What grinds my gears about Todd Gitlin’s “Prime Time Ideology” is that I honestly don’t disagree with its overall argument about television as a reinforcer of capitalist hegemony. But I struggle to get behind the way he builds his argument, and so am going to spend the next 500 words griping about it.
Everything is capitalism. Week-to-week storytelling is capitalism (254). Scheduled programming is capitalism, as is the practice of recording it to watch on your own time (255). Complimenting athletic prowess during sporting events is capitalism (258). Bad acting on contemporary sitcoms is capitalism (260).
Again, I don’t particularly disagree with his main point – it is kind of capitalism all the way down – but Gitlin has built himself a comfortable fortress wherein any counterargument can be refuted, not on the strength of his argument itself, but in the loopholes he has been sure to carve out. If I point out that plenty of television is shaped by artistic integrity as much as it is by network meddling, then I’m just so far deep in the matrix of hegemonic common sense that I’m not understanding it (and look, honestly, maybe I don’t understand it. Lots of things go over my head). If any kind of status quo-disrupting programming finds its way onto network television, that doesn’t mean Gitlin is wrong: just that the industry has sensed the change in audience demand and is shifting accordingly. And no, his claim that sports fans are “out of control of social reality” and “flatter [themselves] that the substitute world of sports is a corner of the world [they] can really grasp” (258) isn’t reductive or condescending, because he already made the disclaimer that he would “not be arguing that the forms of hegemonic entertainment superimpose themselves automatically and finally onto the consciousness or behavior of all audiences at all times” (253). So he’s totally not talking down to the masses.
I have to wonder how he would respond to the current landscape of television programming. Nearly all the elements of television he notes have been disrupted in the current era of niche programming and streaming on demand. Gitlin makes sure to account for this possibility (“the hegemonic system… has continually to be reproduced, continually superimposed, continually to be negotiated and managed, in order to override the alternative and, occasionally, the oppositional forms” (264)), but still I don’t think this world is exactly the one he’s picturing. It seems to me that the contemporary niche/streaming setup offers possibilities for a kind of auteur show-making – what springs to mind first is Issa Rae’s Insecure, though this is by no means the only one. So much of Gitlin’s evidence for television as a hegemonic force doesn’t apply anymore, yet clearly we have not defeated capitalism. Would Gitlin dismiss Insecure as yet more neoliberal smoke and mirrors? Or would he acknowledge that perhaps “everything is capitalism” is not a universally satisfactory argument?
In the end, I think that Gitlin falls into the trap he initially claimed he would be able to avoid: “If ‘hegemony’ explains everything in the sphere of culture, it explains nothing” (252).
I love this post! It also mirrors many of my own thoughts about Gitlin’s article. Your closing comment about the trap that Gitlin falls into reminds me of the “winner loses logic” that one of my undergraduate professors used to talk about (I should definitely acknowledge that my professor pulled this concept from Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, pg. 5). In particular, my professor was referring to film theorists in the 1960s and 1970s who first conceptualized cinema (and television) as an ideological apparatus. The theorists “win” if they prove that everything is capitalist hegemony. But the theorists also “lose” because that means that capitalist hegemony is inescapable, thereby rendering their analyses meaningless. If there is no escape, then there is no need for any sort of critique. And that highlights what I find most frustrating about Gitlin’s article (and other articles like it). As you point out in this post, it’s certainly not that Gitlin is wrong. But I feel like the “winner loses” approach is bound to induce a degree of apathy because – according to this framework – even revolutionary action is destined to end in failure. It also seems to me that the “winner loses” approach weirdly lets humans off the hook when it comes to capitalism; it doesn’t exactly encourage us to acknowledge that we created this mess and we have a responsibility to fix it. In short, this post has made me increasingly wonder how scholars and theorists can continue to effectively address capitalism as a system while also avoiding the “winner loses logic."
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