Posted by Jay Livingston
It’s easy to look back and see how a movie, TV show, or book was a massive hit because it fit perfectly with the spirit of its time. Maybe it expressed what we, all of us, were feeling, or maybe it gave us something we lacked. Think of those 1930s musicals, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, elegantly dressed and dancing their way through sets that dripped with luxury. Perhaps they were so popular because “their musicals offered the purest form of escape from the woes of the Depression, a fantasy of the 1920s seen through the darker prism of the 30s.” (John Rockwell in the New York Times, “Escaping Depression? Just Dance Blues Away.”).
The implication is that there is a zeitgeist tide in the affairs of culture which taken at the flood leads on to fortune, or at least a 15 Nielsen. They’re pretty much the same thing. All you have to do is suss out the zeitgeist.
I had thought that people in the business would be skeptical about this way of thinking. Old Hollywood hands who have a lot of experience in actually making movies and TV shows know how hard it is to create a hit, to know what the public will respond to. Try to imitate a hit by incorporating those elements in it that seem to have resonated with the audience, and you often fail miserably. As screenwriter William Goldman famously wrote in 1983, “Nobody knows anything.”
I had thought that sociologists would be skeptical about this way of thinking. They would be familiar with Wendy Griswold’s 1981 AJS article showing that the content of novels published in the US in the late 19th century may have had more to do with the economics of publishing rather than with a supposed cultural transformation. It was the change in copyright laws, not the feminization of American culture.
Ken Levine (rhymes with divine) is an old Hollywood pro, mostly as a writer — Cheers, M*A*S*H, Frasier, Simpsons, and so on. He also does a weekly podcast (“Hollywood and Levine”). I hadn’t listened to it in a while, but the episode title “How SEINFELD Got on the Air” made me curious. It turned out to be a conversation with another old Hollywood hand, Preston Beckman, whose metier is scheduling. He knows not only how Seinfeld got on the air but why it was on the air Wednesdays at 9:30. He used to blog anonymously as “The Masked Scheduler.” He also has a Ph.D. in sociology from NYU.*
The entire conversation is interesting. Here’s the part that includes the word zeitgeist. They are discussing the success of “American Idol” and “24."
Here’s a transcript, somewhat edited.
| KEN LEVINE: Back in 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated, the country needed something to get out of its funk. And the Beatles came along at just the right time a couple of months later.And in a sense I always felt that “American Idol” was similar in that it was after 9/11. It came along and we needed something positive to focus on. And that became the zeitgeist hit. PRESTON BECKMAN: I totally agree with you. I totally agree. I don’t think anybody at Fox thought it was going to be what it was going to be. And afterwards, thinking about it — and maybe my background as a sociologist before I went into this business. . . . I think the country needed something. What was great about American Idol is that it put control of the process in the hands of the viewer. So after seeing the devastation and everything we had seen, it was like “OK, I have input into this. I have some control over this event.” The pilot episode of “24” was completed in time for the opening of the fall TV season in 2001 but was delayed because Fox was broadcasting the baseball playoffs. Then came 9/11. PRESTON BECKMAN: We actually had to edit the pilot because there was a scene of a plane being blown up. That was another situation where we didn’t know whether this was going to be rejected because of what had happened or going to be embraced, and fortunately I think the casting of Kiefer Sutherland had a lot to do with the success of the show. |
The Hollywood pro and the sociologist-turned-Hollyword-pro agree: It’s the zeitgeist — what the country needed. “American Idol” offered “something positive,” something that gave viewers control at a time when people’s sense of control over their lives and their country had been shaken. It was, says Levine, a “zeitgeist hit.” The zeitgeist was there; the Idolators just figured out a way to cash in on it. Apparently, William Goldman was wrong. Somebody knew something.
But Beckman, though he seems to be unaware of it, says something that’s much closer to Goldman’s view. Nobody at Fox expected “American Idol” to be such a huge hit. The same goes for “24.” Before the show aired, “we didn’t know” if it was going to be a hit. It’s only in retrospect that Levine and Beckman can construct the zeitgeist connection. Even then, Beckman seems to be giving greater weight to casting decisions than to the post-9/11 zeitgeist. It’s only in retrospect that we can look at the attributes of these shows, match them up with elements of the zeitgeist, and then “predict” their success.
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* The title of his 1981 dissertation is “Predicting Television Viewing: an Application of the Box-jenkins Methodology for Time Series Analysis to Levels of Television Usage in the United States (1966-1975).”
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