20th Century Fox/Everett Collection
"Ally McBeal," with Calista Flockhart (seated left), brought a new attitude to network television in the late 1990s.
The Fox Broadcasting Co. launched 25 years ago this month.
Back then, Fox offered just one night of programming Sunday but it would go on to change broadcast television.
Fox really opened up the territry and started doing things networks werent prepared to do, or wouldnt have done, says Syracuse University Prof. Robert Thompson, a pop-culture specialist. It expanded the dramaturgical real estate of television, and some of those shows were really important.
The network which has been home to groundbreaking series such as Married ... With Children, The Simpsons, In Living Color and 21 Jump Street will look back in an anniversary special
Sunday at 8 p.m. Ryan Seacrest will host.
The groundwork for Fox Broadcasting began in 1985, when Rupert Murdochs News Corp. bought the 20th Centur y Fox film studio. A year later, the company bough six stations owned by Metromedia, including WNEW/Ch. 5 (now WNYW) in New York.
Using those stations as a launch pad, the network began with a focus on boundary-pushing shows geared to younger viewers.
I knew if the network could come up with distinctive counterprogramming that it would get an audience looking for something different, says analyst Shari Anne Brill. Back in the mid- to late 80s, young adults and multicultural audiences were underserved by the Big Three.
To win additional affiliates, Fox offered more commercial time to sell locally than its rivals did. As another part of its strategy, Fox started slow and worked its way up to a 15-hour-a-week schedule (compared with the 22 for ABC, CBS and NBC), which allowed stations to keep their lucrative 10 p.m. newscasts in place.
By July 1987, the lineup included a Saturday-night schedule. Monday was added in 1989; the following year saw Th ursday- and Friday-night programming. Wednesday fell into place in 1992, and Tuesday was added in 1993.
The programming Fox offered up was different from the rest, perhaps a little more aggressive in adult content.
Fox put itself on the map by programming brash, edgy fare that appealed to young urban multicultural adults, Brill says.
Fox helped bring television into a raunchier place than ever before, but we were headed in that direction anyway, says Thompson.
Even the sitcoms they were not your typical run-of-the-mill sitcom, he adds. You could spot a Fox half-hour comedy from a mile away.
Brill says few would have guessed that a series of animated shorts used in The Tracey Ullman Show would go on to become a stand-alone series with 500 episodes and counting.
0 comments on Fox Broadcasting marks 25-year anniversa... :
Post a Comment