This Week in Television History: March 2013 PART I

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As always, the further we go back in Hollywood history, the more that fact and legend become intertwined. It's hard to say where the truth really lies.

March 7, 1988 
Writers Guild of America strike begins.  

After rejecting what the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) said was a final offer, representatives of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) called a strike for all the union’s members to begin at 9 a.m. Pacific Time.

The origins of the strike went back to late 1987, when producers began demanding that writers accept a sliding scale on residuals--payment received when work is re-broadcast after its original airing--from domestic syndicated reruns of one-hour shows, claiming that syndication prices had dropped. Writers balked at this restriction; they also wanted a bigger share of foreign rights and more creative control over the scripts they were writing. With negotiations stalled, the current contract between the AMPTP and the WGA expired at midnight on March 1, and the strike began a week later.

Some companies got around the strike by signing interim deals with the WGA, including Carsey-Werner Co., producers of The Cosby Show, who were able to continue production on a new sitcom, Roseanne, which shot to No. 2 in the ratings that season. Near the end of July, after the writers rejected a settlement, the entertainment lawyer Ken Ziffren stepped in to run interference between the two sides of the conflict. Along with the producers’ chief negotiator, Nick Counter, Ziffren got both producers and writers to modify their positions in time for a meeting in early August at the headquarters of the AMPTP in Sherman Oaks, California. Sixteen hours later, the strike was over, after the two sides struck a deal by which producers upped the payment for foreign rights and writers agreed to the sliding scale on syndication residuals.

Though it came at a relatively opportune time, as the networks were winding down TV production for the summer, the five-month walkout still had an effect. Overall network ratings dropped 4.6 percent that fall from a year earlier, and many viewers began watching cable channels, which were not affected by the strike because they showed little original programming. Overall, the walkout was estimated to have cost Hollywood some $500 million. One enduring effect of the strike was the increasing ubiquity of so-called “reality” programming. As networks scrambled to fill the holes in their schedules, they relied on such programs as Unsolved Mysteries, which began as an NBC special but was expanded to a regular series by the network during the strike. Fox’s unscripted police reality series COPS made its debut the following year, and such shows would become increasingly popular during the 1990s.

Mach 8, 1993

The first episode of the animated series Beavis and Butthead airs.

Beavis and Butthead offered audiences rude and crude buddy humor in the tradition of The Three Stooges, Cheech and Chong, and Wayne and Garth of Saturday Night Live and the Wayne’s World movies. The titular main characters were two teenage boys living in the fictional town of Highland; they attended Highland High (based on a real school in creator Mike Judge’s hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico) but spent most of their time eating junk food, talking about girls and--most importantly--watching music videos. Beavis and Butthead alternated between animated storylines and clips of actual music videos, which Beavis and Butthead commented on in their signature bone-headed style, punctuated by sarcastic comments and grunt-like laughter.

Judge first drew his two main characters for an animation festival, where an MTV producer spotted them and picked up an episode for its animated showcase Liquid Television. After signing Judge on for 65 episodes, the network began airing the show on weeknights at 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. Critics were divided in their response: Some praised Judge and MTV for effectively skewering a big part of the network’s own core demographic--young men who watch music videos--while others cited Beavis and Butthead’s lowest-common-denominator humor as evidence of an overall decline in the quality of television.

Despite the mixed critical response, the show earned MTV’s highest ratings. It also sparked a heated controversy over the influence of TV programs on impressionable young children, especially after an incident in 1993, when a mother blamed Beavis and Butthead’s well-documented pyromaniac tendencies for inspiring her five-year-old son to set a fire that killed his two-year-old sister. In response to the uproar over this tragedy, MTV pulled four episodes off the air, cut all references to fire and moved Beavis and Butthead to the 10:30 p.m.-11:30 p.m. time slot, claiming they were simply targeting an older audience.
Regardless of its dubious influence on young audiences, the success of Beavis and Butthead prompted MTV to launch a spin-off program featuring the boys’ nerdy female classmate, Daria Morgendorffer. Daria first aired in March 1997, eight months before Beavis and Butthead ended its run. Judge later created the Emmy-winning animated series King of the Hill for Fox and directed films for the big screen, including a feature-film version of Beavis and Butthead, Beavis and Butthead Do America (1996) and the cult hits Office Space (1999) and Idiocracy (2006).

To quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".

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Tony Figueroa