LA NORMATIVIDAD DEL ABORTO EN DIFERENTES PAÍSES

products to women overseas they had sold domestically through what became known as the soap opera. The genre quickly under- went local customization (straubhaar 2007: 9). starting in the 1950s, by 2002 the foreign trade in these novelas amounted to Us$300 million. Televisa, the Mexican network, has been able to export both across latin america and to spanish- language stations in the Us. Encouraged by the wealth of the latin@ audience north of the border, Mexico launched a satellite in 1984 and was selling telenovelas to nearly 100 countries within fifteen years. TV Globo was exporting shows from Brazil to Europe by the 1970s, and reached 130 nations in 2001. in 2009, it featured a 200-episode

novela filmed and set in india (Protzel 2005; Havens 2005: 271,

275; Cajueiro 2009). in the Us, the most popular programs on spanish- language Univision are latin- american imports, such as

Las Tontas no Van al Cielo (2008–) [Stupid Girls Don’t Go to Heaven]

and Sin Tetas no Hay Paraíso (2006) [There’s No Paradise Without

Breasts]. They are also the most- pirated downloads on youTube of

any TV programs, and led to a gigantic legal battle with the net- work’s Mexican supplier (Goodwin 2009; Wentz 2009; James 2009a). Yo Soy Betty, la fea (1999–2001) was remade as Ugly Betty (2006–) for the Us from its Colombian origins following focus- group research on behalf of the Us producer and network. The firm undertaking the work (one psychologist = “the firm”) was

anglo parlante, and the program drew entirely negative reactions

from trial viewers. But the network proceeded anyway, probably due to salma Hayek’s influence and the mythology then surround- ing nBC’s Ben silverman. no wonder many latin critics bemoan the pressure to standardize that has come with international sales, resulting in a loss of specificity, localism, and cutting- edge critique of social relations (Mazziotti 1996: 113)!

Despite this notable exception of the telenovela,1 _{the overall weight} of the evidence on globalization is clear. The volume of Us exports may be unstable, but their relative significance increases, and their symbolism continues to resonate as both an index and a cause of the power of that country to bewilder, horrify, and enchant people everywhere. and TV’s capacity to travel and sell is undimmed. in 2008 the trade in television programs across the americas, the asia- Pacific region, and Europe was worth e271.6 billion, up 5 percent on the previous year (“World Television Market” 2009). india has

TELEVISION INSTITUTIONS 79 been very open to overseas ownership, so Viacom entered the fray with its network Colors in 2008, quickly achieving second place in national ratings among Hindi channels (“2008” 2009; Fung 2008: 85). The fantasy of a post- Us era of world TV remains just that.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

(1) What was the story of television prior to World War ii? (2) How would you distinguish public from commercial TV? (3) How has deregulation changed television?

(4) What is the debate about media imperialism and globalization – does the United states dominate world television?

(5) What do you think about the different prices charged to TV stations for the same shows around the world?

(6) How do you explain the success of telenovelas?

NOTE

(1) For a fascinating account of attempts to create a novela away from the dominant countries, see Gregory (2007: 116–29).

FURTHER READING

Bignell, Jonathan and andreas Fickers, eds. (2008). A European Television History. Malden: Wiley- Blackwell.

Gomery, Douglas. (2008). A History of Broadcasting in the United States. Malden: Blackwell.

Kraidy, Marwan M. (2005). Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization. Phila- delphia: Temple University Press.

schiller, Herbert i. (1969). Mass Communications and American Empire. Boston: Beacon Press.

straubhaar, Joseph. (2007). World Television: From Global to Local. Thousand oaks: sage.

3

CONTENT

One night in Miami, still dazed from a week on an Atlantic liner, I began watching a film and at first had some difficulty in adjusting to a much greater frequency of commercial “breaks.” Yet this was a minor problem compared to what eventually happened. Two other films, which were due to be shown on the same channel on other nights, began to be inserted as trailers. A crime in San Francisco (the subject of the original film) began to operate in an extraordinary counterpoint not only with the deodorant and cereal commercials but with a romance in Paris and the eruption of a prehistoric monster who laid waste New York. . . . [T]he transitions from film to commercial and from film A to films B and C were in effect unmarked. . . . I believe I registered some incidents as happening in the wrong film, and some characters in the commercials as involved in the film episodes, in what came to seem – for all the occasional bizarre disparities – a single irre- sponsible flow of images and feelings.

(Raymond Williams 1978: 91–2) Cloistered away in a Tokyo hotel, hemmed in on all sides by oppres- sive black frames, we watch through [Chris] Marker’s lens a numbing day of television programming: first, there are the sacred deer of Nara; then a cultural program on NHK about the nineteenth- century French writer and dandy Gérard de Nerval; the Nerval program carries us to the grave of Jean- Jacques Rousseau, followed by an evening program on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; later still, after the killing fields, there is adult programming: “I did it all. All the way to the evening shows for adults – so called.” Images from the day spent before Japanese television recur throughout the film; the persistence of the images suggests that the temporal vertigo of film – the “insane memory,” as one Krasna letter describes the temporality of modern,

CONTENT 81

cinematic and televisual imagery – is borrowed from the small screen. The narrator senses as much. In trying to juxtapose the Nerval/Rous- seau show against images of Pol Pot, the voiceover wonders aloud: “From Jean- Jacques Rousseau to the Khmer Rouge: Coincidence? Or, the sense of history?”

(Adrian Switzer (2009: 93) describing Sans Soleil (Chris Marker 1982)) I really cannot read another cultural studies analysis of . . . The Sopranos [1999–2007].

(Stuart Hall, in MacCabe 2008)

Williams’ fuddy- duddy epigram draws on a moment of discombob- ulation, time as a magazine critic, and years as a left Leavisite, to propose a “central television experience: the fact of flow.” Each program is related to what precedes and follows it through memory, mood, and expectation, denying the possibility of critical viewing (1978: 95).1 _{A more aesthetic, pleasurably delirious sensibility} informs the account of Sans Soleil. And three decades later, Wil- liams’ fellow cultural- studies maven Hall complains about their dis- cipline’s approach to television. I suspect he was expressing ennui in the face of TV Studies 2.0: resistive readings of texts that endow them with magical properties of feminism, socialism, anti- racism, art, redemption, and so on, derived from the critic’s persona. No wonder Olympian social science negatively juxtaposes TV Studies that has “merely performed readings of individual television pro- grams” with “real research” (Grindstaff and Turow 2006: 115). Whatever the merits of such readings – and critiques of them – analysts continue to write about The Sopranos, for example, because it engages so many key themes of US culture: the quotidian mun- danity of family life; irresolvable discrepancies between ideology and reality; hyper- masculine white violence; ethnic stereotypes; state and corporate corruption; and mendacity as a way of life, all amplified beyond what a feature film can do in terms of time, and a commercial TV series can do in terms of risk (Speranza 2008; for an engagement with some of these issues, see Polan 2009). HBO subscribers in 2007 could watch the last season of The Sopranos eight times a week, while those who had digital on- demand could do so at any moment, as could people taping it. Official ratings gave the program 7.4 million viewers for Sunday- night premieres, but 11.1 million watched if one includes other accounting methods