No Rural Purge

the show would have die naturally but allow maybe that 'rural-hillibily' still be part of it for a long time? i loved the beverly hillibiles so maybe i'm biased
 
Something I've wondered about...

Was Silverman's mid-70s T & A regime at ABC a response to his earlier rural-purge at CBS? That is, were things like Love Boat and Three's Company an attempt to win over the rural base that had abandoned CBS after the purge?

Not that being rural makes you neccessarily like TNS, but somehow I see a greater affinity between, say, Hee Haw and Love Boat then, say, All In The Family and Love Boat.
 
Isn't there some debate as to whether the so called "rural purge" was actually a deliberate act by CBS and not part of a normal cycle of aging television shows being ushered out the door?
 
Isn't there some debate as to whether the so called "rural purge" was actually a deliberate act by CBS and not part of a normal cycle of aging television shows being ushered out the door?

Well, I think the general idea is that not only were the old shows rural(whcih could just be a function of there being a big rural or small-town audience) but the new shows werre decidedly urban in their orientation.

You can check the wikipedia article to see precisely how the cycle of cancellations and start-ups played out. For now, I'll just observe anecdotally that when Gomer Pyle, Hee Haw and the Beverly Hillbillies are being tossed out, while All In The Family, MASH, and Bob Newhart are being brought in, it's not completely off-the-wall to conclude that there was an intentional shift going on.
 
The rural purge was inevitable as long as advertisers dominated television broadcasting. When CBS started skewing older again in the '80s with shows like Dallas and Murder, She Wrote, their bottom line suffered as advertisers, recognizing that CBS' large viewer base was concentrated in demographics that didn't spend a lot of money, started turning away from them. It's also why The WB was so successful in the '90s, and why The CW and ABC Family are so successful today -- their ratings are tiny compared to the big networks, but they're overwhelmingly concentrated in the lucrative teenage/young adult demographic, and advertisers love them for it.

IMO, the only thing that could really prevent the rural purge from fully sweeping the American TV landscape would be to have a successful public or non-profit broadcaster in the US, one that doesn't depend on advertising and is instead focused on serving the widest swath of the American public rather than the most lucrative demographics. NET, a non-profit educational broadcaster in the '50s and '60s, would be a great source of butterflies for this, especially given their shift in the '60s towards more entertainment and current affairs programming with mass appeal (such as Mister Rogers' Neighborhood). It had a big problem, however, in the form of their news/documentary program NET Journal. It was acclaimed as one of the best such programs on television, especially after CBS' news department was gutted by pressure from advertisers, but it also infuriated conservatives (especially their affiliates in the South) with its damning reports on racism and poverty. One of those conservatives was Richard Nixon, and you can bet that that figured into the government's management of what became PBS. Furthermore, NET was always dependent on grants from the Ford Foundation, and by the late '60s, they'd invested $130 million into the network with little to show for it. When they cut their funding, this forced affiliates to turn to the government for assistance, leading to the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1967 and later PBS in 1970.

Ironically, "dumbing down" NET may well be the only way to save it and prevent the conservative movement of the '70s from destroying it once it becomes federally-funded. That, or find a way to get it self-sustaining in the '60s while keeping it non-profit, without having to turn to government funding in the first place. (Maybe it scores a hit program or two, or an episode of NET Journal makes a particularly big splash and resonates with a large section of the populace, leading to universities, charitable foundations, and cultural associations providing investment?) That way, you'd have a successful fourth network that isn't under pressure from advertisers to cancel everything with a tree, as Pat Buttram from Green Acres described the rural purge. I find it ironic how the conservatives of the time, by essentially declaring war on public broadcasting, enabled the domination of television by the very same "coastal elites" that they railed against.
 
Televising the Grand Ole Opry showcase seems like a good cultural fit for a slightly different NET, or even PBS, honestly. PBS certainly headed in this direction in recent decades, anyway.

Another way to look at this challenge would be to restructure the TV ad market. Somehow make it more broadly regional, rather than based on exact local affiliate rates. If you've got 4-6 markets rather than dozens, some shows appealing to the south will make it on the air.
 
Ironically CBS is the most successful network these days and has been for a decade yet IIRC their viewer base is far and away the oldest.

The thing is NOT that older viewers don't spend money. They actually have far more money available than young viewers, it is that older people tend not to change brands or try new products at near the rates of younger people.

Thus, advertisers do not like spending money on ad time directed at older viewers.
 
Televising the Grand Ole Opry showcase seems like a good cultural fit for a slightly different NET, or even PBS, honestly. PBS certainly headed in this direction in recent decades, anyway.

Televising the Grand Ole Opry would be a perfect fit for both NET and for slowing the rural purge. It's a regional cultural showcase that would both fit the network's educational mission and provide populist entertainment, the Opry and the musicians alike would be more than happy to use NET to reach a national stage, and NET could use the Opry as the carrot to convince Southern affiliates upset over the content of NET Journal to stay with the network lest they lose the popular Opry broadcasts. Plus, it's a program rooted in rural culture, and its success could convince NET to greenlight other rural-themed shows, especially once the rural purge hits the commercial networks.

The highbrow, educational side of NET would have to find a way to coexist with the network's new rural identity, but OTL's NPR proves that it can be done remarkably well. A Prairie Home Companion, anyone?

Ironically CBS is the most successful network these days and has been for a decade yet IIRC their viewer base is far and away the oldest.

The thing is NOT that older viewers don't spend money. They actually have far more money available than young viewers, it is that older people tend not to change brands or try new products at near the rates of younger people.

Thus, advertisers do not like spending money on ad time directed at older viewers.

That's a good point I didn't think of. Young people have less brand loyalty than their parents and grandparents, because they've just started being consumers in their own right. That makes them an inviting target for marketers, far out of proportion to their spending power. It's the same reason why family films and TV shows are such merchandising cash cows. An 55-year-old man may have lots of money, but he's already decided what brands he trusts and doesn't trust, and all the advertising in the world won't change his mind. In fact, advertising can backfire with them -- just look at the notorious "not your father's Oldsmobile" ad campaign for the fifth-generation Cutlass Supreme in the late '80s, and how it destroyed generations of brand loyalty and ultimately the Oldsmobile brand itself.
 
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