skype becomes another character on these shows: the frequent technical difficulties are a charming return to the “Please Stand By” days of early television, but also underwrite claims to “videolow” through which technological elites position themselves as outsider-underdogs.
• The tech-personality ecosystem:  Remember those ads for the WB—Dawson dancing with Felicity, Angel flirting with Prue? Cottage networks instantiate that fantasy by promiscuously mixing personalities across a spectrum of old and new media. For example, one of MacBreak Weekly’s most popular guests, Merlin Mann, is also a blogger, podcaster, and Twitter superstar; Xeni Jardin (of über-blog Boing Boing) is an occasional guest on the TWiT network as well as a mainstream radio and television personality; geek goddess Molly Wood, aside from her regular gigs on CNET’s Buzz Out Loud and (the just cancelled) Gadgettes, frequently shows up on TWiT; and so on.  The result is a self-reinforcing star system supported by the multiplier effects of a self-reinforcing media system, one (adjusted for scale, natch) that even the TV-Hollywood nexus should envy.

I don’t know whether this model is currently just a geek phenomenon, but there is little doubt it will spread, demonstrating the power of leveraging social networks, tapping into personality ecosystems, exploiting different revenue streams, and knowing one’s audience well.  It’s Yochai Benkler’s “networked information economy” finally come to television production.

(Photo Credit:  Leo Laporte;  released under a Creative Commons License – CC BY-NC-SA)