Since the early days of television, most programs have been produced in New Amsterdam. New Amsterdam, then and now the largest city in the ASB, had the greatest concentration of resources and talent, so the majority of early studios were established there. While most programs were filmed in French, the majority of early actors were of Dutch descent: Jakob Vandersteur, Stefaan Troost, Marten Brandts, Laurens Olthuis, Hubert Boogaard, and Frederik Albers to name a few. A significant portion of acting talent came from nearby Christiana, such as Jan Dalstrom and Ingrid Borg. These and many others acted in the numerous television studios on lower Heerestraat. This led to what became known as the "Heerestraat Accent," a very slight Dutch- and Swedish- influenced accent in spoken French that signaled the speaker as someone cultured and influential. The Heerestraat Accent was taught in acting courses from the 1930s to the 1960s, when it gradually fell out of favor.
In the 1950s, the most popular television shows came in a number of genres: Game shows, Comedy variety shows, Famcoms, and Frontier Tales.
Game Shows and Comedy variety shows were quite similar to one another, in that neither were scripted. Game shows involved ordinary people competing in silly games to win prizes, while variety shows involved professional comedians performing brief comedic skits. Because they were unscripted and mostly featured people whose first language was Dutch, some Dutch words and phrases were frequently uttered in ostensibly French-language programs.
A Famcom is a scripted comedy program involving a family, hence the name "Famcom." In the early 1950s, most Famcoms involved a husband and wife, frequently newlyweds, while in the late 1950s most famcoms featured children as well. A typical famcom would involve a quirky or mischievous housewife or child as its primary focus character and the husband or father as the stable, authoritative core of the family, but gave ample screen time to other supporting characters.
Frontier Tales, or Leatherstockings, are stories that take place in the early-to-mid 18th century, frequently involving a single frontiersman and his adventures dealing with other frontiersmen and Indians, both of which can be friends and foes at times. These stories frequently involve escorting damsels through dangerous terrain, and espouse proto-environmentalist themes. Since many Frontier Tales' script writers were New Netherlanders of partly Iroquois descent, the Iroquois were generally depicted as heroic while historical rivals such as Hurons were depicted as savage.
Movies at this time were frequently mysteries and crime thrillers set in the seedy underbelly of New Amsterdam, although there were also comedies and musicals. Animation came into vogue for feature-length, family-oriented films, with production of these films centered in Chicagou and Toronto.
In the 1960s, more cities began to establish their own studios. The first new city was Chicagou in Upper Country. Far from the hustle-and-bustle of New Amsterdam, Chicagou's studios focused on the rural French- and English-speaking demographic. Actors in Chicagou studios spoke a more rustic variety of French, and occasionally English, with none of the Heerestraat accent that had begun to alienate inland audiences. Soon, there were copycat studios in Upper Louisiana, Upper Virginia, and Carolina, all of which catered to rural groups, and many of which simply reshot Upper Country programs with local actors.
Upper Country famcoms generally took place on a farm, and featured a cast that was uneducated, but clever in their own way. Most of these programs heavily featured animals as full-fledged characters instead of as props or background scenery, and the music featured on these programs was typically Mountain Music, an increasingly popular style that came from the Appalachians.
One style of program, the Teleromantique or Teleroman for short, became wildly popular in Huronia and Canada. Teleromans filmed numerous episodes on a shoestring budget, then aired them every weekday; each episode led into the next as a continuous serial rather than stand-alone episodes. The first Teleromans were period dramas, depicting interpersonal dramas in the rustic Upper Country frontiers; before long, Canadian and Huronian studios produced their own Teleromans that took place in the Canadian and Huronian frontiers, respectively. The harsh climate and remote setting were usually the drivers of conflict on these shows, and morality was presented as an essential survival skill.
This "Rural Period" of television was not to last, however. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, more and more families were moving from the countryside to cities, and the increasing focus on social issues made these rural programs seem isolated and out of touch with viewers. In the early '70s, most of the rural studios went out of business, and Chicagou shifted focus to the urban centers of Upper Country. In Huronia and Canada, however, the Teleroman continued on, though most new programs dropped the period frontier setting in favor of a modern urban one.
While variety comedies were declining in popularity in the northern parts of the country, they experienced a massive boom in the Spanish-speaking states. Cuba in particular became a center of Spanish-language TV in the early 1960s, located as it was midway between West Florida and East Dominica. Famous Spanish-speaking comedians brought a manic energy to the New Amsterdam variety show format, delighting audiences throughout the Caribbean. Additionally, Cuban TV pioneered using the Teleroman format for contemporary shows rather than period pieces.
Movies during the 1960s were varied. Comedies were frequently either romantic comedies or political satire, action-oriented films frequently used increasingly-tense international politics as a backdrop, and in the last years of the decade the gritty thriller genre gradually gave way to a more supernaturally-oriented horror genre.
By the 1970s, Chicagou had become nearly the equal of New Amsterdam in producing television content. New famcoms captured the struggles of poor, urban working-class families in both New Amsterdam and Chicagou. At the same time, a certain Charlotte-based studio in Carolina became wildly successful for producing "Blackcoms," famcoms where the majority of the cast was black. The struggles of blacks in the South had become a hot topic as pressure for full suffrage in West Florida gained national attention and the country became more attuned to the historically oppressed group. In Cherokee and Iroquoia, studios produced similar but less-successful "Indycoms" featuring all-native casts speaking native languages. Since these required dubbing or subtitling, and most studios lacked native-language experts to translate, most Indycoms were never brought into the ASB mainstream. A related phenomenon was the decline in the popularity of Frontier Tales, as modern-day audiences began to find the focus on the violent Indian distasteful.
Also in the 1970s, following on the establishment of the BSA in 1969, Chicagou-based television studios began to produce science fiction shows. These programs generally focused on a single spaceship and its crew as they explored various planets and interacted with various alien races, either as friends or as foes. Famcoms of the era would sometimes take cues from science fiction, featuring alien or robot characters interacting comically with ordinary humans.
While this was happening, Cuban TV studios began to experiment with edutainment, programming aimed specifically at educating and entertaining children. While the concept had been around for a long time, edutainment shows had never become particularly popular in the ASB. However, in the mid-to-late 1970s, several Cuban animation studios created shows which turned out to be breakout hits. Many of these shows were syndicated nationally, and Havana became the center of TV animation to counterbalance Chicagou's hold on feature-length movie animation.
Films of the 1970s frequently focused on outer space. Those films which focused on real life often focused on crime and war, and the most popular comedies were often parodies of more serious films.
The 1980s continued the famcom trends of the 1970s for the most part. In the action genre, the sharp decline of Leatherstockings left a void that was filled by crimefighting stories. Though the police procedural had first been invented in the late 1960s, a wide variety of crimefighting stories with varying degrees of realism and seriousness were developed.
In English-language television, Boston became more active than Charlotte or Savannah, particularly in the production of famcoms, though police procedurals and blackcoms were still overwhelmingly produced in Carolina. For the first time, TV shows produced in Havana achieved wide release, and the growth of Two Forts led to more shows being produced there. However even with these new studios producing television, Chicagou and New Amsterdam combined still outproduced the entire rest of the nation.
Films of the 1980s were as varied as films of the 1970s, and featured many of the same themes, but there were changes behind the scenes. There was a push to standardize age ratings for films; whereas before, each state had its own rating system to determine what films were suitable for younger audiences, the Confederal Motion Picture Ratings Board, or CMPRB imposed a national standard. As a result, movie producers had clearer limitations on subject matter, and those limitations were becoming more lax year by year. Action films featured heavier weapons and more muscular protagonists, while horror films became more daring in their depiction of violence and gore. On the lighter side of film, romantic comedies were less popular, with youth comedies taking their place. Finally, the geopolitical changes of the late '80s and early '90s led to increased interest in foreign films in the ASB, especially Californian and Russian ones.
The 1990s featured a revival of the famcom, with a new subgenre focusing on single, career-oriented adults rather than newlyweds. New Amsterdam was both the pioneer and the leading creator of these adult-oriented comedies. Other famcoms focused on the daily lives of adolescents at school, rather than younger children and their families, but the traditional family-focused famcom format still remained popular. Action-oriented programs became less popular in favor of mystery dramas, and Cuban educational animated programming gave way to childrens' programs that were purely entertaining.
1990s films of all genres began to feature philosophical and psychological themes more heavily, where they had been present in a more subtle form in earlier films. Youth comedies remained popular with teenagers, but a new type of film became more and more prominent: The tearjerker. Stories about loss, tragedy, and the horrors of war stood a good chance at earning movie industry accolades, and more and more films were being made that tugged at audiences' heartstrings.
The 2000s kept the famcom genres of the '90s, but the family-oriented setting for which the genre had been named had all but died off. Instead, famcoms had more or less neatly split into youth-oriented school life famcoms and adult-oriented career famcoms, which many academics consider to be its own distinct genre, sometimes dubbed "carcoms," though the term is not widely used. Dramatic, crime-oriented shows featured a resurgence, but with a novel twist: many of these new crime shows were produced from the perspective of the criminal, rather than the "good guys."
Animation underwent a shift as well. Instead of being solely for children, a select few animated comedies oriented solely towards adult audiences became massively popular. These shows were usually produced in the "triangle" of New England, New Amsterdam, and Christiania.
Despite these changes, the geographic share of TV show production in the ASB had more or less stabilized, with New Amsterdam producing roughly a third of programs and Chicagou producing an additional sixth, with the various other states producing the remaining half; Cuba and Allegheny were the biggest contributors to TV production in the "runners-up" states.
Films in the 2000s were as varied as any other decade. Comedies tended to focus more on character interaction than on situational humor, while action films seemed to split into two main categories: gritty running-and-shooting, and cinematic special effects festivals. Horror became more diverse, with different films focusing on gory realism, supernatural horror, survivalist "plague stories," and even self-parodies that elicit laughs as much as screams.
The 2010s are called a "new golden age" of television. New television studios connected to new media companies are popping up seemingly overnight, and many of them produce well-written, quality programming. A wide variety of critically-acclaimed dramas has led the charge, though comedies and even horror (long thought to be only viable on the big screen) are popular as well. The famcom is beginning to revive, though many new famcoms focus on the various recent social changes that have happened recently in the ASB.
