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 SOCIAL PROBLEMS. Vol. 26. No. 3. February 1979

PRIME TIME IDEOLOGY: THE HEGEMONIC PROCESS

IN TELEVISION ENTERTAINMENT*

TODD GITLIN
University of California, Berkeley

Many of the formal conventions of American television entertainment are sup-

ports of a larger hegemonic structure. After proposing the concept of ideological
hegemony as a useful approach to questions of ideology and control, I indicate inter-
related ways in which television messages are integrated into the dominant system
of discourse and the prevailing structures of labor, consumption, and politics, in par-
ticular through these formal features of prime-time network programs: (1)format and
formula (including the rigidity of program length and the narrative curve of action);
(2) genre; (3) setting and character type; (4) topical slant; and (5) the solution im-
posed on the fictional problem. Within certain definite limits-related both to the
core of dominant values and to market tolerances-these formal structures are flex-
ible; for example, some of Norman Lear's comedies have disrupted stereotypical
conventions of static character and imposed solution. The hegemonic commercial
cultural system routinely incorporates some aspects of alternative ideology and re-
jects the unassimilable. I trace this process to the self-contradictory nature of the
dominant ideology.

Every society works to reproduce itself-and its internal conflicts-within its cultural order,
the structure of practices and meanings around which the society takes shape. So much is
tautology. In this paper I look at contemporary mass media in the United States as one cultural
system promoting that reproduction. I try to show how ideology is relayed through various
features of American television, and how television programs register larger ideological structures
and changes. The question here is not, What is the impact of these programs? but rather a prior
one, What do these programs mean? For only after thinking through their possible meanings as
cultural objects and as signs of cultural interactions among producers and audiences may we
begin intelligibly to ask about their "effects."
The attempt to understand the sources and transformations of ideology in American society
has been leading social theorists not only to social-psychological investigations, but to a long
overdue interest in Antonio Gramsci's (1971) notion of ideological hegemony. It was Gramsci
who, in the late Twenties and Thirties, with the rise of Fascism and the failure of the Western
European working-class movements, began to consider why the working class was not necessarily
revolutionary; why it could, in fact, yield to Fascism. Condemned to a Fascist prison precisely
because the insurrectionary workers' movement in Northern Italy just after World War I failed,
Gramsci spent years trying to account for the defeat, resorting in large measure to the concept of
hegemony: bourgeois domination of the thought, the common sense, the life-ways and everyday
assumptions of the working class. Gramsci countetposed "hegemony" to "coercion"; these Were
two analytically distinct processes through which ruling classes secure the consent of the
dominated. Gramsci did not always make plain where to draw the line between hegemony and
coercion; or rather, as Perry Anderson shows convincingly (1976)1, he drew the line differently at
different times. Nonetheless, ambiguities aside, Gramsci's distinction was a great advance for
radical thought, for it called attention to the routine structures of everyday thought-down to

* An earlier version of this paper was delivered to the 73rd Annual Meeting of the American Sociological
Association, San Francisco, September, 1978. Thanks to Victoria Bonnell, Bruce Dancis, Wally Goldfrank,
Karen Shapiro and several anonymous reviewers for stimulating comments on earlier drafts.
1. Anderson has read Gramsci closely to tease out this and other ambiguities in Gramsci's diffuse and at
times Aesopian texts. (Gramsci was writing in a Fascist prison, he was concerned about passing censorship,
and he was at times gravely ill.)
 252 GITLIN

"common sense" itself-which worked to sustain class domination and tyranny. That is to say,
paradoxically, it took the working class seriously enough as a potential agent of revolution to
hold it accountable for its failures.
Because Leninism failed abysmally throughout the West, Western Marxists and non-Marxist
radicals have both been drawn back to Gramsci, hoping to address the evident fact that the
Western working classes are not predestined toward socialist revolution.2 In Europe this fact
could be taken as strategic rather than normative wisdom on the part of the working class; but in
America the working class is not only hostile to revolutionary strategy, it seems to disdain the
socialist goal as well. At the very least, although a recent Peter Hart opinion poll showed that
Americans abstractly "favor" workers' control, Americans do not seem to care enough about it
to organize very widely in its behalf. While there are abundant "contradictions" throughout
American society, they are played out substantially in the realm of "culture" or "ideology,"
which orthodox Marxism had consigned to the secondary category of "superstructure." Mean-
while, critical theory-especially in the work of T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer-had
argued with great force that the dominant forms of commercial ("mass") culture were
crystallizations of authoritarian ideology; yet despite the ingenuity and brilliance of particular
feats of critical exegesis (Adorno, 1954, 1974; Adorno and Horkheimer, 1972), they seemed to be
arguing that the "culture industry" was not only meretricious but wholly and statically complete.
In the Seventies, some of their approaches along with Gramsci's have been elaborated and furthered
by Alvin W. Gouldner (1976; see also Kellner, 1978) and Raymond Williams (1973), in distinctly
provocative ways.
In this paper I wish to contribute to the process of bringing the discussion of cultural hegemony
down to earth. For much of the discussion so far remains abstract, almost as if cultural hegemony
were a substance with a life of its own, a sort of immutable fog that has settled over the whole
public life of capitalist societies to confound the truth of the proletarian telos. Thus to the ques-
tions, "Why are radical ideas suppressed in the schools?", "Why do workers oppose socialism?"
and so on, comes the single Delphic answer: hegemony. "Hegemony" becomes the magical ex-
planation of last resort. And as such it is useful neither as explanation nor as guide to action. If
"hegemony" explains everything in the sphere of culture, it explains nothing.
Concurrent with the theoretical discussion, but on a different plane, looms an entire sub-
industry criticizing and explicating specific mass-cultural products and straining to find "eman-
cipatory" if not "revolutionary" meanings in them. Thus in 1977 there was cacophony about the
TV version of Roots; this year the trend-setter seems to be TV's handling of violence. Mass media
criticism becomes mass-mediated, an auxiliary sideshow serving cultural producers as well as the
wider public of the cultural spectacle. Piece by piece we see fast and furious analysis of this
movie, that TV show, that book, that spectator sport. Many of these pieces have merit one by
one, but as a whole they do not accumulate toward a more general theory of how the cultural
forms are managed and reproduced-and how they change. Without analytic point, item-by-item
analyses of the standard fare of mass culture run the risk of degenerating into high-toned gossip,
even a kind of critical groupie-ism. Unaware of the ambiguity of their own motives and
strategies, the partial critics may be yielding to a displaced envy, where criticism covertly asks to
be taken into the spotlight along with the celebrity culture ostensibly under criticism. Yet another
trouble is that partial critiques in the mass-culture tradition don't help us understand the hold

2. In my reading, the most thoughtful specific approach to this question since Gramsci, using comparative
structural categories to explain the emergence or absence of socialist class consciousness, is Mann (1973).
Mann's analysis takes us to structural features of American society that detract from revolutionary con-
sciousness and organization. Although my paper does not discuss social-structural and historical features, I
do not wish their absence to be interpreted as a belief that culture is all-determining. This paper discusses
aspects of the hegemonic culture, and makes no claims to a more sweeping theory of American society.
 Prime Time Ideology 253

and the limits of cultural products, the degree to which people do and do not incorporate mass-
cultural forms, sing the jingles, wear the corporate T-shirts, and most important, permit their
life-worlds to be demarcated by them.
My task in what follows is to propose some features of a lexicon for discussing the forms of
hegemony in the concrete. Elsewhere I have described some of the operations of cultural
hegemony in the sphere of television news, especially in the news's framing procedures for op-
3
position movements (Gitlin, 1977a,b) . Here I wish to speak of the realm of entertainment: about
television entertainment in particular-as the most pervasive and (in the living room sense)
familiar of our cultural sites-and about movies secondarily. How do the formal devices of TV
prime-time programs encourage viewers to experience themselves as anti-political, privately ac-
cumulating individuals (also see Gitlin, 1977c)? And how do these forms express social conflict,
containing and diverting the images of contrary social possibilities? I want to isolate a few of the
routine devices, though of course in reality they do not operate in isolation; rather, they work in
combination, where their force is often enough magnified (though they can also work in con-
tradictory ways). And, crucially, it must be borne in mind throughout this discussion that the
forms of mass-cultural production do not either spring up or operate independently of the rest of
social life. Commercial culture does not manufacture ideology; it relays and reproduces and pro-
cesses and packages and focuses ideology that is constantly arising both from social elites and
from active social groups and movements throughout the society (as well as within media
organizations and practices).
A more complete analysis of ideological process in a commercial society would look both above
and below, to elites and to audiences. Above, it would take a long look at the economics and
politics of broadcasting, at its relation to the FCC, the Congress, the President, the courts; in
case studies and with a developing theory of ideology it would study media's peculiar combina-
tion and refraction of corporate, political, bureaucratic and professional interests, giving the
media a sort of limited independence-or what Marxists are calling "relative autonomy"-in the
upper reaches of the political-economic system. Below, as Raymond Williams has insisted,
cultural hegemony operates within a whole social life-pattern; the people who consume mass-
mediated products are also the people who work, reside, compete, go to school, live in families.
And there are a good many traditional and material interests at stake for audiences: the political
inertia of the American population now, for example, certainly has something to do with the con-
tinuing productivity of the goods-producing and -distributing industries, not simply with the
force of mass culture. Let me try to avoid misunderstanding at the outset by insisting that I will
not be arguing that the forms of hegemonic entertainment superimpose themselves automatically
and finally onto the consciousness or behavior of all audiences at all times: it remains for
sociologists to generate what Dave Morley (1974)' has called "an ethnography of audiences,"
and to study what Ronald Abramson (1978) calls "the phenomenology of audiences" if we are to
have anything like a satisfactory account of how audiences consciously and unconsciously pro-
cess, transform, and are transformed by the contents of television. For many years the subject of
media effects was severely narrowed by a behaviorist definition of the problem (see Gitlin, 1978a);
more recently, the "agenda-setting function" of mass media has been usefully studied in news
media, but not in entertainment. (On the other hand, the very pervasiveness of TV entertainment
makes laboratory study of its "effects" almost inconceivable.) It remains to incorporate occa-
sional sociological insights into the actual behavior of TV audiences' into a more general theory

3. In Part III of the latter, I discuss the theory of hegemony more extensively. This will be published in book
form by the University of California Press in 1980.
4. See also, Willis (n.d.) for an excellent discussion of the limits of both ideological analysis of cultural ar-
tifacts and the social meaning system of audiences, when each is taken by itself and isolated from the other.
5. Most strikingly, see Blum's (1964) findings on black viewers putting down TV shows while watching
254 GITLIN

of the interaction-a theory which avoids both the mechanical assumptions of behaviorism and
the trivialities of the "uses and gratifications" approach.
But alas, that more general theory of the interaction is not on the horizon. My more modest at-
tempt in this extremely preliminary essay is to sketch an approach to the hegemonic thrust of
some TV forms, not to address the deflection, resistance, and reinterpretation achieved by au-
diences. I will show that hegemonic ideology is systematically preferred by certain features of TV
programs, and that at the same time alternative and oppositional values are brought into the
cultural system, and domesticated into hegemonic forms at times, by the routine workings of the
market. Hegemony is reasserted in different ways at different times, even by different logics; if
this variety is analytically messy, the messiness corresponds to a disordered ideological order, a
contradictory society. This said, I proceed to some of the forms in which ideological hegemony is
embedded: format and formula; genre; setting and character type; slant; and solution. Then
these particulars will suggest a somewhat more fully developed theory of hegemony.

Format and Formula

Until recently at least, the TV schedule has been dominated by standard lengths and cadences,
standardized packages of TV entertainment appearing, as the announcers used to say, "same
time, same station." This week-to-weekness-or, in the case of soap operas, day-to-
dayness-obstructed the development of characters; at least the primary characters had to be
preserved intact for next week's show. Perry Mason was Perry Mason, once and for all; if you
watched the reruns, you couldn't know from character or set whether you were watching the
first or the last in the series. For commercial and production reasons which are in practice in-
separable-and this is why ideological hegemony is not reducible to the economic interests of
elites-the regular schedule prefers the repeatable formula: it is far easier for production com-
panies to hire writers to write for standardized, static characters than for characters who develop.
Assembly-line production works through regularity of time slot, of duration, and of character to
convey images of social steadiness: come what may, Gunsmoke or Kojak will check in to your
mind at a certain time on a certain evening. Should they lose ratings (at least at the "upscale"
reaches of the "demographics," where ratings translate into disposable dollars),, their
replacements would be-for a time, at least!-equally reliable. Moreover, the standard curve of
narrative action-stock characters encounter new version of stock situation; the plot thickens,
allowing stock characters to show their standard stuff; the plot resolves-over twenty-two or fifty
minutes is itself a source of rigidity and forced regularity.
In these ways, the usual programs are performances that rehearse social fixity: they express and
cement the obduracy of a social world impervious to substantial change. Yet at the same time
there are signs of routine obsolescence, as hunks of last year's regular schedule drop from sight
only to be supplanted by this season's attractions. Standardization and the threat of evanescence
are curiously linked: they match the intertwined processes of commodity production, predic-
tability and obsolescence, in a high-consumption society. I speculate that they help instruct au-
diences in the rightness and naturalness of a world that, in only apparent paradox, regularly re-
quires an irregularity, an unreliability which it calls progress. In this way, the regular changes in
TV programs, like the regular elections of public officials, seem to affirm the sovereignty of the

them. See also Willis' (n.d.) program for studying the substantive meanings of particular pop music
records for distinct youth subcultures; but note that it is easier to study the active uses of music than TV,
since music is more often heard publicly and because, there being so many choices, the preference for a par-
ticular set of songs or singers or beats expresses more about the mentality of the audience than is true for TV.
6. A few years ago, Gunsmoke was cancelled although it was still among the top ten shows in Nielsen
ratings. The audience was primarily older and disproportionately rural, thus an audience less well sold to
advertisers. So much for the networks' democratic rationale.
 Pr/mn T/mn 1,nlnn, 255

audience while keeping deep alternatives off the agenda. Elite authority and consumer choice are
affirmed at once-this is one of the central operations of the hegemonic liberal capitalist
ideology.
Then too, by organizing the "free time" of persons into end-to-end interchangeable units,
broadcasting extends, and harmonizes with, the industrialization of time. Media time and school
time, with their equivalent units and curves of action, mirror the time of clocked labor and rein-
force the seeming naturalness of clock time. Anyone who reads Harry Braverman's Labor and
Monopoly Capital can trace the steady degradation of the work process, both white and blue col-
lar, through the twentieth century, even if Braverman has exaggerated the extent of the process
by focusing on managerial strategiesmore than on actual work processes. Something similar has
happened in other life-sectors.' Leisure is industrialized, duration is homogenized, even excite-
ment is routinized, and the standard repeated TV format is an important component of the pro-
cess. And typically, too, capitalism provides relief from these confines for its more favored
citizens, those who can afford to buy their way out of the standardized social reality which
capitalism produces. Thus Sony and RCA now sell home video recorders, enabling consumers to
tape programs they'd otherwise miss. The widely felt need to overcome assembly-line "leisure"
time becomes the source of a new market-to sell the means for private, commoditized solutions
to the time-jam.
Commercials, of course, are also major features of the regular TV format. There can be no
question but that commercials have a good deal to do with shaping and maintaining markets-no
advertiser dreams of cutting advertising costs as long as the competition is still on the air. But
commercials also have important indirect consequences on the contours of consciousness overall:
they get us accustomed to thinking of ourselves and behaving as a market rather than a public, as
consumers rather than citizens. Public problems (like air pollution) are propounded as suscep-
tible to private commodity solutions (like eyedrops). In the process, commercials acculturate us to
interruption through the rest of our lives. Time and attention are not one's own; the established
social powers have the capacity to colonize consciousness, and unconsciousness, as they see fit.
By watching, the audience one by one consents. Regardless of the commercial's "effect" on our
behavior, we are consenting to its domination of the public space. Yet we should note that this
colonizing process does not actually require commercials, as long as it can form discrete packages
of ideological content that call forth discontinuous responses in the audience. Even public
broadcasting's children's shows take over the commercial forms to their own educational
ends-and supplant narrative forms by herky-jerky bustle. The producers of Sesame Street, in
likening knowledge to commercial products ("and now a message from the letter B"), may well
be legitimizing the commercial form in its discontinuity and in its invasiveness. Again, regularity
and discontinuity, superficially discrepant, may be linked at a deep level of meaning. And
perhaps the deepest privatizing function of television, its most powerful impact on public life,
may lie in the most obvious thing about it: we receive the images in the privacy of our living
rooms, making public discourse and response difficult. At the same time, the paradox is that at
any given time many viewers are receiving images discrepant with many of their beliefs, challeng-
ing their received opinions.
TV routines have been built into the broadcast schedule since its inception. But arguably their
regularity has been waning since Norman Lear's first comedy, All in the Family, made its net-
work debut in 1971. Lear's contribution to TV content was obvious: where previous shows might
have made passing reference to social conflicts, Lear brought wrenching social issues into the very
mainspring of his series, uniting his characters, as Michael Arlen once pointed out, in a harshly

7. Borrowing "on time," over commensurable, arithmetically calculated lengths of time, is part of the same
process: production, consumption and acculturation made compatible.
 256 GITLIN

funny ressentiment peculiarly appealing to audiences of the Nixon era and its cynical, disabused
sequel. 8 As I'll argue below, the hegemonic ideology is maintained in the Seventies by domes-
ticating divisive issues where in the Fifties it would have simply ignored them.
Lear also let his characters develop. Edith Bunker grew less sappy and more feminist and com-
monsensical; Gloria and Mike moved next door, and finally to California. On the threshold of
this generational rupture, Mike broke through his stereotype by expressing affection for Archie,
and Archie, oh-so-reluctantly but definitely for all that, hugged back and broke through his own.
And of course other Lear characters, the Jeffersons and Maude, had earlier been spun off into
their own shows, as The Mary Tyler Moore Show had spawned Rhoda and Phyllis. These
changes resulted from commercial decisions; they were built on intelligent business perceptions
that an audience existed for situation comedies directly addressing racism, sexism, and the
decomposition of conventional families. But there is no such thing as a strictly economic "ex-
planation" for production choice, since the success of a show-despite market research-is not
foreordained. In the context of my argument, the importance of such developments lies in their
partial break with the established, static formulae of prime time television.
Evidently daytime soap operas have also been sliding into character development and a direct
exploitation of divisive social issues, rather than going on constructing a race-free, class-free,
feminism-free world. And more conspicuously, the "mini-series" has now disrupted the taken-
for-granted repetitiveness of the prime time format. Both content and form mattered to the com-
mercial success of Roots; certainly the industry, speaking through trade journals, was convinced
that the phenomenon was rooted in the series' break with the week-to-week format. When the
programming wizards at ABC decided to put the show on for eight straight nights, they were also,
inadvertently, making it possible for characters to develop within the bounds of a single show.
And of course they were rendering the whole sequence immensely more powerful than if it had
been diffused over eight weeks. The very format was testimony to the fact that history takes place
as a continuing process in which people grow up, have children, die; that people experience their
lives within the domain of social institutions. This is no small achievement in a country that
routinely denies the rich texture of history.
In any event, the first thing the industry seems to have learned from its success with Roots is
that they had a new hot formula, the night-after-night series with some claim to historical
verisimilitude. So, according to Broadcasting, they began preparing a number of "docu-drama"
series, of which 1977's products included NBC's three-part series Loose Change and King, and its
four-part Holocaust, this latter evidently planned before the Roots broadcast. How many of
those first announced as in progress will actually be broadcast is something else again-one
awaits the networks' domestication and trivializing of the radicalism of All God's Children: The
Life of Nate Shaw, announced in early 1977. Roots' financial success-ABC sold its commercial
minutes for $120,000, compared to that season's usual $85,000 to $90,000-might not be
repeatable. Perhaps the network could not expect audiences to tune in more than once every few
years to a series that began one night at eight o'clock, the next night at nine, and the next at eight

8. The time of the show is important to its success or failure. Lear's All in the Family was rejected by ABC
before CBS bought it. An earlier attempt to bring problems of class, race and poverty into the heart of televi-
sion series was East Side, West Side of 1964, in which George C. Scott played a caring social worker con-
sistently unable to accomplish much for his clients. As time went on, the Scott character came to the con-
clusion that politics might accomplish what social work could not, and changed jobs, going to work as the
assistant to a liberal Congressman. It was rumored about that the hero was going to discover there, too, the
limits of reformism-but the show was cancelled, presumably for low ratings. Perhaps Lear's shows, by con-
trast, have lasted in part because they are comedies: audiences will let their defenses down for some good
laughs, even on themselves, at least when the characters are, like Archie Bunker himself, ambiguous nor-
mative symbols. At the same time, the comedy form allows white racists to indulge themselves in Archie's ra-
tionalizations without seeing that the joke is on them.
 Prime Time Ideology 257

again. In summary it is hard to say to what extent these format changes signify an acceleration of
the networks' competition for advertising dollars, and to what extent they reveal the networks'
responses to the restiveness and boredom of the mass audience, or the emergence of new potential
audiences. But in any case the shifts are there, and constitute a fruitful territory for any thinking
about the course of popular culture.

Genre'
The networks try to finance and choose programs that will likely attract the largest conceivable
audiences of spenders; this imperative requires that the broadcasting elites have in mind some no-
tion of popular taste from moment to moment. Genre, in other words, is necessarily somewhat
sensitive; in its rough outlines, if not in detail, it tells us something about popular moods. Indeed,
since there are only three networks, there is something of an oversensitivity to a given success; the
pendulum tends to swing hard to replicate a winner. Thus Charlie'sAngelsengenders Flying High
and American Girls, about stewardesses and female reporters respectively, each on a long leash
under male authority.
Here I suggest only a few signs of this sensitivity to shifting moods and group identities in the
audience. The adult western of the middle and late Fifties, with its drama of solitary
righteousness and suppressed libidinousness, for example, can be seen in retrospect to have
played on the quiet malaise under the surface of the complacency of the Eisenhower years, even
in contradictory ways. Some lone heroes were identified with traditionally frontier-American in-
formal and individualistic relations to authority (Paladin in Have Gun, Will Travel, Bart
Maverick in Maverick), standing for sturdy individualism struggling for hedonistic values and
taking law-and-order wryly. Meanwhile, other heroes were decent officials like Gunsmoke's Matt
Dillon, affirming the decency of paternalistic law and order against the temptations of worldly
pleasure. With the rise of the Camelot mystique, and the vigorous "long twilight struggle" that
John F. Kennedy personified, spy stories like Mission:Impossible and The Man From Uncle were
well suited to capitalize on the macho CIA aura. More recently, police stories, with cops sur-
mounting humanist illusions to draw thin blue lines against anarcho-criminal barbarism, afford a
variety of official ways of coping with "the social issue," ranging from Starsky and Hutch's
muted homoeroticism to Barney Miller's team pluralism. The single-women shows following
from Mary Tyler Moore acknowledge in their privatized ways that some sort of feminism is here
to stay, and work to contain it with hilarious versions of "new life styles" for single career
women. Such shows probably appeal to the market of "upscale" singles with relatively large
disposable incomes, women who are disaffected from the traditional imagery of housewife and
helpmeet. In the current wave of "jiggle" or "T&A" shows patterned on Charlie'sAngels (the
terms are widely used in the industry), the attempt is to appeal to the prurience of the male au-
dience by keeping the "girls" free of romance, thus catering to male (and female?) backlash
against feminism. The black sitcoms probably reflect the rise of a black middle class with the pur-
chasing power to bring forth advertisers, while also appealing as comedies-for conflicting
reasons, perhaps-to important parts of the white audience. (Serious black drama would be far
more threatening to the majority audience.)
Whenever possible it is illuminating to trace the transformations in a genre over a longer period
of time. For example, the shows of technological prowess have metamorphosed over four
decades as hegemonic ideology has been contested by alternative cultural forms. In work not yet

9. 1use the term loosely to refer to general categories of TV entertainment, like "adult western," "cops and
robbers," "black shows." Genre is not an objective feature of the cultural universe, but a conventional name
for a convention, and should not be reified-as both cultural analysis and practice often do-into a cultural
essence.
 258 GITLIN

published, Tom Andrae of the Political Science Department at the University of California,
Berkeley, shows how the Superman archetype began in 1933 as a menace to society; then became
something of a New Dealing, anti-Establishmentarian individualist casting his lot with the op-
pressed and, at times, against the State; and only in the Forties metamorphosed into the current
incarnation who prosecutes criminals in the name of "the American way." Then the straight-
arrow Superman of the Forties and Fifties was supplemented by the whimsical, self-satirical Bat-
man and the Marvel Comics series of the Sixties and Seventies, symbols of power gone silly, no
longer prepossessing. In playing against the conventions, their producers seem to have been ex-
hibiting the self-consciousness of genre so popular among "high arts" too, as with Pop and
minimal art. Thus shifts in genre presuppose the changing mentality of critical masses of writers
and cultural producers; yet these changes would not take root commercially without correspond-
ing changes in the dispositions (even the self-consciousness) of large audiences. In other words,
changes in cultural ideals and in audience sensibilities must be harmonized to make for shifts in\
genre or formula.
Finally, the latest form of technological hero corresponds to an authoritarian turn in
hegemonic ideology, as well as to a shift in popular (at least children's) mentality. The Seventies
generation of physically augmented, obedient, patriotic super-heroes (The Six Million Dollar
Man and The Bionic Woman) differ from the earlier waves in being organizational products
through and through; these team players have no private lives from which they are recruited task
by task, as in Mission: Impossible, but they are actually invented by the State, to whom they owe
their lives.
Televised sports too is best understood as an entertainment genre, one of the most powerful.' 0
What we know as professional sports today is inseparably intertwined with the networks'
development of the sports market. TV sports is rather consistently framed to reproduce dominant
American values. First, although TV is ostensibly a medium for the eyes, the sound is often
decisive in taking the action off the field. The audience is not trusted to come to its own conclu-
sions. The announcers are not simply describing events ("Reggie Jackson hits a ground ball to
shortstop"), but interpreting them ("World Series 1978! It's great to be here"). One may see
here a process equivalent to advertising's project of taking human qualities out of the consumer
and removing them to the product: sexy perfume, zesty beer.
In televised sports, the hegemonic impositions have, if anything, probably became more in-
tense over the last twenty years. One technique for interpreting the event is to regale the audience
with bits of information in the form of "stats." "A lot of people forget they won eleven out of
their last twelve games ... ." "There was an extraordinary game in last years World Series .... "
"Rick Barry hasn't missed two free throws in a row for 72 games .... '."Thelast time the War-
riors were in Milwaukee Clifford Ray also blocked two shots in the second quarter." How about
that? The announcers can't shut up; they're constantly chattering. And the stat flashed on the
screen further removes the action from the field. What is one to make of all this? Why would
anyone want to know a player's free throw percentage not only during the regular season but dur-
ing the playoffs?
But the trivialities have their reason: they amount to an interpretation that flatters and disdains
the audience at the same time. It flatters in small ways, giving you the chance to be the one person
on the block who already possessed this tidbit of fact. At the same time, symbolically, it treats
you as someone who really knows what's going on in the world. Out of control of social reality,
you may flatter yourself that the substitute world of sports is a corner of the world you can really
grasp. Indeed, throughout modern society, the availability of statistics is often mistaken for the
availability of knowledge and deep meaning. To know the number of megatons in the nuclear

10. This discussion of televised sports was published in similar form (Gitlin, 1978b).
 ,,,II1;
II, IU U ,i 25Q

arsenal is not to grasp its horror; but we are tempted to bury our fear in the possession of com-
forting fact. To have made "body counts" in Vietnam was not to be in control of the coun-
tryside, but the U. S. Army flattered itself that the stats looked good. TV sports shows, encourag-
ing the audience to value stats, harmonize with a stat-happy society. Not that TV operates
independently of the sports event itself; in fact, the event is increasingly organized to fit the struc-
ture of the broadcast. There are extra time-outs to permit the network to sell more commercial
time. Michael Real of the University of California, San Diego, used a stopwatch to calculate that
during the 1974 Super Bowl, the football was actually moving for-seven minutes (Real, 1977).
Meanwhile, electronic billboards transplant the stats into the stadium itself.
Another framing practice is the reduction of the sports experience to a sequence of individual
achievements. In a fusion of populist and capitalist dogma, everyone is somehow the best. This
one has "great hands," this one has "a great slam dunk," that one's "great on defense." This in-
discriminate commendation raises the premium on personal competition, and at the same time
undermines the meaning of personal achievement: everyone is excellent at something, as at a
child's birthday party. I was most struck by the force of this sort of framing during the NBA
basketball playoffs of 1975, when, after a season of hearing Bill King announce the games over
local KTVU, I found myself watching and hearing the network version. King's Warriors were not
CBS's. A fine irony: King with his weird mustache and San Francisco panache was talking about
team relations and team strategy; CBS, with its organization-man team of announcers, could talk
of little besides the personal records of the players. Again, at one point during the 1977 basketball
playoffs, CBS's Brent Musburger gushed: "I've got one of the greatest players of all time [Rick
Barry] and one of the greatest referees of all time [Mendy Rudolph] sitting next to me! ... I'm
surrounded by experts!" All in all, the network exalts statistics, personal competition, expertise.
The message is: The way to understand things is by storing up statistics and tracing their trajec-
tories. This is training in observation without comprehension.
Everything is technique and know-how; nothing is purpose. Likewise, the instant replay
generates the thrill of recreating the play, even second-guessing the referee. The appeal is to the
American tradition of exalting means over ends: this is the same spirit that animates popular
science magazines and do-it-yourself. It's a complicated and contradictory spirit, one that lends
itself to the preservation of craft values in a time of assembly-line production, and at the same
time distracts interest from any desire to control the goals of the central work process.
The significance of this fetishism of means is hard to decipher. Though the network version ap-
peals to technical thinking, the announcers are not only small-minded but incompetent to boot.
No sooner have they dutifully complimented a new acquisition as "a fine addition to the club"
than often enough he flubs a play. But still they function as cheerleaders, revving up the razzle-
dazzle rhetoric and reminding us how uniquely favored we are by the spectacle. By staying tuned
in, somehow we're "participating" in sports history-indeed, by proxy, in history itself. The
pulsing theme music and electronic logo reinforce this sense of hot-shot glamor. The
breathlessness never lets up, and it has its pecuniary motives: if we can be convinced that the
game really is fascinating (even if it's a dog), we're more likely to stay tuned for the commercials
for which Miller Lite and Goodyear have paid $100,000 a minute to rent our attention.
On the other hand, the network version does not inevitably succeed in forcing itself upon our
consciousness and defining our reception of the event. TV audiences don't necessarily succumb
to the announcers' hype. In semi-public situations like barrooms, audiences are more likely to
see through the trivialization and ignorance and-in "para-social interaction" -to tell the an-
nouncers off. But in the privacy of living rooms, the announcers' framing probably penetrates
farther into the collective definition of the event. It should not be surprising that one fairly com-
mon counter-hegemonic practice is to watch the broadcast picture without the network sound,
listening to the local announcer on the radio.
 260 GITLIN

Setting and Character Type

Closely related to genre and its changes are setting and character type. And here again we see
shifting market tolerances making for certain changes in content, while the core of hegemonic
values remains virtually impervious.
In the Fifties, when the TV forms were first devised, the standard TV series presented-in
Herbert Gold's phrase-happy people with happy problems. In the Seventies it is more com-
plicated: there are unhappy people with happy ways of coping. But the set itself propounds a vi-
sion of consumer happiness. Living rooms and kitchens usually display the standard package of
consumer goods. Even where the set is ratty, as in Sanford andSon, or working-class, as in All in
the Family, the bright color of the TV tube almost always glamorizes the surroundings so that
there will be no sharp break between the glorious color of the program and the glorious color of
the commercial. In the more primitive Fifties, by contrast, it was still possible for a series like The
Honeymooners or The PhilSilvers Show (Sergeant Bilko) to get by with one or two simple sets
per show: the life of a good skit was in its accomplished acting. But that series, in its sympathetic
treatment of working-class mores, was exceptional. Color broadcasting accomplishes the
glamorous ideal willy-nilly.
Permissible character types have evolved, partly because of changes in the structure of broad-
casting power. In the Fifties, before the quiz show scandal, advertising agencies contracted direct-
ly with production companies to produce TV series (Barnouw, 1970). They ordered up exactly
what they wanted, as if by the yard; and with some important but occasional exceptions-I'll
mention some in a moment-what they wanted was glamor and fun, a showcase for commercials.
In 1954, for example, one agency wrote to the playwright Elmer Rice explaining why his Street
Scene, with its "lower class social level," would be unsuitable for telecasting:

We know of no advertiser or advertising agency of any importance in this country who would knowingly
allow the products which he is trying to advertise to the public to become associated with the squalor...
and general 'down' character ... of Street Scene....
On the contrary it is the general policy of advertisers to glamorize their products, the people who buy
them, and the whole American social and economic scene. . . . The American consuming public as
presented by the advertising industry today is middle class, not lower class; happy in general, not miserable
and frustrated ... (Barnouw, 1970:33).
Later in the Fifties, comedies were able to represent discrepant settings, permitting viewers both
to identify and to indulge their sense of superiority through comic distance: The Honeymooners
and Bilko, which capitalized on Jackie Gleason's and Phil Silvers' enormous personal popularity
(a personality cult can always perform wonders and break rules), were able to extend dignity to
working-class characters in anti-glamorous situations (see Czitrom, 1977).
Beginning in 1960, the networks took direct control of production away from advertisers. And
since the networks are less provincial than particular advertisers, since they are more closely at-
tuned to general tolerances in the population, and since they are firmly in charge of a buyers'
market for advertising (as long as they produce shows that some corporation will sponsor), it now
became possible-if by no means easy-for independent production companies to get somewhat
distinct cultural forms, like Norman Lear's comedies, on the air. The near-universality of televi-
sion set ownership, at the same time, creates the possibility of a wider range of audiences, in-
cluding minority-group, working-class and age-segmented audiences, than existed in the Fifties,
and thus makes possible a wider range of fictional characters. Thus changes in the organization
of TV production, as well as new market pressures, have helped to change the prevalent settings
and character types on television.
But the power of corporate ideology over character types remains very strong, and sets limits
on the permissible; the changes from the Fifties through the Sixties and Seventies should be
understood in the context of essential cultural features that have not changed. To show the quali-
 Prime Time 1deology,,

ty of deliberate choice that is often operating, consider a book called The Youth Market, by two
admen, published in 1970, counseling companies on ways to pick "the right character for your
product":

But in our opinion, if you want to create your own hard-hitting spokesman to children, the most effective
route is the superhero-miracle worker. He certainly can demonstrate food products, drug items, many
kinds of toys, and innumerable household items.... The character should be adventurous. And he should
be on the right side of the law. A child must be able to mimic his hero, whether he is James Bond, Super-
man or Dick Tracy; to be able to fight and shoot to kill without punishment or guilt feelings (Helitzer and
Heyel, 1970).
If this sort of thinking is resisted within the industry itself, it's not so much because of com-
mitments to artistry in television as such, but more because there are other markets that are not
"penetrated" by these hard-hitting heroes. The industry is noticing, for example, that Roots
brought to the tube an audience who don't normally watch TV. The homes-using-television levels
during the week of Roots were up between six and twelve percent over the programs of the
previous year (Broadcasting, Jan. 31, 1977). Untapped markets-often composed of people who
have, or wish to have, somewhat alternative views of the world-can only be brought in by
unusual sorts of programming. There is room in the schedule for rebellious human slaves just as
there is room for hard-hitting patriotic-technological heroes. In other words-and contrary to a
simplistic argument against television manipulation by network elites-the receptivity of enor-
mous parts of the population is an important limiting factor affecting what gets on television. On
the other hand, network elites do not risk investing in regular heroes who will challenge the core
values of corporate capitalist society: who are, say, explicit socialists, or union organizers, or for
that matter born-again evangelists. But like the dramatic series Playhouse 90 in the Fifties, TV
movies permit a somewhat wider range of choice than weekly series. It is apparently easier for
producers to sell exceptional material for one-shot showings-whether sympathetic to lesbian
mothers, critical of the 1950s blacklist or of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Most likely these impor-
tant exceptions have prestige value for the networks.

Slant
Within the formula of a program, a specific slant often pushes through, registering a certain
position on a particular public issue. When issues are politically charged, when there is overt
social conflict, programs capitalize on the currency. ("Capitalize" is an interesting word, refer-
ring both to use and to profit.) In the program's brief compass, only the most stereotyped
characters are deemed to "register" on the audience, and therefore slant, embedded in character,
is almost always simplistic and thin. The specific slant is sometimes mistaken for the whole of
ideological tilt or "bias," as if the bias dissolves when no position is taken on a topical issue. But
the week-after-week angle of the show is more basic, a hardened definition of a routine situation
within which the specific topical slant emerges. The occasional topical slant then seems to anchor
the program's general. meanings. For instance, a 1977 show of The Six Million DollarMan told
the story of a Russian-East German plot to stop the testing of the new B-1 bomber; by implica-
tion, it linked the domestic movement against the B-I to the foreign Red menace. Likewise, in the
last Sixties and Seventies, police and spy dramas have commonly clucked over violent terrorists
and heavily-armed "anarchist" maniacs, labeled as "radicals" or "revolutionaries," giving the
cops a chance to justify their heavy armament and crude machismo. But the other common varie-
ty of slant is sympathetic to forms of deviance which are either private (the lesbian mother shown
to be a good mother to her children) or quietly reformist (the brief vogue for Storefront Lawyers
and the like in the early Seventies). The usual slants, then, fall into two categories: either (a) a
legitimation of depoliticized forms of deviance, usually ethnic or sexual; or (b) a delegitimation
of the dangerous, the violent, the out-of-bounds.
 262 GITLIN

The slants that find their way into network programs, in short, are not uniform. Can we say
anything systematic about them? Whereas in the Fifties family dramas and sit-coms usually ig-
nored-or indirectly sublimated-the existence of deep social problems in the world outside the
set, programs of the Seventies much more often domesticate them. From Ozzie and Harrietor
FatherKnows Best to All in the Family or The Jeffersons marks a distinct shift for formula,
character, and slant: a shift, among other things, in the image of how a family copes with the
world outside. Again, changes in content have in large part to be referred back to changes in
social values and sensibilities, particularly the values of writers, actors, and other practitioners:
there is a large audience now that prefers acknowledging and domesticating social problems
directly rather than ignoring them or treating them only indirectly and in a sublimated way; there
are also media practitioners who have some roots in the rebellions of the Sixties. Whether
hegemonic style will operate more by exclusion (Fifties) than by domestication (Seventies) will de-
pend on the level of public dissensus as well as on internal factors of media organization (the Fif-
ties blacklist of TV writers probably exercised a chilling effect on subject matter and slant; so did
the fact that sponsors directly developed their own shows).

Solution
Finally, cultural hegemony operates through the solutions proposed to difficult problems.
However grave the problems posed, however rich the imbroglio, the episodes regularly end with
the click of a solution: an arrest, a defiant smile, an I-told-you-so explanation. The characters we
have been asked to care about are alive and well, ready for next week. Such a world is not so
much fictional as fake. However deeply the problem is located within society, it will be solved
among a few persons: the heroes must attain a solution that leaves the rest of the society un-
touched. The self-enclosed world of the TV drama justifies itself, and its exclusions, by "wrap-
ping it all up." Occasional exceptions are either short-lived, like East Side, West Side, or in-
dependently syndicated outside the networks, like Lear's Mary Hartman,Mary Hartman. On the
networks, All in the Family has been unusual in sometimes ending obliquely, softly or ironically,
refusing to pretend to solve a social problem that cannot, in fact, be solved by the actions of the
Bunkers alone. The Lou Grant show is also partial to downbeat, alienating endings.
Likewise, in mid-Seventies mass-market films like Chinatown, Rollerball, Network and King
Kong, we see an interesting form of closure: as befits the common cynicism and helplessness,
society owns the victory. Reluctant heroes go up against vast impersonal forces, often multina-
tional corporations like the same Gulf& Western (sent up as "Engulf& Devour" in Mel Brooks's
Silent Movie) that, through its Paramount subsidiary, produces some of these films. Driven to
anger or bitterness by the evident corruption, the rebels break loose-only to bring the whole
structure crashing down on them. (In the case of King Kong, the great ape falls of his own
weight-from the World Trade Center roof, no less-after the helicopter gunships "zap" him.)
These popular films appeal to a kind of populism and rebelliousness, usually of a routine and
vapid sort, but then close off the possibilities of effective opposition. The rich get richer and the
incoherent rebels get bought or killed.
Often the sense of frustration funneled through these films is diffuse and ambiguous enough to
encourage a variety of political responses. While many left-wing cultural critics raved about Net-
work, for example, right-wing politicians in Southern California campaigned for Proposition 13
using the film's slogan, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more." Indeed, thefact
that the same film is subject to a variety of conflicting yet plausibleinterpretationsmay suggest a
crisis in hegemonic ideology. The economic system is demonstrably troubled, but the traditional
liberal recourse, the State, is no longer widely enough trusted to provide reassurance. Articulate
social groups do not know whom to blame; public opinion is fluid and volatile, and people at all
 Prime Time Ideology 263

levels in the society withdraw from public participation." In this situation, commercial culture
succeeds with diverse interest groups, as well as with the baffled and ambivalent, precisely by pro-
pounding ambiguous or even self-contradictory situations and solutions.

THE HEGEMONIC PROCESS IN LIBERAL CAPITALISM

Again it bears emphasizing that, for all these tricks of the entertainment trade, the mass-
cultural system is not one-dimensional. High-consumption corporate capitalism implies a certain
sensitivity to audience taste, taste which is never wholly manufactured. Shows are made by guess-
ing at audience desires and tolerances, and finding ways to speak to them that perpetuate the go-
ing system.' 2 (Addressing one set of needs entails scanting and distorting others, ordinarily the
less mean, less invidious, less aggressive, less reducible to commodity forms.) The cultural
hegemony system that results is not a closed system. It leaks. Its very structure leaks, at the least
because it remains to some extent competitive. Networks sell the audience's attention to adver-
tisers who want what they think will be a suitably big, suitably rich audience for their products;
since the show is bait, advertisers will put up with-or rather buy into-a great many possible
baits, as long as they seem likely to attract a buying audience. In the news, there are also tradi-
tions of real though limited journalistic independence, traditions whose modern extension causes
businessmen, indeed, to loathe the press. In their 1976 book Ethics and Profits, Leonard Silk and
David Vogel quote a number of big businessmen complaining about the raw deal they get from
the press. A typical comment: "Even though the press is a business, it doesn't reflect business
values." That is, it has a certain real interest in truth-partial, superficial, occasion- and
celebrity-centered truth, but truth nevertheless.
Outside the news, the networks have no particular interest in truth as such, but they remain
sensitive to currents of interest in the population, including the yank and haul and insistence of
popular movements. With few ethical or strategic reasons not to absorb trends, they are adept at
perpetuating them with new formats, new styles, tie-in commodities (dolls, posters, T-shirts, fan
magazines) that fans love. In any case, it is in no small measure because of the economic drives
themselves that the hegemonic system itselfamplifies legitimatedforms of opposition. In liberal
capitalism, hegemonic ideology develops by domesticating opposition, absorbing it into forms
compatible with the core ideological structure. Consent is managed by absorption as well as by
exclusion. The hegemonic ideology changes in order to remain hegemonic; that is the peculiar
nature of the dominant ideology of liberal capitalism.
Raymond Williams (1977) has insisted rightly on the difference between two types of non-
hegemonic ideology: alternativeforms, presenting a distinct but supplementary and containable
view of the world, and oppositional forms, rarer and more tenuous within commercial culture,
intimating an authentically different social order. Williams makes the useful distinction between
residualforms, descending from declining social formations, and emergent forms, reflecting for-
mations on the rise. Although it is easier to speak of these possibilities in the abstract than in the

11. In another essay I will be arguing that forms of pseudo-participation (including cult movies like Rocky
HorrorPictureShow and Animal House, along with religious sects) are developing simultaneously to fill the
vacuum left by the declining of credible radical politics, and to provide ritual forms of expression that
alienated groups cannot find within the political culture.
12. See the careful, important and unfairly neglected discussion of the tricky needs issue in Leiss, 1976. Leiss
cuts through the Frankfurt premise that commodity culture addresses false needs by arguing that audience
needs for happiness, diversion, self-assertion and so on are ontologically real; what commercial culture does is
not to invent needs (how could it do that?) but to insist upon the possibility of meeting them through the pur-
chase of commodities. For Leiss, all specifically human needs are social; they develop within one social form
or another. From this argument-and, less rigorously but more daringly from Ewen (1976)-flow powerful
political implications I cannot develop here. On the early popularity of entertainment forms which cannot
possibly be laid at the door of a modern "culture industry" and media-produced needs, see Altick (1978).
 GITLIN

concrete, and although it is not clear what the emergent formations are (this is one of the major
questions for social analysis now), these concepts may help organize an agenda for thought and
research on popular culture. I would add to Williams' own carefully modulated remarks on the
subject only that there is no reason a priorito expect that emergent forms will be expressed as the
ideologies of rising classes, or as "proletarian ideology" in particular; currently in the United
States the emergent forms have to do with racial minorities and other ethnic groups, with women,
with singles, with homosexuals, with old-age subcultures, as well as with technocrats and with
political interest groups (loosely but not inflexibly linked to corporate interests) with particular
strategic goals (like the new militarists of the Committee on the Present Danger). Analysis of the
hegemonic ideology and its rivals should not be allowed to lapse into some form of what
C. Wright Mills (1948) called the "labor metaphysic."
One point should be clear: the hegemonic system is not cut-and-dried, not definitive. It has con-
tinually to be reproduced, continually superimposed, continually to be negotiated and managed,
in order to override the alternative and, occasionally, the oppositional forms. To put it another
way: major social conflicts are transported into the cultural system, where the hegemonic process
frames them, form and content both, into compatibility with dominant systems of meaning.
Alternative material is routinely incorporated:brought into the body of cultural production. Oc-
casionally oppositional material may succeed in being indigestible; that material is excluded from
the media discourse and returned to the cultural margins from which it came, while elements of it
are incorporated into the dominant forms.
In these terms, Roots was an alternative "form, representing slaves as unblinkable facts of
American history, blacks as victimized humans and humans nonetheless. In the end, perhaps, the
story is dominated by the chance for upward mobility; the upshot of travail is freedom. Where
Alex Haley's book is subtitled "The Saga of an American Family," ABC's version carries the
label-and the self-congratulation-"The Triumph of an American Family." It is hard to say
categorically which story prevails; in any case there is a tension, a struggle, between the collective
agony and the triumph of a single family. That struggle is the friction in the works of the
hegemonic system.
And all the evident friction within television entertainment-as well as within the schools, the
family, religion, sexuality, and the State-points back to a deeper truth about bourgeois culture.
In the United States, at least, hegemonic ideology is extremely complex and absorptive; it is only
by absorbing and domesticating conflicting definitions of reality and demands on it, in fact, that
it remains hegemonic. In this way, the hegemonic ideology of liberal capitalism is dramatically
different from the ideologies of pre-capitalist societies, and from the dominant ideology of
authoritarian socialist or Fascist regimes. What permits it to absorb and domesticate critique is
not something accidental to capitalist ideology, but rather its core. The hegemonic ideology of
liberal capitalist society is deeply and essentially conflicted in a number of ways. As Daniel Bell
(1976) has argued, it urges people to work hard, but proposes that real satisfaction is to be found
in leisure, which ostensibly embodies values opposed to work.'I More profoundly, at the center
of liberal capitalist ideology there is a tension between the affirmation of patriarchal
authority-currently enshrined in the national security state-and the affirmation of individual
worth and self-determination. Bourgeois ideology in all its incarnations has been from the first a
contradiction in terms, affirming "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," or "liberty, equali-

13. There is considerable truth in Bell's thesis. Then why do I say "ostensibly?" Bell exaggerates his case
against "adversary culture" by emphasizing changes in avant-garde culture above all (Pop Art, happenings,
John Cage, etc.); if he looked at popular culture, he would more likely find ways in which aspects of the
culture of consumption support key aspects of the culture of production. I offer my discussion of sports as
one instance. Morris Dickstein's (1977) affirmation of the critical culture of the Sixties commits the counter-
part error of overemphasizing the importance of other selected domains of literary and avant-garde culture.
 Prime ohgy
dTn 265

ty, fraternity," as if these ideals are compatible, even mutually dependent, at all times in all
places, as they were for one revolutionary group at one time in one place. But all anti-bourgeois
movements wage their battles precisely in terms of liberty, equality or fraternity (or, recently,
sorority); they press on liberal capitalist ideology in its own name.
Thus we can understand something of the vulnerability of bourgeois ideology, as well as its per-
sistence. In the twentieth century, the dominant ideology has shifted toward sanctifying con-
sumer satisfaction as the premium definition of "the pursuit of happiness," in this way justifying
corporate domination of the economy. What is hegemonic in consumer capitalist ideology is
precisely the notion that happiness, or liberty, or equality, or fraternity can be affirmed through
the existing private commodity forms, under the benign, protective eye of the national security
state. This ideological core is what remains essentially unchanged and unchallenged in television
entertainment, at the same time the inner tensions persist and are even magnified.

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