#I hope this is clear. happy to further clarify any point. I'm trying to condense a LOT of info w/o missing anything important

[tomwambsmilk]

What are some of the characteristics of these white middle class men you speak of or how do you know someone is middle class? and why would prestige tv cater to only this dempgrpahic?

This is honestly a great question, and one that's surprisingly difficult to answer in a concise way. I've done my best, but in case you don't want to read, the TL;DR is: HBO (a cable frontrunner who defined the strategy for other competitors who emerged later) intentionally catered to men in its early (pre-prestige) days because they knew the networks were intentionally catering to women. This meant that when it shifted into prestige TV in the late 90s, the existing subscriber base was middle-class white men. It's first big flagship "prestige TV" drama, The Sopranos, appealed heavily to that demo and was wildly commercially successful. The Wire, while airing at the same time with equal critical acclaim, did not appeal to that demo and actively critiqued societal structures which benefitted that demo, and flopped both commercially and in the awards circuit. These two shows came very early in the "Prestige TV era", and execs took note of their respective receptions; consequently, much of the prestige TV which came after was selected with that middle-class white male demo in mind.

Longer explanation below the cut:

I should first clarify that when I say "Prestige TV" I'm using it more in the academic sense, of referring to a specific type of television which emerged in the "Prestige TV era", also called the "Second Golden Age" (around 1999-2020, although the precise end date depends on who you ask). A large range of shows fall into that category, but the common characteristics include heavy serialization (ie an emphasis on long-form storytelling, rather than standalone episodes), morally ambiguous characters, complex plots, diverse perspectives, and "R-rated" content. It's pretty widely agreed that this era was "kicked off" by The Sopranos; if I had to list other key Prestige TV/Second Golden Age shows, I'd probably default to the other eleven Alan Sepinwall analyzes in The Revolution Was Televised, his book about how television changed during the Prestige TV era (those eleven are: Oz, The Wire, Deadwood, The Shield, Lost, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 24, Battlestar Galactica, Friday Night Lights, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad. Not all of those are commonly thought of as Prestige TV, because that label is now so removed from its source that it's only applied to a very narrow subsection of shows, but they are Prestige TV in the proper academic sense because of the impact they had on the era).

Not all of those shows were targeted at middle-class white men, and it wasn't my intention to suggest that every individual Prestige TV show is. But generally speaking, with only a few exceptions, the shows that defined the Prestige TV era and had the most commercial success while airing were the ones which appealed to that white, male, middle-class demo. And that's not a demo HBO picked up accidentally. It was explicitly built into their early strategies to go after that demographic, and so that was the demographic that had access to Prestige TV before people thought of it as Prestige TV, which means their opinions did a lot to influence how it developed.

HBO's primary strategy for survival in its early years, especially before other cable networks emerged, was differentiation. The problem they faced was there was lots of television that people could watch for free on network TV, and there wasn't the same distaste for advertising we have now which might have pushed people to pay for a subscription. Their solution was to try and target the people who a) had disposable income, and b) were dissatisfied with what was on the networks. Studio execs knew that the primary target market network execs had in mind when they were buying shows was middle-class white women, because that's the demo that their advertisers wanted to hit. Obviously, the definition of middle-class is contentious now, but I'm using it to mean people with disposable income, which is what made them attractive; white, because the middle class was disproportionately white, and also because network TV was trying to target a generic default 'American' audience, which to their minds was white; and women because advertisers believed women made most of the household purchasing decisions. HBO also needed people with disposable income, so it also targeted middle-class whites by default. However, the main place it decided to differentiate was by going after men, in an extremely intentional programming strategy developed by HBO CEO Michael Fuchs. Sheila Nevins, who was in charge of documentary programming, developed several documentary series, called, respectively, Real Sex, G-String Divas, Cathouse, and Sex Bytes, intentionally to try and cater to men - and it worked! Subscriber numbers increased in droves. And sure, we don't definitively know most of those subscribers were men. But... anecdotally, and in terms of the extremely limited market data we do have, the evidence for those subscribers and viewers being mostly men is quite strong.

White middle-class men weren't by any means the only group they targeted; another part of HBO's strategy was to create a wide variety of content catered to many different groups of people. But those white middle-class men became the most reliable paying subscribers, so HBO's content strategy leaned heavily on catering to their tastes to bring in funding they could use for "brand projects" - weightier, more artistic projects that improved HBO's brand image. When competitors like Showtime emerged, they developed their own spins on HBO's strategy; they targeted their markets in different ways, but ultimately everyone was trying to appeal to the groups who were unsatisfied with network TV, and everyone wanted the white middle-class male subscriber's dollar because it was considered the most "reliable". That demo essentially became to cable TV what advertisers were to network TV.

To trace cable TV's history from the 70s to The Sopranos would take a while and also involve spending more time talking about boxing and Mike Tyson than you would expect. HBO continued to stick to this strategy of differentiation and slowly achieved more market dominance. Ultimately, that brought HBO a combination of funding and creative respect that allowed them to gamble on The Sopranos, a show that several networks passed on before it was pitched to HBO, who ordered the pilot, only to have it perform extremely poorly in the test screening. So poorly that no sane executive would have ordered more episodes.

Except.

The head of HBO at the time, Chris Albrecht (considered by many to be the 'godfather of prestige tv'), heavily related to Tony Soprano, and he felt that his (very male) social networks also would. He's quoted as repeatedly saying, "The only difference between Tony Soprano and every guy I know is that he's the don of New Jersey." Which might sound like hyperbole, but.... In that history of HBO we skipped over there is also a long and unsettling history of misogyny and violence (including sexual violence) sanctioned and covered up by the network which, even by our desensitized modern standards, I actually found pretty shocking. It's bad, y'all. Chris Albrecht (and his fellow execs) didn't relate to Tony despite the violence of the show and his anger issues - they related to him because of it. The most famous incident concerning Albrecht specifically involves him strangling a female subordinate during a disagreement in her office, an allegation which led to HBO paying her a $400,000 settlement. And that's unfortunately not an outlier. (By the way, Albrecht objected to one of Sopranos most famous season 1 episodes, "College", because he felt Tony strangling another character to death would make him 'too unlikable', and viewers wouldn't be able to 'see his humour and charm').

Of course, The Sopranos turned out to be a massive hit, and deservedly so. But I think it's notable that its first season was only ordered because a small group of male executives steeped in violence, misogyny, and toxic masculinity personally related to Tony. And it's also worth noting that at the time, Tony Soprano was often compared to Mike Tyson, who many consider to be HBO's "first antihero". HBO was very involved in his career largely because the controversy around him brought in that middle-class male demo; Tony Soprano was considered to be a continuation of that strategy.

(To be clear, not all men who liked The Sopranos liked it for those reasons. But if we want to get in the weeds about it, HBO catered not just to men in general, but in a very particular way, to the subsection of men who did).

Another thing to note is that part of the success of The Sopranos was the way it catered to the anxieties of the now-shrinking middle class. When the series aired, the stock market was booming, but a spree of mega-mergers and consolidations resulted in record layoffs. CEO pay was skyrocketing while median family income was dropping, and the "middle class" that HBO had always catered to (bc of the disposable income) was disappearing. At its core, The Sopranos was very much about the anxiety which surrounds a way of life disappearing; consequently, the middle-class demo HBO had worked so hard to cultivate was immediately hooked. And yeah, a lot of them were no longer middle-class, strictly speaking. But HBO was still very much trying to cater to, for example, white-collar workers who recently fell out of that income bracket, rather than blue-collar workers or lower income brackets.

Let's also look at The Wire, a show essentially pitched as an audience bait-and-switch. Creator David Simon wanted it to look like a standard-issue broadcast police procedural, like pretty much every TV network had. But what would make it different is that, as the show developed, it would become increasingly subversive - instead of wondering "whether the bad guys would get caught", he wanted the audience to wonder "who the real bad guys are, and whether catching them means anything at all". In his pitch to HBO, he wrote: "You will not be stealing market share from the networks by only venturing into worlds where they can't; you will be stealing it by taking their worlds and transforming them with honesty and wit and a darker, cynical, and more piercing viewpoint than they would undertake."

While The Wire is textbook Prestige TV, it actually didn't hit that middle-class white male demo. David Simon wasn't concerned with hitting demos or relatability; he wanted to create a far-ranging critique of the police system, neo-liberalism, and capitalism. These were topics that simply didn't resonate with the demographic HBO had built up in its subscriber base, many of whom were quite happy with the police system, neo-liberalism, and capitalism, since they were benefitting pretty heavily from it. The only subscriber demo it did consistently hit was critics, academics, and journalists. And even then - despite its massive critical acclaim, The Wire was heavily snubbed in the awards circuit. The awards snubs are especially telling, given how much the critics claimed to love the show, calling it "Dickensian" - a lot of these people were the same ones voting in the Emmys, so what gives? A lot of people have spent a lot of time trying to figure it out, and what they keep coming back to time and time again is that the majority of the cast of The Wire was black. (It's also worth noting that the original plans for season 1 involved killing off the character of Kima Greggs, a black lesbian, until executive Carolyn Strauss pushed - hard - to reverse the decision, on the grounds that HBO's programming was already too white, male, and heterosexual. Greggs eventually went on to become a particular favourite of the show's extremely small fanbase, which I think is indicative of the kind of demographic the show picked up.) The response was so disappointing that it was nearly cancelled several times; in the first near-cancellation, Albrecht joked that he'd heard from "all 250 of the viewers".

These are just two shows, obviously. But they're two shows that came very early in the era, and so heavily influenced what came after. The Sopranos especially redefined what TV could be; it proved that morally complex, serialized stories with antihero protagonists had a market - and the limitations on network television meant that market could only be reached by cable networks like HBO, which had built up a specific sort of subscriber base. We have to make a distinction between what David Chase wanted to communicate with The Sopranos and why it succeeded the way that it did. Chase didn't set out to create a show that would resonate with white middle-class men, but he did, and it was wildly successful. David Simon's show, while equally critically acclaimed and airing in largely the same time period, did not resonate with white middle-class men, and it never achieved the sort of viewer ratings during its run that other shows of comparable quality did. Studio execs inside and outside of HBO saw that and took note.

Again, the decisions that go into the creation of TV shows are extremely complex, and to say "all Prestige TV is targeted at white middle-class men" is a huge oversimplification. There's a lot more to the history of HBO than just Sopranos and The Wire. But a reliance on that demo, and an active desire to cater to their interests, has heavily defined the kinds of shows which are considered to be Prestige TV, as well as the kinds of shows that cable TV studios are willing to put money into developing. If you want to really examine the context that the "Second Golden Age" is rooted in, you have to be willing to grapple with that history.

#asks #anon #there's a whole history which comes after this as well so. its complicated #I hope this is clear. happy to further clarify any point. I'm trying to condense a LOT of info w/o missing anything important #also belatedly realized you asked about middle class and I focussed on men. I hope it’s clear enough to just say middle class here means #people with disposable income #and #that middle class demo was picked up in the 60s and 70s when the middle class WAS a thing #the financial demo they hit now might not be considered middle class anymore #but it’s still that same demo of white-collar suburbia they cater to #rather then lower income or blue collar demos