ABSTRACT
This scene, with its efficient evocation of rising suspense and mystery, may remind the regular television viewer of the opening sequence of a run-of-the-mill television adventure show. In fact, it is a fictionalized description of the extremely pronounced place that ‘ratings’ take in the professional activities of American network executives-a place that, certainly to the sceptical outsider, has a mysterious edge indeed. Hugh Malcolm (Mal) Beville, writer of the scene, is one of the founding fathers of the American ratings industry and he assures his readers that the scene he has summoned up does not give an exaggerated picture at all. So, ratings are said to dominate the lives of the typical, and obviously typically workaholic, network president. As the New York Times once wrote about Robert Daly, then president of CBS Entertainment: ‘[Ratings] are the first thing he thinks about in the morning, …and one of the last things he thinks about at night’ (quoted in ibid.: 187).
