South Park boys and Sex and the City women. Television trade, narrowcasting and the export of gender...

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ISCC 2 (3) pp. 179–196 Intellect Limited 2010

Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture Volume 2 Number 3

© 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/iscc.2.3.179_1

Giselinde KuipersUniversity of Amsterdam and Erasmus University Rotterdam

South Park boys and Sex and

the City women: Television

trade, narrowcasting and the

export of gender categories

AbsTrAcT

This article analyses the export of the gendered ‘demographic logics’ of American television to four European countries: France, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland. As American and (later) European television landscapes have become increasingly fragmented, television targets increasingly specific audiences. Through interviews with cultural intermediaries and document and website analysis, three gendered categories were found representing central ‘target audiences’ for today’s narrow-casting that came to Europe from Hollywood: the housewife, the Sex and the City woman, and the South Park boy. This article traces the emergence of these catego-ries, and their uneven diffusion in European television landscapes, highlighting the dynamics of transnational diffusion of cultural categories. It shows how gendered audience categorizations provide a strategic site to employ the notoriously elusive concept of intersectionality in actual empirical analysis. This analysis of imported gendered categories underscores the similarity between the logic of narrowcasting and the analytical stance proposed by intersectionality theory, allowing us to criti-cally analyse the politics of narrowcasting.

Keywords

television tradecultural intermediariesgenderintersectionalitynarrowcastingEuropetelevision audiences

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inTroducTion: GenderinG Audiences in The TrAnsnATionAl TV field

In 2008, I visited MIPCOM, the world’s largest international fair for audio-visual content, held annually in Cannes, France. HBO, the American cable channel for ‘quality TV’, had set up a large tent on top of the Palais des Festivals, overlooking the Mediterranean, the yachts in the marina below and the palm trees along the boulevard. As I browsed the flyers advertising the series and movies offered to television buyers from around the world, two leaflets caught my eye: a soft pink and a soft blue one of the same size with similar layouts. These flyers presented HBO’s made-for-TV movies for men – the blue flyer – and for women – the pink one. The pink leaflet had three pictures of women in low-cut evening gowns, one of a happy couple, and advertised titles like Bernard and Doris, The Christmas Wife and Dancing in September. The blue one featured images of western movies, a man in a 1930s suit, and a cheering football team, offering titles like Always Outnumbered, Barbarians at the Gate and In Pursuit of Honor.

Television executives around the world often explicitly identify programmes, formats and genres as feminine or masculine. Since the early days of televi-sion, soap operas have targeted ‘daytime audiences’: TV-speak for housewives. Sports or action series are considered male and are programmed accordingly: late at night or on Sunday afternoons. For a long time, however, the major-ity of television programmes were designed to appeal to broad audiences – typically families watching television together (Byars and Meehan 1994; Press 2009).

American television makers, in contrast with television producers else-where, always worked for two target audiences: American and global audi-ences. As American television programmes were exported worldwide, American understandings of family life and gender roles travelled with them. Hollywood is still the largest exporter of television in the western world (Bielby and Harrington 2008; Havens 2006; Straubhaar 2007). However, today its exports are much more varied than the mostly family-oriented fare of the 1950s to 1970s.

In the 1980s, the USA was the first country to witness a spectacular multiplication of television channels, leading to fragmentation of audiences. Television producers and networks invented strategies to target smaller and more specific audiences. Family programming became a ‘niche’, alongside other programming intended for specific groups: single urban women in their 30s and 40s, college-educated middle-aged males, Latino girls under 20. This is known as the shift from ‘broadcasting’ to ‘narrowcasting’ (Byars and Meehan 1994; Smith-Shomade 2004).

One of the commonest ways to break up audiences is according to gender. Some channels, networks or time slots are ‘female-oriented’ whereas others target mainly men – although often less explicitly. Other important divi-sions in narrowcasting are age, educational level, religion, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, and combinations of those categories. These ‘narrowcast’ programmes and formats also made their way overseas. The HBO flyers that I found in Cannes illustrate this: television programmes and formats are typi-cally sold with a specific ‘demographic’ attached to it.

This article investigates how the demographic logic of narrowcasting affects acquisition and programming practices of European broadcasters. I investigate specifically how European channels deal with gender targeting in American


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television programmes and formats. To what extent do European television channels take over the gender classifications and divisions of American televi-sion? How are American gendered genres and classifications combined with local programming? How does this vary across countries? These questions are answered by analysing the acquisition and programming of American televi-sion in four European countries. In France, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland, I interviewed central ‘cultural intermediaries’ in the television field, and inves-tigated programming grids and practices.

Gender is central to (American) television culture. It has been a key element in the classification and division of audiences since the beginning of TV. The omnipresence of the gendered soap genre and the equally gendered sports talkshow attest to this. Moreover, gender is a classification that – so far – has proven easily transferable compared with divisions in American culture like race, ethnicity, religion or class (which in the United States function differ-ently than in Europe). However, the rise of narrowcasting has created new ‘intersections’ (Weldon 2008) between gender and categories like age, class, ethnicity and sexual orientation.

Again, the HBO flyers underline this. Not only are they gendered to the point of cliché (pink for girls, blue for boys), their HBO pedigree sends the additional message of ‘quality’ – a muted yet unmistakable reference to education and social class. American cable channels like HBO, Fox, Lifetime and MTV have led the way, globally, in narrowcasting. Thus they introduced the world to new, internationally recognizable intersectional categories like Sex and the City women and South Park boys.

TeleVision TrAde: exporTinG Gendered proGrAmmes, prAcTices And represenTATions

Since the beginning of television, broadcasters have imported foreign programmes. Especially in smaller or less prosperous countries, television producers simply cannot fill all the airtime themselves. In Europe, the presence of foreign, especially American programmes on national TV increased sharply in the 1990s. With some exceptions (Great-Britain, Finland) European states did not lose their broadcasting monopolies until the late 1980s and 1990s. The new commercial channels filled much of their ever-expanding airtime with foreign, especially American acquisitions (Bens and Smaele 2001).

There are several interrelated reasons for this growing American domi-nance of European TV. Television professionals generally point to the dependable quality and ‘production value’ of American programmes. This allows them to play safe and still attract large audiences (Kuipers 2011). Moreover, the 1990s were a golden age of American cultural and political global dominance (subsumed under the seemingly neutral label of ‘globali-zation’), paving the way for an enthusiastic reception of American popular culture even in former Communist countries. From an economic point of view, the Americanization of European TV reflects an increasingly asymmetrical dependence of European broadcasters on American producers. The expan-sion of commercial television in Europe caused a sharp increase in demand for ‘content’. The American ‘majors’ (large Hollywood producers like Disney or Fox) were happy to oblige (Havens 2006). This had a self-reinforcing effect. As audiences became more habituated to American television, it became less risky to rely on American programming, making imports from other countries less and less appealing.


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The resulting asymmetric power relations are reflected in the contracts many European broadcasters have with the American majors. Programmes and movies are usually sold in packages, combining attractive items with less appealing fare. In more competitive markets (France, Italy, the Netherlands), buyers often close ‘output deals’ giving them first right of acquisition, but with an obligation to buy a specific amount of programming for a fixed period (usually three years). Hence, broadcasters have to buy more than they want. In the case of output deals they even consent to buying things that have not been made yet. Obviously, such deals can only exist in markets with few powerful sellers and many eager buyers (Kuipers 2011).

The expansion of TV trade and import leads to the diffusion of practices and norms, both to local TV industries and to audiences around the world (Straubhaar 2007; Bielby and Harrington 2008; Kuipers 2011). These practices and norms do not move automatically from American studios to European living rooms. Instead, they are passed on, selectively and often with some modifications, by cultural intermediaries: the persons concerned with transfer-ring cultural products from one field to another (Havens 2006; Kuipers 2012; Smith Maguire and Matthews 2010). The popular metaphor of globalization as ‘flow’, suggesting easy and automatic movement to the point of lower elevation or resistance, obfuscates the fact that considerable work is involved in making cultural objects ‘flow’. The diffusion of American television is made possible by sellers, buyers, translators, programmers, marketers and other middlemen specialized in making things work across boundaries.

Here, I analyse the work of cultural intermediaries in the television field, looking specifically at the transnational diffusion of gender practices and norms. Television plays an important role in the formation and perpetuation of gender ideologies. TV itself, with its focus on domesticity and its central location in the house is often considered a female medium (Press 2009). Moreover, television presents viewers with an array of gender roles and portrayals, reflecting particular gender ideologies (Press 2009; Zoonen 1994). Finally, television regulates and shapes time use, daily practices and hence: social relations. It draws together people for collective viewing, but also sepa-rates social categories through targeting specific audiences. With the increase of channels and televisions per household, television becomes a segregating force, separating men and women even in the same dwelling.

Television, then, is suffused with gender. However, American television is suffused first and foremost with American notions of gender. These are not always easily translated to other cultures. Cultural intermediaries must create local audiences for programs ‘gendered’ for and by Americans. Alternatively, they may decide to reject shows when cultural distance seems too large to bridge.

With the shift in American television from ‘broadcasting’ to ‘narrowcast-ing’, gender representations and distinctions in television have become more diverse and specific. Potentially, this presents television buyers and program-mers in ‘receiving’ countries with new challenges, as more specific targeting may mean more cultural specificity. However, the international success of shows like Sex and the City (Darren Star/HBO, 1998–2004), or specialist chan-nels like MTV or Comedy Central suggests that the same niches exists across countries.

The logic of ‘narrowcasting’, an industry term dating back at least 30 years, resonates interestingly with the notion of ‘intersectionality’, currently en vogue in gender studies (Davis 2008). Like narrowcasting, intersectionality insists



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1. Figures on television imports are hard to come by and not easily comparable (see Kuipers 2011).

that gender is not the only category, but that a variety of social categories interact to produce distinct identities. Both in narrowcasting and in intersec-tionality theory, this results in increasingly nuanced and fine-grained analysis of social relations. However, while both concepts reflect attempts to grasp the workings of identity in twenty-first century society, their goals and politics are obviously different.

Various scholars have critically analysed the politics of narrowcasting. In Breaking up America, Turow (1998) argued that the dividing of audiences into ever-smaller categories not only leads to the exclusion of certain groups, but also affects the fabric of social life, removing commonalities and connections between groups. Shomade-Smith (2004) showed that narrowcasting, while finally ‘discovering’ black audiences, reproduced exclusionary patterns. On the other hand, products of narrowcasting like Ally McBeal (Fox/David E. Kelly Productions, 1997–2002) and Sex and the City, have met with positive responses among feminist scholars (Akass and McCabe 2004; Dubrofsky 2002).

Narrowcasting, then, does what the intersectionality perspective has urged gender scholars to do – but with a different purpose and politics. This industry strategy and its transnational diffusion present us with a strategic site for studying intersectionality in a concrete case study. Intersectionality has proven difficult to study in actual empirical cases, precisely because it is so multifaceted (Hancock 2007; Weldon 2008). In narrowcast programming, intersectionality is ‘built into’ social reality. By looking at cultural intermedi-aries in four different countries, we capture how demographic classifications and their intersections function in everyday practice. How do cultural inter-mediaries employ or transform these categorizations? But also the reverse: how do these categorizations affect and transform cultural intermediaries and their practices?

The reseArch

This article investigates how the gendered logic of narrowcasting affects TV programming in four European countries: France, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland. These countries vary in their openness towards and position vis-à-vis international television, in their media landscapes and television policies. Consequently, television in these countries differs both in degree and type of internationalization.

Of these four countries, the Netherlands is the most open to foreign televi-sion, with a high percentage of American and British imports on all channels. The percentage of imported programs on Italian TV is only slightly lower,1 but more mixed, with American alongside European and Latin-American programmes. In France, the percentage of American programmes is the lowest in Western Europe, but despite strict policy measures it is rising stead-ily. French TV also airs programmes from other, especially European nations. Poland, finally, only became integrated into the transnational television arena after 1989, and is strongly nationally orientated by European standards. Polish broadcasters usually have no output deals with American majors, and only the biggest American (and British) shows are available on Polish TV (for detailed analysis, see Kuipers 2011, 2012).

Between 2005 and 2009, I interviewed 42 ‘cultural intermediaries’ between global and national television: nine in France, eleven in Italy, ten in the Netherlands, and twelve in Poland. The main intermediaries are buyers, the executives responsible for acquisition of foreign programming.


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For this research I interviewed 31 such buyers, at least one at each public, commercial and subscription broadcaster in each of these countries. Other interviewees were programmers (responsible for scheduling programmes), editors and translation supervisors. Several interviewees were contacted again in 2010 and 2011 for updates. During these interviews, which typi-cally lasted between one and two hours, we discussed the channel’s buying and programming practices, interviewees’ perceptions of the national and transnational television fields, and their quality standards and percep-tions of the audience. The interviews were analysed with HyperResearch software.

In addition, I analysed national media landscapes and programming prac-tices by studying TV grids, annual reports of broadcasters and publications in the trade press (including online sources) about national and international TV markets. I also consulted websites of channels and broadcasters, as they contain the most up-to-date information on programming.

Gender And The demoGrAphic loGic of TV

TV schedules are the product of decisions made by cultural intermediar-ies. In making these decisions, intermediaries rarely rely on their own tastes (Kuipers 2012). Instead, they select and schedule programmes for target audi-ences, which are delineated in specific demographic terms. In my interviews, I found three gendered categories – two female, one male – that cultural inter-mediaries employed in buying and programming strategies. However, not all categories were equally prominent in all four countries.

‘The commercial target, housewives – age 18–49’

In all four countries, gender was an important category in creating channel identities. One archetypical woman was to be the central figure in buying and programming strategies.

We have two target audiences. We have individuals, which are every-body over 4 years old and we have the commercial target which are the housewives aged 18 to 50 years old.

So, women?

Yes women. So it’s a very usual target and we do not overtarget it like in the States. We try to be with these two targets. Sometimes, very rarely we try to target youngsters, young people not youngsters, meaning 15–35 years old, and the goal in targeting them is just not to lose ground on younger people. Because in France 50 per cent of our audience is over 50 years old. So it’s very easy for a French TV station to have huge ratings only with elder people. Very easy, because they are very numerous so we have to be very careful not to fall into this trap.

(buyer, M, TF1, France)

If you could describe the other channels, what are their characteristics or their audiences, how do they differ from you?

I think that the best description would be in terms of the target, of the audience. For us it is 10–49 generally, housewives during daytime. For



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TV4 it is 18–39 big cities, it is almost the same target as TVN, which is big cities, younger and more educated and more female. TVP’s target is four plus, it is very broad.

(buyer, F, Polsat, Poland)

‘Housewives aged 18 to 50’, or housewives combined with ‘10–49 generally’ or ‘individuals’ is the target group of the largest commercial channel in each country: French TF1, Dutch RTL4, Italian Canale5 and Polsat in Poland. The reason for this is rather mundane: ‘They are the ones making the shopping decisions’ (programmer, F, Mediaset, Italy). In Dutch advertising jargon, this group is known as ‘boodschappers’, which simultaneously (and tellingly) means ‘shoppers’ and ‘messengers’.

As the quotes show, the labels used to categorize audiences were remark-ably similar across countries, including the age cutoff points: 15–35 or 16–35 is ‘young’, 18–49 or 18–50 is ‘everyone’. Audiences above 50 do not exist for commercial broadcasters because ‘they always buy the same. They don’t change brands anymore’ (programmer, F, Mediaset, Italy). In public and subscription channels, the demographic logic is less prominent, but never completely absent. While these channels are less radical in their rejection of older viewers, everyone is eager to attract the younger audiences, in the 15–35 ‘age bracket’.

Poles, Italians and French all spoke of ‘age brackets’, ‘female-skewed programming’, ‘more sophisticated viewers’ and ‘urban audiences’ who did not like ‘Black shows’ but loved ‘quality programs’. Even in the interviews I conducted in Dutch, English words were often used to describe audiences and audience segments. This suggests that these demographic classifications are international – and probably American by origin.

Often, cultural intermediaries supplement these rather dry demographics with more personalized information or imaginations about their target groups. The most elaborate example of the way demography is employed in television programming I found at RTL Netherlands:

We even gave them names. Extensive marketing research has gone into that. The target group of Yorin is 20–34, we call them Mark and Kim. And it turns out these names are common in that demographic […] I have a general image of the house they live in. They have finished school, not thinking about kids yet. She secretly is. He not yet. They are on their first jobs. He does something with IT, her job I don’t remember. What car they drive in has been specified. How they live too: in this case we decided on an apartment in Utrecht. For RTL5 we came up with Erik. He’s a little older, has kids of about 6 years or so. He has been linked to the brands he likes, what he watches, the extent to which his wife is wearing the pants. For RTL4 we have one too, that I can’t recall right now. Or yes, that’s a housewife. And how old she is, more or less, where she is, in her life, what her expectations for the future are, what kind of work she does, we captured that in concrete totally non-existent persons. […] Cause they don’t exist, we use them as guidelines, like: picture these people when you try to decide what would work on which channel.

(programmer, M, RTL Netherlands)

At the time of this interview, RTL was in the process of revising chan-nel profiles. In the new system, RTL4 remained for housewives and general


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publics. RTL5 became a channel for young people. Yorin became RTL7, which the present head buyer calls ‘the male channel of the Netherlands’ (as will become clear below, these males are mainly young).

This quote underscores the centrality of housewives in the ‘demographic imagination’ of television makers. Yet, it seems telling that hers is the name he cannot remember. ‘Mark and Kim’ represent an intersection of age and class: young, urban and with mid-level education, they are unlikely viewers for both public television and the broad, family-oriented RTL4. Note that the Polish buyer described the target group of TV4 as quite similar. Erik represents the (relatively) young male viewer who now is served by RTL 7. However, the most important new group in European broadcasters ‘demographic imagina-tion’ is female.

‘Still women of course – women with a good job so they have money to spend’

The second female audience archetype is the educated, prosperous, urban woman. Prominence of this type varies across countries. Only in the Netherlands and Poland, this group was explicitly identified as target group for one (or more) of the large broadcasters. A programmer at Dutch Net5 (one of three channels of SBS), described this group as follows:

We call RTL4 [which targets housewives] simply prissy. But we are competing so that’s a little lame. Young women today are more directed towards – Well they are still women of course, so concerned with chil-dren but in a very liberal not conservative – in a very modern way. Strong women. Often women with a good job so they also have money to spend. Also on luxury items. That is the Net5 woman.

(programmer, M, SBS, Netherlands)

Polish TVN, the smaller of two commercial broadcasters, defined its target audiences as follows:

So our target audience it is female audience first of all, 16 to 49. In general we aim for big cities, and like in the upper level of economy, with upper level salaries. And as regards the schedule, the current schedule is little bit different from the schedules, let’s say from 1997, when TVN started, or even 1998 especially as regards American product. Because at the beginning in ’97, ’98 or even ’99 American product was very very popu-lar […] They were a lot of series, like sitcoms, dramas, soap operas. All genres practically and if you look at the current schedule […] you will practically have only a few American series in the schedules of the main stations. And it was replaced by the local production. And of course the local production, some of the local productions are also based on the American formats, on the series that were acclaimed and that were successful in other territories.

(buyer, F, TVN, Poland)

As this buyer describes, after an initial enthusiastic embrace of American imports TVN became more locally oriented. However, the target remains the same, now lured with local products, remakes of American programmes and international ‘female-skewed’ formats like Next Top Model.



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In France and Italy, this particular demographic of ‘sophisticated women’ came up in the interviews less frequently. Both countries have specialty chan-nels on subscription TV (Canal + in France; Sky/Fox in Italy) specifically targeting younger women. However, in neither country is it the backbone of one of the large channels.

In France, the main divisions in the media landscape are class and age, with gender a secondary category. The buyer for French M6, the second largest commercial broadcaster, described ‘modern working women’ as a subcategory of the audience for his youth-oriented channel. Some slots and nights on M6 are reserved for men, with action and science fiction, whereas others are reserved for women. M6 owns the rights to programmes typical for this demographic, like Sex and the City or Desperate Housewives (ABC/Cherry Productions, 2004–). They are broadcast on women-oriented nights, along with French female-oriented programming.

In Italy, the figure of the young, urban, professional woman was remark-ably absent from the interviews – as she is from Italian television in general. The only women mentioned by interviewees at the large broadcasters RAI (public) and Mediaset (Silvio Berlusconi’s company) were housewives, the preferred target for American soaps, Italian historical drama and Latin-American telenovelas.

An attempt to fill this niche in the Italian media landscape has failed. Since 2001, smaller commercial channel La7, has tried to establish itself as a quality network providing an alternative to the relentless focus on popular entertainment of RAI and Mediaset. La7 focuses on news, information, and ‘quality entertainment’, including programmes for ‘sophisticated female audi-ences’ as the buyer put it. When I asked the buyer, in 2009, what programme he would like to buy if he could, he said:

Maybe for our schedule Desperate Housewives would be much more useful because in our mind we want to change our viewer. At the moment we are much more male than female and we want to be much more female than male.

(buyer, M, La 7, Italy)

The struggling La7 has wooed sophisticated female audiences since its incep-tion, with strategies clearly inspired by American cable shows. It broadcast Sex and the City and even its lesbian, equally glamorous counterpart The L Word (Anonymous Content/ Dufferin Gate/ Showtime, 2004–2009). However, my interviewee granted that ‘this worked not as well as we hoped’. Since the interview, La7 has not succeeded in keeping the smallish female audiences it attracted with these shows. Currently, the channel focuses on documentaries, news, and British and American drama – none of which is particularly female. As of yet, the Italian ‘woman with a good job so they have money to spend’ does not have her own TV channel – or even TV night.

‘The cool young man who does not take himself too seriously’

A third gender division in TV programming revolves around a male type: the young, adventurous, slightly rebellious man who likes action, comedy, sports, cars – and maybe some (soft) porn too, when media policy allows.

In the Netherlands, this niche is most developed, with no less than two mainstream channels competing fiercely to catch this group. RTL Netherlands


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2. Source: interviewee at MTV Europe, Amsterdam. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedy_Central, accessed 28 February 2012.

has RTL7, ‘the male channel of the Netherlands’. In addition, competitor SBS has male-oriented Veronica. As SBS’s buyer explained:

Net5 is for the young enterprising self-assured women, a little humor and a whiff of sexy. And Veronica is for the cool young man with humor, self – how would you call that – doesn’t take himself too seriously, irrev-erent, outspoken, likes to have fun.

(buyer, F, SBS, Netherlands)

Note that the male and female categories are not each other’s mirror image. Whereas the ‘Sex and the City woman’ is independent and educated, the education or prosperity of these young men is left unmarked. When I asked the previous buyer of SBS about this, he explained: ‘The highly educated men are with the public broadcasters. But for the educated women, there was noth-ing just for them. So we filled that gap’ (buyer, M, SBS, Netherlands).

Indeed, ‘the highly educated viewer’, the favourite target group of public broadcasters and ‘quality networks’, is more gendered than the neutral label suggests. This group is lured with news, documentaries, political talkshows, satire and ‘quality’ crime shows – a line-up of genres typically placed on the masculine end of the spectrum of gender and genre.

In France, Italy and Poland, none of the large mainstream broadcasters specifically targets this group. As we saw, French M6 reserves time slots for this category, filled with American action, comedy and science fiction series. In Poland and Italy, youth-oriented commercial channels target this group as part of the more general ‘15–35 age bracket’.

However, this small but attractive target group of ‘irreverent young men’ has been the focus of close attention of specialty channels since the 1990s. MTV has been active in all four countries for over twenty years. With programmes like Beavis and Butt-head (Judgemental Films Inc/MTV/Tenth Annual Industries, 1993–1998; 2011–) and Jackass (Dickhouse Productions/MTV, 2000–), this channel has made irreverent adolescence one of its specialisms. More recently, Comedy Central (part of MTV Networks) has started broadcasting in the Netherlands (2007), Poland (2006) and Italy (2007).2

Like MTV, Comedy Central does not present itself as exclusively male. However, it has a convincing record in attracting younger men, for instance with its flagship programme South Park (Comedy Central/Braniff/Comedy Partners/South Park Studios 1997–). As the buyer for Comedy Central Netherlands (responsible for all acquisitions for North Europe, including Poland) explained:

Could you describe the target group of Comedy Central?

Yes, that really depends on the time slot. […] You can imagine that between three and five we have different people watching than between six and eight, or between ten and one. But then I have the whole palette of 13–49, so youth and everyone. So afterschool [in English] is really 13–19, so that is the slightly younger group. And then after six it become just 20–49. With stress on 20–34, 35–49 is less important for us. […] Also, we get more men, especially later. If you look at the Dutch ratings, in the young category, Comedy Central has twice as many boys as girls, if you compare it with MTV. […] We are not a male channel exclusively.


http://en.wikipedia.org/


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3. See http://www.jimmy.fr/ and http://www.jimmytv.it/. See also http://www.millecanali.it/jimmy-una-fine-annunciata/0,1254,57_ART_7597,00.html, accessed 28 February 2012.

4. Both the reliance on their own taste, and their ignorance of ratings, can be explained from their working at subscription channels (see Kuipers 2012).

We have South Park, The Office and Californication. But That’s Seventies Show, Scrubs – that is much less masculine.

(buyer, M, MTV, Netherlands)

Long before Comedy Central came to Europe, a similar niche was filled up in France and Italy by Canal Jimmy, an originally French channel specializing in ‘cult series’. Started in France in 1991, it was ‘exported’ to Italy in 1997. In France, Jimmy is part of the package of subscription channel Canal+. In Italy, it was part of the Sky/Fox subscription channel, but has ceased operations after 2010.3

Jimmy (the name refers to Jimi Hendrix and James Dean, heroes of the channel’s founder) specialized in American and British ‘cult’ series, often in ‘original versions’ (subtitled, not dubbed). It also aired local and imported comedy, and Jimmy Italy had manga and erotic programmes. Because it ran on subscription TV, Jimmy avoided strict rules on language (in France, subtitling is more or less forbidden) and moral censorship (in Italy free-to-air channels typically remove ‘immoral’ references). Thus, Jimmy was young, rebellious, cosmopolitan, humour-loving and male-oriented.

However, my respondents at French and Italian Jimmy did not speak the language spoken at Comedy Central, or indeed large channels elsewhere. They often referred to ‘cult series’ – a label I never heard elsewhere. They never spoke of age brackets and target demographics. In general, it was difficult to extract from them the information about target groups that came so naturally to most interviewees. Surprisingly, my interviewees did not know the gender composition of their audiences (‘We do not measure that at Canal+’ my informant told me.). Yet, they both conceded it was probably more male, and certainly young. Most startlingly, these cultural intermediaries were allowed to follow their own tastes:4

I do this because our audience is like me. I like American television, I like comedy, I want to watch original versions. So yes, our audiences is young, lives in Paris, wants to speak foreign languages. […] We have more boys than girls I think. Because boys like comedy, and they like America more.

(buyer, M, Canal+/Jimmy, France)

Since you worked here, what has been your biggest success?

For more the most important – There are two … I love two series, one is American, one is English. The American is by Comedy Central that is That’s my Bush it is a parody and for me I am proud, when I found this series I felt very proud because I thought it was very funny. And also I loved very much The Ali G show, both the English version [produced by Channel 4, GK] and the American version (produced by HBO, GK), with Borat.

And did they work well with your audience?

Yes. Very well.(programmer, F, Digicast/Jimmy, Italy)

In the Italian and French television landscapes, this is a clear, remarkably early example of narrowcasting. However, while this strategy revolved around


http://www.jimmy.fr/

http://www.jimmy.fr/

http://www

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5. European buyers are very reluctant to buy ‘Black shows’; and the gender stereotypes are rather evidently heterosexual. However, several buyers noted, with a note of satisfaction, that the female niche programming also attracts gay men.

American content, the strategy, the target group and the channel profile breathe a different discourse and jargon. It would seem that the same niche group, ‘the young man who doesn’t take himself too seriously’, was discov-ered twice – in America by Comedy Central, and in France, from a slightly different angle, by Jimmy.

nArrowcAsTinG And The imporT of Gender cATeGories

From the interviews with cultural intermediaries, three intersectional catego-ries emerged, representing specific combinations of gender, age and educa-tion, and implicitly ethnicity and sexual orientation.5 The first, the housewife has American roots, probably dating back to the 1950s and 1960s. Today, she is the backbone of mainstream commercial television everywhere.

The other categories are more recent and specific. The first category can be summarized as Sex and the City women, referring to the successful HBO series about the glamorous, prosperous and promiscuous lives of four female friends in their 30s and 40s in New York City. The second category I call South Park boys, after the flagship series of Comedy Central. Drawn in a purposively rough and sloppy style and dealing with the lives of four rebellious and foul-mouthed boys from middle America, this cartoon flaunts and celebrates its irreverence and political incorrectness. Despite their differences, these series share some important characteristics. Both produced by American cable chan-nels known for their daring and experimental programming, they have caused considerable controversy. Through their style and subject matter, they will-fully exclude a large proportion of the audience. Both shows are character-ized by smart (i.e. difficult) writing and sharp wit. As such, they are typical products of narrowcasting: they target specific audiences, and are not afraid to chase others away.

The audience segments targeted by these shows therefore are rela-tively new, and in their current European form probably have their roots in American television. Yet, they are not as universally employed and recog-nized by European television executives as the omnipresent housewives. This uneven spread allows us to analyse the diffusion of these newer and less universally adopted categories. How did they emerge in these four European countries, if at all? To what extent can this be interpreted as the direct import of American gender categories and classifications?

How the sex and the city woman was transplanted to Europe

In 1999, Dutch Net5 announced that Tuesday night would be ‘women’s night’. Back to back, this night featured Ally McBeal, Sex and the City, and – after a few months – The Gilmore Girls (Dorothy Parker Drank Here Productions/ Hofflund Polone/Warner Bros television, 2000–2007). Soon, Tuesday night became an institution: groups of women friends would get together to watch the shows together. Somewhat startled by this success, broadcaster SBS announced that Net5 would become the ‘women’s channel’. The channel has maintained this strategy till today.

This move was largely supply driven, and its success rather unexpected (Langeslag 2002). Since SBS was the second commercial broadcaster, the broad, family-oriented ‘housewife’ market was already covered by compet-itor RTL. The first SBS channel programmed mostly local fare, leaving the broadcaster with a lot of American programming, bought in bulk, to ‘place’



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6. The original version of Grace under Fire was produced between 1993 and 1998 by Carsey-Werner and ABC; Ugly Betty, a remake of Betty La Fea, was produced by Silent H/ABC between 2006 and 2010; The Nanny was produced by CBS/ Highschool Sweethearts and Sternin and Fraser Ink between 1993 and 1999.

somewhere. As SBS’s buyer explained: ‘From America, we kept getting these feminine things, and then we decided to put them all together. And that worked very well’.

In Poland, something similar happened around the same time. TVN also was the second commercial channel to enter the market, finding the main-stream commercial niche already taken. TVN first aimed for younger, urban audiences, gradually specializing in women. As in the Netherlands, this was supply driven: inexperienced in producing TV, TVN worked with what they got from the American sellers. As audience interest in American programmes dwindled, the channel started producing more female-oriented programmes, often based on American or British scripts or formats.

However, these two channels and their female target audiences developed differently – gradually transforming the American programming template into a hybrid of American and local gender representations. With remakes of The Nanny, Ugly Betty and Grace under Fire6, TVN become more Polish and more mainstream. The channel remained cautious in its portrayal of independent women. Sex and the City was left to the public channel TVP, where it was broadcast late at night, and considered very controversial. TVN’s production Magda M (Akson Studio, 2005–2007), dubbed ‘the Polish Ally McBeal’, had a rather conventional soap opera story line about a woman confronted with love and illness. While it protagonist was successful lawyer, her lifestyle was less erratic and promiscuous than Ally McBeal’s.

This shift towards a more mainstream feminine profile is the combined effect of national culture and national field dynamics. As the uproar surround-ing Sex and the City illustrates, independent, liberated women are not easily accepted in Poland. TVN’s buyer explained: ‘Poland is very catholic, and a little conservative still’. Within the TV field, TVN’s competitor Polsat was even more cautious in its presentation of women, and more Polish oriented in its programming. As their buyer put it ‘we are quite rural’. This left TVN with a broad female market to usurp.

In the Netherlands, the Net5 niche remained more specific than in Poland: young, educated, urban, female, modern. While dominated by American films and series, it produced some Dutch additions, like Evelien (Endemol Nederland BV, 2005–2006) and Julia’s Tango (Endemol Nederland BV, 2007–2008) to the Net5 line-up. These programmes were similar to American shows on the channel both in style and tone, and reached a similar demographic.

Again, the explanation for the persistence of this niche is part field dynamics, part culture. The Netherlands has more channels than other countries (ten mainstream channels, as compared to seven in Poland, France and Italy), making smaller niches feasible. Since the Netherlands is rather more progressive regarding gender and sexuality than Poland, the gender poli-tics of these shows was not a problem at all. Sex and the City at a certain point was broadcast daily between seven and eight, a timeslot typically reserved for families and young adolescents.

Both the Polish and the Dutch channels attracted their target women with locally produced new series. These series, while adapted to local culture and setting, are remarkably similar in tone and style to the American exam-ples: mixtures of drama and comedy, characterized by a light, witty and self-reflexive style, featuring independent, attractive, prosperous female protagonists. The visual style is comparable: stylish and visually attractive, with bright colours and fashionable clothes, shot in a variety of indoor and outdoor locales, they are like televised high-end fashion magazines. This same


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7. For an overview, see Kuipers (2011).

visual style dominates the DVD boxes of both American and locally produced shows: bright and shiny, with a noticeable preference for girlish features like the colour pink, hearts and butterflies. Clearly, the Sex and the City woman has been transplanted successfully to the Polish and Dutch TV world – and now functions independently of its American donor.

In France and Italy, this TV archetype is less prominent. It is not the back-bone of any of the mainstream channels. While the American programmes shows about younger, independent women are available, scattered across various channels, I have found no local remakes or new programmes adopt-ing the same style or target audience.

In France, the strong protectionist policies7 undoubtedly have hampered the import of American target groups and categories, as they hampered the import of American TV generally. Unlike its Dutch and Polish counterparts, the second commercial channel M6 did not break up its young urban audi-ence further. In the French TV field, the niche of international youth-oriented programming is already rather specific.

In France, a more general cultural distance, along with a certain anti-Americanism, and lack of habituation to American television have made the import of these shows, and the audience categories stowed away in them, more difficult. While visually attractive, these shows are also very verbal, full of cultural references and a certain American brashness. The erratic history of Sex and the City in France underlines the cultural gap that had to be bridged. The public France2 acquired first rights in 1999, but decided not to air it. According to the buyer ‘It just didn’t work in French. Sex and the City in French just comes out slutty’ (buyer, F, France2). For a long time, it was aired on a small specialty channel TEVA. Only much later, around the time when the movie based on the series came out, it was picked up by M6.

In Italy, the cultural gap is even wider, despite the audience’s greater habituation to American fare. La7’s failure to attract this female audience is partly due to its weak position in a field controlled completely by Berlusconi. But La7 only got the rights to Sex and the City and The L Word because these shows were deemed too controversial by the Mediaset and RAI.

The lack of programming targeting independent, successful women on Italian TV reflects a wider cultural politics. Italy is among the most conserva-tive nations in Europe where gender is concerned, and Italian television is easily the most sexist of Europe. Among the many imported programs, the local colour is provided by Italian variety shows, presented by tanned, silver-haired hosts in expensive suits flanked by scantily clad blondes half their age. This underscores the role of women in Italian TV: to be looked at, rarely to speak for themselves.

Throughout my conversations with Italians, both in the media and outside, American shows like Sex and the City, Ally McBeal or recently Cougar Town (Doozer, Coquette Productions, ABC, 2009–) were described as overly risqué, their gender politics too controversial by Italian standards. As a programmer at Mediaset told me: ‘American programs often do not show good family values. Divorced women, single women having babies. Italian audiences do not like that’ (programmer, F, Mediaset, Italy). While I cannot establish with certainty whether, indeed, the entire Italian audience shares this opinion, many televi-sion makers certainly believe this. As television makers control the airwaves, what they believe often becomes true. Hence, on Italian TV there is no place for ‘women with good jobs so they have money to spend’.



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south park boys in Europe: Merging local and American niches

The Sex and the City women, when they arrived at European TV, arrived in the mainstream. The South Park boys, instead, made their appearance though a side entrance. In the late 1990s and 2000s, they entered Europe via MTV and Comedy Central. With the exception of the Netherlands, there is little chance that this group will become more central to the mainstream TV landscape.

The advent of this target group differs from the sophisticated females in more respects. This niche was not entirely new to the local TV landscapes of Italy, France and the Netherlands. In France and Italy, its forerunner (with a local twist) was targeted by specialty channel Canal Jimmy. In the Netherlands, too, the two male channels have their roots in an earlier niche: both RTL7 and Veronica are descendants – through various mergers and separations – of the pirate radio channel, then public TV channel Veronica. Veronica was ‘young, fast and wild’ as the slogan ran, male oriented and focused on international pop culture.

Only in Poland, largely cut off from American pop culture until the 1990s, was no pre-existing niche for young, rebellious, American-focused, male-oriented television. This division between Poland and the rest suggests that the existence of this target group is the result of an earlier period of American cultural expansion: male-oriented American pop culture, made into increasingly nationally specific hybrids like Jimmy and Veronica.

Rather than a completely supply-driven ‘transplant’ of a new audience category, the introduction of the South Park boys represents the merging of a pre-existing television niche with a new one. Indeed, the local versions of Comedy Central often incorporated local comedies and comedians, which they felt ‘were right’ for their channel. Hence, rather than converting the American into the national, making it part of the local mainstream, as has happened to the Sex and the City women – here the national is made part of a transnational channel and brand identity.

This unusual move of ‘avoiding the mainstream’ is possible because specialty channels like Jimmy, MTV and Comedy Central are less dependent on the local television landscape and culture. They are relatively sheltered from the competition among mainstream channels. As specialty channels, their identity is based on exclusivity. Part of this exclusivity is the lack of localization. Their audiences pride themselves on their cosmopolitanism, sharing in the aura of American pop culture with its cultivated rebellion, its messy, gritty style, and its American pop cultural references. The Sex and the City women reflect the simul-taneous emergence of a similar group in various countries: both the American and local shows appeal to the same lifestyle, which now can be found in New York but also in Warsaw, Paris, Amsterdam and Milan. The South Park boys, with their embrace of non-localized American culture, show something differ-ent: the emergence of a transnational stratum of cosmopolitan youths.

conclusion: The exporT of clAssificATions – And Their inTersecTions

This article analysed the export of the gendered ‘demographic logics’ of American television to four European countries. Cultural intermediaries work-ing in television in France, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland often used the same demographic labels and categories to describe the programmes on their national channels. Three of these demographic categories were gendered and obviously American imports. All three reflected specific intersections


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of gender and other demographic categories: housewives, Sex and the City women, and South Park boys. While the housewife is the backbone of main-stream programming in all four countries, the other two categories were less evenly distributed across countries.

These categories have followed different trajectories from Hollywood to these four European television fields. The advent of the independent, sophis-ticated women on TV is largely supply driven. If its introduction was success-ful, it established itself in the mainstream channels, and led to the creation of local hybrids. The target audience of the rebellious adolescents found an already existing niche audience in all countries except Poland, leading to a merging of old and new niches. Hence, rather than localizing the American categories, here existing local categories were ‘Americanized’ or ‘globalized’ through their incorporation into transnational channel identities.

This analysis highlights, first, the dynamics of transnational cultural diffu-sion. Rather then leading to ‘homogenization’ or ‘Americanization’, the globalization of culture leads to complicated interactions of transnational prac-tices and ideas with local culture and field dynamics. Hence, both ‘the global’ and ‘the American’ look very different in different countries. Moreover, local culture and local cultural intermediaries can facilitate or block the import of specific categories and ideas – as the Italian case shows most strikingly.

Yet, transnational diffusion is more subtle, and thus probably more effec-tive than critics of ‘Americanization’, policy-makers with their quotas for national and European content, or audiences may realize. The pre-packaged and strictly targeted American imports not only increasingly fill up television channels in all four European countries. They also shape the grids, profiles and media landscapes with their increasingly narrowcast logic; and they inform the discourses and practices of cultural intermediaries. Even when the programmes are largely local, as in Poland, the underlying demographic logic may still be the result of imported gender categories.

The logic of ‘narrowcasting’ that suffuses American television program-ming is strikingly reminiscent of the analytical stance promoted by intersec-tionality theory: gender only becomes meaningful in its interaction with other categories. Narrowcasting, therefore, provides a strategic site to study intersec-tionality in practice. Moreover, viewing this industry practice through the lens of intersectionality highlight the politics of narrowcasting. As I have shown here, narrowcasting produces inclusion and exclusion of specific groups, but also fragmentation – which affects all groups. Young, prosperous women and even younger cosmopolitan males have been discovered, first in Hollywood, then in Europe, as new and interesting ‘intersections’. But in their comfortable and entertaining niches, they are unaware of the people located on the less-privileged intersections of the demographic map.

In today’s fragmented TV field, the true gender politics of television may not lay in representation anymore, but instead in isolation and separation – of women from men, and women from women. Hence, we may need to rethink enthusiastic feminist reception of Ally, Carry, Betty, Jules, and all the other liberated, independent women of narrowcast TV.

AcKnowledGemenTs

This research was funded by a Veni grant from the innovative research scheme of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), grant number 451-03-091. The author is grateful to Tonny Krijnen for her



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encouragement, patience, and critical feedback; and to Jeroen de Kloet for his insightful comments.

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suGGesTed ciTATion

Kuipers, G. (2010), ‘South Park boys and Sex and the City women: Television trade, narrowcasting and the export of gender categories’, Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 2: 3, pp. 179–196, doi: 10.1386/iscc.2.3.179_1

conTribuTor deTAils

Giselinde Kuipers is Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Amsterdam, and Norbert Elias Professor of Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She has published widely on humor, media, cultural globalization and comparative sociology.

Contact: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, OZ Achterburgwal 185, 1012DK Amsterdam, The Netherlands.E-mail: [email protected]

Giselinde Kuipers has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.


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