ABSTRACT
The proliferation of the prime time, animated sitcom in the 1990s often seems a particularly tangible sign of the broad economic and cultural challenges to the commercial broadcast network system (indeed, to traditional US notions of “television” itself) which confronted media producers in the last two decades of the twentieth century. At the very least, the increased prominence of animated sitcoms in this period can be linked directly to the context of broadcast network erosion and eventual dominance of cable signal transmission inasmuch as the well from which the prime time animation boom was drawn – The Simpsons – is very much a product of the cable age. The success of News Corps.'s FOX broadcast network, which The Simpsons is widely credited with having helped to build, was only made possible by the completed cable wiring of the national market. 1 Only cable signal delivery made possible the building of a “broadcast” network via the use of primarily UHF broadcast affiliates. 2 In the course of their expansion, the earliest cable networks usurped the programming strategies and undermined the audience base that had long been the mainstay of independent station groups (old movies, syndicated sitcom reruns, and daytime children's programming, in particular). The advance of cable also assisted the development of FOX and other upstart networks as increasingly anachronistic, independent broadcast stations became less profitable and readily available for purchase (specifically, the flagship Metromedia group, which Rupert Murdoch seized from a foundation of major market owned-and-operated broadcast stations) in order to build his network (Kaplan 1985: 34; “Foundation For 4th Network” 1985: 1).
