Timothy Havens

`The biggest show in the world': race and the global popularity of The Cosby Show

The Cosby Show changed the face of international television distribution as profoundly as it altered American television culture. However, while many scholars have addressed the shows domestic popularity, its international acceptance remains a virtual mystery. This article investigates the various economic, textual and audience practices that led to The Cosby Shows international success, and that continue to make middle-class African American sitcoms lucrative international fare. The Cosby Show set the representational and marketing standards that continue to determine what types of African American shows are sold internationally, and where those shows are sold. While the international syndication industry learned many lessons from The Cosby Show, including the global appeal of domestic sitcoms, this article suggests that deeper revelations regarding the importance of televisual representations of race in global programming remain unrecognized.

It's still a white world out there: the interplay of culture and economics in international television trade

Drawing on interviews with more than thirty international television executives from around the world, this article provides a case study of how distribution and acquisition practices in international television trade extract profit from television culture. While previous research in international television has tended to ignore or to oversimplify the importance of the distribution industry, this article demonstrates how studying distribution gives us insights into the contents and directions of transborder television flows that other methods and research foci miss. Specifically, the article explores how economic and cultural forces intersect to shape the global flow of African American situation comedies. As the television industry continues to globalize, cultural differences such as race will prove pivotal in attracting multinational viewers, and this article calls for more research into how such differences are commodified by the international distribution industry.

The hybrid grid: globalization, cultural power and Hungarian television schedules

While television scheduling practices overdetermine a host of institutional and cultural practices, including program import decisions and the popularity of specific programs, scheduling has received scant attention from critical media scholars. Drawing on the insight that contemporary scheduling practices - like most media practices today - are hybrid phenomena, this article demonstrates in some detail the variety of factors, both foreign and domestic, that come into play in specific scheduling decisions, paying particular attention to the conditions under which power relations among domestic, regional and global ideas about scheduling differ. I concentrate on three case studies of scheduling innovation in Hungary, each of which demonstrates different routes through which foreign scheduling practices enter the market. The resulting analysis has implications for understanding international television flows, as well as the ways in which power operates among global media institutions.

Introduction: Popular Television in Central and Eastern Europe

T special issue of the Journal of Popular Film and Television is, as far as we know, the first venue dedicated exclusively to research on popular television in Central and Eastern Europe. Assuming this is the case, we nevertheless trust that it will not be the last: A field of scholarship ences and were struck by the diversity and quality of emerging research on popular television in the region, which contrasted sharply with the comparative marginalization of the scholarship at both conferences. At the Beyond East and West conference, the focus on media systems, journalism, regulatory pracvision as an object of study in Central and Eastern Europe. Asking why two specialty conferences located in Europe—one actually in Central Europe, the other actually focused on popular television—failed to provide a proper venue can reveal several interconnected reasons why Central and Eastern European television has not yet entered fully into academic discourse. One reason behind the lack of proper venues for studying popular television in the region is the lasting ideological and disciplinary legacy of the Cold War. On the Western side of the defunct Iron Curtain, a bipolar paradigm developed in media studies that focused on how totalitarian regimes controlled propaganda-generating mass media such as television, while opposition was imagined as emanating only from dissident intellectuals, typically fiction writers and filmmakers. Television studies, which carved its disciplinary space out of mass communications in the West in the 1970s and 1980s, established its identity through the infusion of cultural studies theory, in particular a focus on the contradictory nature of popular texts under capitalism and attention to the pleasures of viewing. It worked within frameworks that were fairly specific to Copyright

The Business and Cultural Functions of Global Television Fairs

While the technical capacity for worldwide television broadcasting has existed at least since 1967, when the live program Our World was beamed to thirty-one countries (Parks, 2003), the cultural challenges facing transnational television exchanges have proved more formidable. Even within a single nation, cultural trends and audience tastes are fickle and unpredictable, making television programs risky commercial ventures. The added cultural differences that those programs face when they cross national, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries make it even more difficult to predict the potential popularity of any single television program. Nevertheless, international syndication markets have become more and more important for funding television production around the world over the past two decades (Havens 2006). Consequently, the global television business has developed a variety of strategies to deal with the risks posed by worldwide cultural differences. Central to these strategies are the relationships, reputations, and brand identities that get expressed and renewed at the global television sales fairs.