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normally trial it for two years, both for it to catch on with its audience and, if applicable, to amortize establishment production costs. Shows as famous and successful as Cheers and Cagney and Lacey suffered poor ratings in their first two years, but were persevered with. Recent years of recession and cable’s effect of fragmenting the market have generated what Cristal calls the networks’ “ultra-conservatism.” The expansion of cable meant that by 1991 Los Angeles residents might choose from some forty-one channels, while the figure elsewhere in the country tops sixty. This enables advertisers to diversify their expenditure, spending, for instance, US$30,000 on ten different ads, rather than risk US$300,000 per minute on The Cosby Show, or somewhat less on a Neighbours. Such a situation encourages deep caution among television station executives once ratings fail to measure up. A final factor was mentioned by none of the reviews or interviewees. It is, though, reasonable to speculate that the age of the show – episode one dates from March 1985, pre-Kylie – may have combined with its lack of crisis-a-minute plot lines and strange accents to discourage viewers. For the fashion, interior decor, and casual deportment of Neighbours 1985-model would in 1991 in the US have seemed light years beyond those of daytime soaps such as General Hospital, not to mention those of Dallasty. The sitcom appearance would not have yielded enough jokes to compare with a Roseanne, while its plot lines would have appeared to belong on another planet from those of Days of Our Lives – certainly outside the orbit of the American soapscape. Neighbours’s failure in the US market, then, can be seen to proceed from its non-exceptional realism, its foreignness, the gridlock of US television scheduling for such a soap, the brevity of its run, and, probably, the quaintness of its six-year-old material. The preceding material authorizes some further conclusions, about American acceptance of other countries’ media product. In so far as the Australianness/non-Americanness of Neighbours was the sticking-point for US television executives, there are two significant indices of the degrees of acceptability of Australian/non-American material for American network television. The first is the unashamed (though not broad) Australian accent of Tristan Rogers, who plays leading man and long-time heartthrob, variously police commissioner and secret agent, Robert Scorpio, on the “goliath of daytime soaps” (Twan 1984: 13), the ABC network’s General Hospital. On his 1981 debut on the show, he expressed pride in being “the first leading man who’s been allowed to retain his Australian accent on American television [Rod Taylor had not], and I’m very pleased it’s proving successful” (quoted by Church 1981: 24). In subsequent publicity and advertorial, Rogers’s Australian origin has taken a key position in a discursive set of permutable qualifiers such as “suave,” “handsome,” “charming,” and ‘heartthrob.” Its function as a distinguishing marketing tag is evident from such descriptions as “Robert Scorpio (Tristan Rogers) whose Australian accent and smouldering good look” (Tormey 1982: 119); “Tristan . . . introduced the suave Aussie, Robert Scorpio, to General Hospital’s
DOI link for normally trial it for two years, both for it to catch on with its audience and, if applicable, to amortize establishment production costs. Shows as famous and successful as Cheers and Cagney and Lacey suffered poor ratings in their first two years, but were persevered with. Recent years of recession and cable’s effect of fragmenting the market have generated what Cristal calls the networks’ “ultra-conservatism.” The expansion of cable meant that by 1991 Los Angeles residents might choose from some forty-one channels, while the figure elsewhere in the country tops sixty. This enables advertisers to diversify their expenditure, spending, for instance, US$30,000 on ten different ads, rather than risk US$300,000 per minute on The Cosby Show, or somewhat less on a Neighbours. Such a situation encourages deep caution among television station executives once ratings fail to measure up. A final factor was mentioned by none of the reviews or interviewees. It is, though, reasonable to speculate that the age of the show – episode one dates from March 1985, pre-Kylie – may have combined with its lack of crisis-a-minute plot lines and strange accents to discourage viewers. For the fashion, interior decor, and casual deportment of Neighbours 1985-model would in 1991 in the US have seemed light years beyond those of daytime soaps such as General Hospital, not to mention those of Dallasty. The sitcom appearance would not have yielded enough jokes to compare with a Roseanne, while its plot lines would have appeared to belong on another planet from those of Days of Our Lives – certainly outside the orbit of the American soapscape. Neighbours’s failure in the US market, then, can be seen to proceed from its non-exceptional realism, its foreignness, the gridlock of US television scheduling for such a soap, the brevity of its run, and, probably, the quaintness of its six-year-old material. The preceding material authorizes some further conclusions, about American acceptance of other countries’ media product. In so far as the Australianness/non-Americanness of Neighbours was the sticking-point for US television executives, there are two significant indices of the degrees of acceptability of Australian/non-American material for American network television. The first is the unashamed (though not broad) Australian accent of Tristan Rogers, who plays leading man and long-time heartthrob, variously police commissioner and secret agent, Robert Scorpio, on the “goliath of daytime soaps” (Twan 1984: 13), the ABC network’s General Hospital. On his 1981 debut on the show, he expressed pride in being “the first leading man who’s been allowed to retain his Australian accent on American television [Rod Taylor had not], and I’m very pleased it’s proving successful” (quoted by Church 1981: 24). In subsequent publicity and advertorial, Rogers’s Australian origin has taken a key position in a discursive set of permutable qualifiers such as “suave,” “handsome,” “charming,” and ‘heartthrob.” Its function as a distinguishing marketing tag is evident from such descriptions as “Robert Scorpio (Tristan Rogers) whose Australian accent and smouldering good look” (Tormey 1982: 119); “Tristan . . . introduced the suave Aussie, Robert Scorpio, to General Hospital’s
normally trial it for two years, both for it to catch on with its audience and, if applicable, to amortize establishment production costs. Shows as famous and successful as Cheers and Cagney and Lacey suffered poor ratings in their first two years, but were persevered with. Recent years of recession and cable’s effect of fragmenting the market have generated what Cristal calls the networks’ “ultra-conservatism.” The expansion of cable meant that by 1991 Los Angeles residents might choose from some forty-one channels, while the figure elsewhere in the country tops sixty. This enables advertisers to diversify their expenditure, spending, for instance, US$30,000 on ten different ads, rather than risk US$300,000 per minute on The Cosby Show, or somewhat less on a Neighbours. Such a situation encourages deep caution among television station executives once ratings fail to measure up. A final factor was mentioned by none of the reviews or interviewees. It is, though, reasonable to speculate that the age of the show – episode one dates from March 1985, pre-Kylie – may have combined with its lack of crisis-a-minute plot lines and strange accents to discourage viewers. For the fashion, interior decor, and casual deportment of Neighbours 1985-model would in 1991 in the US have seemed light years beyond those of daytime soaps such as General Hospital, not to mention those of Dallasty. The sitcom appearance would not have yielded enough jokes to compare with a Roseanne, while its plot lines would have appeared to belong on another planet from those of Days of Our Lives – certainly outside the orbit of the American soapscape. Neighbours’s failure in the US market, then, can be seen to proceed from its non-exceptional realism, its foreignness, the gridlock of US television scheduling for such a soap, the brevity of its run, and, probably, the quaintness of its six-year-old material. The preceding material authorizes some further conclusions, about American acceptance of other countries’ media product. In so far as the Australianness/non-Americanness of Neighbours was the sticking-point for US television executives, there are two significant indices of the degrees of acceptability of Australian/non-American material for American network television. The first is the unashamed (though not broad) Australian accent of Tristan Rogers, who plays leading man and long-time heartthrob, variously police commissioner and secret agent, Robert Scorpio, on the “goliath of daytime soaps” (Twan 1984: 13), the ABC network’s General Hospital. On his 1981 debut on the show, he expressed pride in being “the first leading man who’s been allowed to retain his Australian accent on American television [Rod Taylor had not], and I’m very pleased it’s proving successful” (quoted by Church 1981: 24). In subsequent publicity and advertorial, Rogers’s Australian origin has taken a key position in a discursive set of permutable qualifiers such as “suave,” “handsome,” “charming,” and ‘heartthrob.” Its function as a distinguishing marketing tag is evident from such descriptions as “Robert Scorpio (Tristan Rogers) whose Australian accent and smouldering good look” (Tormey 1982: 119); “Tristan . . . introduced the suave Aussie, Robert Scorpio, to General Hospital’s
ABSTRACT
STEPHEN CROFTS