During the prime decades, television networks harbored a powerful weapon against movie-making Hollywood: the miniseries. From the 1970s until the turn of the century, networks aired the likes of Roots, Lonesome Dove, Holocaust, Merlin, and a slew of Stephen King adaptations. Some became prestigious classics; most remain not. Though the miniseries could cover any topic, they were united by their dark and dramatic stories, expansive world-building, and unrestrained runtimes that allowed stories to breathe in ways movies couldn’t. And they predicted the golden age of television we live in now.
Let’s take a look at how this was accomplished by the network miniseries, and why it had to die in the process.
A joke in tribute to our dear dead friend:
“What’s the difference between America and yogurt? Given enough time, yogurt will develop its own culture.”
The miniseries would laugh if it were here today, and probably take two hours doing so. Because the miniseries, despite being known as a tradition of American entertainment, was not born here, but snatched from across the Atlantic. The year was 1968 and the BBC aired The Forsyte Saga, a 12-part multigenerational family epic based on a series of novels by John Galdsworthy. Saga was a Brit phenomenon: London traffic vanished from the streets every Sunday, as bars and church services shuttered early.
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The miniseries, despite being known as a tradition of American entertainment, was not born here, but snatched from across the Atlantic. |
At the same time in the United States, free-spirited executives at NET (which later became PBS) had just transformed children’s programming forever by launching Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. NET turned to the BBC, looking for non-traditional material, and brokered a deal to air The Forsyte Saga in the States. Though traffic didn’t clear out in New York on Sundays as a result, Saga was successful enough to create our public TV partnership with the BBC: Masterpiece Theater, today’s home of Downton Abbey and Sherlock.
Television in the 1970s was dominated by ABC, CBS, and NBC, collectively known as the Big Three. Intrigued by NET’s success, they tested the miniseries waters by producing the likes of QB VII (1974) and Rich Man, Poor Man (1976), following the melodramatic literary tradition of Forsyte Saga. The American response to the miniseries format was good enough for the Big Three to continue making them, leading into ABC’s ratings jackpot, Roots, in 1977. A violent, decades-spanning, tragedy of slavery in America, Roots aired for eight consecutive nights in January, each episode gaining in viewership, with the finale becoming the then most-watched hour of television of all time with 100 million viewers. This time, traffic did clear out every night in America as we huddled around the TV like nationwide broadcast campfire. And beyond that, Roots altered the public consciousness, opening up a widespread conversation about our shared history and those who we share with it today. But you don’t have to take my word for it…
“I watched this nation become transformed during eight nights of television,” wrote LeVar Burton (star of Roots as slave Kunta Kinte, and eternal host of Reading Rainbow) during his Reddit AMA, “There was a SHIFT that happened. We all got an education about slavery and the cost of slavery. Not the monetary cost, the human cost.”
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This was the power of the miniseries: a cinematic story freeing itself from the restriction of an acceptable movie runtime. |
Fred Silverman was executive of ABC programming at the time. When Roots had completed filming, he and his wife sat down with all 12 hours one weekend, in what could be history’s most important binge marathon:
“As the credits rolled, The Silvermans felt overwhelmed by the show’s emotional wallop. Instead of scheduling Roots over a period of weeks, Silverman decided to run it on eight consecutive nights. ‘To spread it out would have dissipated the impact,’ he said.”1
How do we watch television today? Increasingly not on actual TV sets, and less and less the night it airs. We watch our shows on computers, laptops, and phones, via full-season subscriptions models from Netflix and Amazon. Remember when we had no expectation that our favorite shows would even get released on DVD? Now it’s a world of watch all, take everywhere, access anytime. We even have a symbolic ritual of our gluttony for damn good stories: the binge watch. But back when we were completely beholden to network scheduling, binge watching was impossible. So Silverman did the next best thing: he ran his miniseries eight straight nights, inserting Roots into the national conversation. If everyone is watching the same thing in every home, what else are we going to talk about?
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Roots came out in 1977, the same year as Star Wars, the two flipping their industries upside down. |
This was the power of the miniseries: a cinematic story freeing itself from the restriction of an acceptable movie runtime. Because damn good stories need all the time it takes to be told. By increasing the length of a story to its necessary conclusion but compacting the time necessary to consume it, television increased in narrative power. This was a tenet Silverman discovered, and remains in play today.
Roots came out in 1977, the same year as Star Wars, the two flipping their industries upside down. Star Wars was a shift in the movie force, where Hollywood began skewing younger in demographic with merchandise tie-ins twinkling in advertisers’ eyes, and showed it was possible to sell an audience just a piece of the story. Build a better sequel, and they will come. (Or just build a sequel, they’ll come anyway.) Roots, and the miniseries at large, demonstrated the enormous power of television telling a complete story, rather than dragging on for season after season in a race to see if the money or audience patience ran out first.
Alex Haley, author of Roots, had needed convincing. Producer Stan Margulies recalled in 1982, “Roots had originally been bought by Columbia as a feature film, but they had let the option drop. At first Alex didn’t want to sell it to us. He had the dream of all American writers, which is that he was going to write a book and see it turned into a movie. No one ever said, ‘I’m going to write a book, and they’re going to make television out of it.’ But we pointed out that if you made a movie of Roots, you could only tell a minuscule part of the story. In a movie we could have used maybe 100 to 150 pages of the book. That was one of the major points that eventually convinced Alex that Roots should be done as a miniseries.”2
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Miniseries were not cheap to make and market. But the money kept rolling in. |
Bolstered by advertising cash and Hollywood respect, the Big Three trawled bestseller lists for books to adapt. Stars — the likes of Meryl Streep, Anthony Hopkins, and Charlton Heston — started showing up, back when it was almost career suicide for a movie celeb to appear on TV. Throughout the rest of the decade and into the 1980s, dozens of miniseries aired by a variety of authors, from John Steinbeck (East of Eden, 1981) to Louisa May Alcott (Little Women, 1978) and Jackie Collins (Hollywood Wives, 1985). The miniseries broadened in scope and subject: the Civil War (North & South, Centennial, The Blue and the Gray), World War II (The Winds of War, Holocaust), and religious tales (Jesus of Nazareth, Masada). As an example of how hard the networks were riding the miniseries, in 1983 at the height of the craze, ABC aired Winds of War‘s seven episodes for a week in February, averaging 80 million viewers per night. In March, one month later, ABC premiered The Thorn Birds, the still-beloved romantic epic. And these things were not cheap to make and market. But the money kept rolling in.
The Me decade was here. According to The New York Times, a mentality of limousines and champagne crept into network decision-making, sparing no expense on the beloved miniseries. The chase to give audiences complete presentations of 900-page novels was used to excuse bloated runtimes featuring superfluous supporting cast roles and padded subplots — things avoided in theatrical filmmaking, which requires judicious economy in budget and editing. And younger viewers tended to be repulsed by the miniseries’ tradition of historical and romantic stories. That demographic was being lured out of the house and into multiplexes where entertainment came by way of Steven Spielberg, John Hughes, and Master Splinter.
In 1976, 90% of Americans TV viewers tuned to ABC, CBS, or NBC every night. At the end of the 80s, that number plunged to 62 percent. The at-home market had become crowded with cable networks, high-tech VCRs, video game consoles, and the new network on the block: FOX. Their programming lineup of The Simpsons, In Living Color, and Beverly Hills, 90210 siphoned teens and young adults. The traditional operation of a TV network had become unsustainable. In 1986, ABC, CBS, and NBC each entered corporate takeovers, ushering in new bosses, slashed budgets, and massive layoffs. The accouterments that had become industry standard — chauffeured Jaguars, private dining rooms, and the $2,600 Good Morning America billed weekly for breakfast snacks — were all cut. How then to justify the exorbitant costs in making a miniseries?
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“Frankly, the economics of making one of these things is not that attractive. This is one of the last of these to be around.” |
ABC was producing a particular miniseries during its takeover. Amerika, about the United States peacefully capitulating to Soviet rule, ended up costing $40 million in 1987 and ran 14.5 hours across seven consecutive nights in February. It’s the longest piece of American entertainment written and directed by one person. TV Guide called it “the most boring miniseries in a decade.” Before airing, Amerika‘s biggest sponsor Chrysler pulled their commercials. They marketed their vehicles based on patriotic pride, and who wants to buy a Town & Country from a company that doesn’t support going all Red Dawn on some dirty commies?
John B. Sias had inherited Amerika when he became the new CEO of ABC in 1985. He addressed the Chrysler pullout in the same New York Times article by saying, “We’re going to run that program come rain, blood or horse manure.”
Then he added: “Frankly, the economics of making one of these things is not that attractive. This is one of the last of these to be around.”
Like North Korea’s Interview hack last December, the idea of entertainment being dictated by external or political elements had a possibly chilling effect. Brandon Stoddard, president of ABC Entertainment who’d greenlighted Amerika and kept his job during the takeover, argued: “What I think must be avoided by any entertainment division is self-censorship, the possibility that the creative people at a network censor themselves even before an idea comes into development. That would be tragic. That is the most important question that has to be answered, and I don’t have the answer to it.”
Two years later, Stoddard announced his retirement. The Los Angeles Times covered it, plastering his quote right in the headline: “It’s just no fun anymore.”
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“It’s just no fun anymore.” |
As economic winds changed and ’90s cynicism set in, miniseries production was drying up. Fantasy epics like The Odyssey and Merlin were produced, whose rights cost exactly zilch to grab. Musty romances and epics were ditched in favor of Stephen King, who reigned over the decade. IT came out in 1990 (you can thank your fear of clowns for that). Then The Tommyknockers in 1993, The Stand in 1994, Langoliers the year after, followed by 1997’s The Shining, personally adapted with dutiful faithfulness by King who always hated Stanley Kubrick’s impressionistic take on it. Storm of the Century closed out our 20th century.
As the millennium approached and the miniseries dwindled, ABC resurrected the primetime game show in August 1999 with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire hosted by Regis Philbin. At the height of Millionaire‘s popularity, 30 million viewers were tuning in to every show, so ABC gave it that oh-so-familiar schedule of multiple consecutive nights every week. Here was the next big thing. And it was very, very cheap: ABC recouped the $300,000 cost of each episode by selling a single 30-second ad spot. Rival networks created game shows in turn, with reality TV’s explosive revolution around the corner. American Idol required two nights a week to work, a competition night and a results night after tallying your votes. These formulas were drumming up the same daily chatter as something like Roots would, but at a faster pace and friendly to product placement. There was no time left over for the miniseries.
But we live now in a golden age of television.
While network entertainment infantilized, scripted shows geared for adults needed a place to go. It was time to take a trip to cabletown. The Sopranos launched on HBO in 1999, the same year as Millionaire. The show calcified a bubbling notion that TV protagonists didn’t have to be heroes or even likable, so long as their dilemmas were human. We could justify Tony Soprano raising national blood pressure as long as he also raised the right kind of questions about ourselves. And why did creator David Chase quit a stalled film career and come to television? As a GQ interview put it: “The reason, again and again, was always the same. His writing, he was told, was ‘too dark.'”
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What is a miniseries? What exactly is an event series? These labels don’t matter anymore. |
Like Alex Haley before him, Chase needed movie studio rejection to turn to television. And for decades, the miniseries was proof there’s an audience hungry for big stories with complete story arcs and complex characters. What it couldn’t offer in way of Hollywood budget was the promise of story and creative freedom, for actors to build their characters over long periods of time and for audiences to build relationships into obsession and online frenzy. That a common household appliance need not tell common-denominator tales.
In the end, the “miniseries” label is now just that: a label. When monoculture was alive and 9 out of 10 Americans watched the same three channels every day, it was the format of the miniseries that gave it much of its power, the way it was scheduled across consecutive nights that you had to watch or be out of the loop forever. But now that modern audiences have atomized into millions of technologic personal bubbles, where content is consumed at our own pace, format has no meaning. Are True Detective and American Horror Story miniseries? Why is Transparent or Orange is the New Black considered television when we watch it on the internet? Is the limited series (that’s what Twin Peaks is being called when/if it comes back in 2016) the new miniseries? And just what exactly is an event series? These labels don’t matter anymore.
The golden age of television then is not necessarily defined by the content that’s being produced, but by the destruction of being forced to watch something on a network’s timetable. We have the technology now to binge watch anything, anytime, anywhere — including the power to rewind, save, freeze frame, screenshot and animated gifify, while live tweeting and blathering into the social network. The obsession to consume and pick apart has given rise to television of depth, nuance, and boldness that encourages this kind of behavior. Now that we’re no longer dictated how and when to watch something, it’s all entertainment.
Who needs the miniseries anyway?
-Farber, Stephen. “Making Book on TV.” Film Comment Nov-Dec 1982. Pages 42-47.
