Prime Time Ideology: The Hegemonic Process in Television Entertainment

TLDR

American television entertainment’s formal conventions reinforce a hegemonic structure, while the hegemonic commercial cultural system selectively incorporates alternative ideology and rejects the unassimilable. The study proposes ideological hegemony as a lens and identifies how prime‑time network programs’ formal features—format, genre, setting, topical slant, and imposed solutions—embed television messages into the dominant discourse, labor, consumption, and politics. The mechanism is an analysis of how prime‑time program features embed messages, traced to the self‑contradictory nature of dominant ideology. The findings show that formal structures are flexible within limits of dominant values and market tolerances, as exemplified by Norman Lear’s comedies that disrupted stereotypical character conventions and imposed solutions.

Abstract

Many of the formal conventions of American television entertainment are supports of a larger hegemonic structure. After proposing the concept of ideological hegemony as a useful approach to questions of ideology and control, I indicate interrelated ways in which television messages are integrated into the dominant system of discourse and the prevailing structures of labor, consumption, and politics, in particular through these formal features of prime-time network programs: (1) format and formula (including the rigidity of program length and the narrative curve of action); (2) genre; (3) setting and character type; (4) topical slant; and (5) the solution imposed on the fictional problem. Within certain definite limits—related both to the core of dominant values and to market tolerances—these formal structures are flexible; for example, some of Norman Lear's comedies have disrupted stereotypical conventions of static character and imposed solution. The hegemonic commercial cultural system routinely incorporates some aspects of alternative ideology and rejects the unassimilable. I trace this process to the self-contradictory nature of the dominant ideology.