"[...]ratings indicate that the American public prefer hillbillies, cowboys, and spies."<p>This kind of correlation has always seemed specious to me. It's the streetlight effect—it's hard to quantify why a show is popular we'll just assume it's because of the genre, since that's easy to identify.<p>I remember when Desperate Housewives took off in 2004, and studio execs assumed that viewers suddenly wanted prime time soaps. And they released a bunch more prime time soaps that were lousy and flopped.<p>I think viewers want quality content, regardless of genre. Genre is just a heuristic device.
> Both Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies had dropped from the Nielsen top 30 by the 1970–71 season, yet both shows continued to win their respective time slots and had loyal followings, warranting renewal for another season.<p>Lotta editorializing here for a wikipedia article. Continually declining popularity seems like it could easily also be said to warrant cancellation.
It seems like this was more driven by a desire to have television shows that addressed real world problems. "Rural" here is basically a euphemism for "sterile world where nothing bad actually happens." It's just easier to sterilize a cabin in the woods. Plus, the country has always been idyllic in American culture.<p>This was an era where pregnancy was a forbidden topic (among so much more) and where parents were shown sleeping in separate beds. It's not surprising that people eventually grew to hate this fantasy world.
I'm always curious about what is featured in entertainment vs reality.<p>This was mostly because of my contact / travels with younger folks outside the US who I would talk to. I was supersized by how may other younger people seemed to have their view of America heavily influenced by imported TV shows / movies. A surprising number seemed to assume that everyone was a TV 'type', school life was like a TV show, and the assumption that most everyone was wealthy like the shows at the time.<p>This was well before the age of the internet.<p>As far as the actual media trends, I think it usually just follows fads and trends. I don't think there's a real 'motivation' behind it outside getting eyeballs on TV.
Another phenomenon that accelerated in the early 1970s is the bifurcation of the American public into a cognitive elite and cognitive normal. Colleges became exceedingly efficient at filtering entrants by IQ, with the typical college student 1 standard deviation above the mean IQ, and with some prestigious colleges like Harvard having an average student multiple SDs above the mean. Simultaneously business administration became the purview of the same cognitive elite.<p>Could the rural purge have been the result of network executives alienated and at odds with the viewership they were nominally at the behest of?<p>Urbanization did not increase significantly at this time, so it seems cultural factors are the better explanation.
I grew up watching Nick at Night, and I wish we still had shows like that today. They were idealized versions of Americana, but I think it was closer to what viewers wanted believed about America. I wish there were more shows today about rural communities, it might help us understand one another better.
There are still networks (MeTV for example) that make a living off of re-airing those shows.<p>The popularity of all of the "Jane Goodall studying the gorillas" redneck porn on Discovery and National Geographic and History Channel, along with more prestigious dramas like Yellowstone or Justified or Longmire would indicate to me that this is still a very profitable demographic to target, albeit distasteful to the major television executives.
I think this kind of thing is ultimately what I like most about new media. A Youtube series doesn't need to be concerned about skewed audiences or the network's branding: as long as it has a loyal following and an enthusiastic creator, it'll keep coming out. A lot of my favorite content probably wouldn't make it if they had to air on CBS.
Lots of things went wrong in 1971: <a href="https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/" rel="nofollow">https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/</a>