ABSTRACT
Circumvention and containment are key issues in the twenty-first-century U.S. television industry. Using timeshifting technology, broadcast TV viewers make TV programming conform to their schedules and subject it to the whims of their clickers, now equipped with the capability of fast forwarding through live as well as recorded programming. In doing so, they circumvent the carefully planned commercial flow in which U.S. networks place their broadcast TV products.1 This challenges the decades-long practice of the linear segmentation of an evening’s programming into timed increments with a specific logic that Williams famously described as flow-the way an evening of network programming flows from story segment to sponsor commercials with network promos, feature film previews, and network news previews included among them throughout the primetime blocks. This timed segmentation is the strategy, or so networks have traditionally assumed, that produced the kind of flow that would best deliver an audience to the sponsors who had paid for air time, and, hence, for the TV shows. A similar assumption was made about getting the audience caught up in a network’s sponsor-oriented seasonal scheduling, with its family-oriented school-year TV cycle with September premieres and May sweeps, preceding the upfronts at which sponsors buy air time in advance of the new Fall season. While this paradigm can be thought of in linear and sequential terms, in today’s Must-Click environment, programming and scheduling and windowing are often conceptualized in more concurrent terms. Today’s flow is more circular, with one platform encouraging viewers to access another, which, hopefully, prompts them to return to the on-air text. That networks now invest in the continual circulation of their TV products on multiple platforms does not mean that flow no longer matters, as should be evident from all the material networks and their media conglomerates pack in between story segments.2
