Exam preparation materials

PART V • CONTENT

Chapter 9 • Entertainment

A scene from Captain America Civil War, with Captain America and Bucky Barnes standing in front of a semicircular structure. Bucky Barnes holds a gun in both hands.

Captain America: Civil War followed in the footsteps of many other Marvel movies by opening to both commercial and critical success.

tlaspix/Alamy Stock Photo

Key Idea: Story formulas help designers of entertainment messages attract audience attention and condition audiences for repeat exposures.

· What Is Entertainment?

o Audience’s Perspective

o Programmer’s Perspective

o Patterns

§ Content Analysis Method

§ Character Patterns

§ Controversial Elements

§ Health

§ Body Image

· Telling Stories as a Business

o Story Formulas

o General Story Formula

o Genres

§ Comedy

§ Drama

§ Romance

o Challenges

§ Different Media

§ Changing Public Taste

§ Dealing with Risk

· Becoming Media Literate with Entertainment Messages

o Appreciate the Blend of Reality and Fantasy

o Appreciate Story Formulas

· Summary

· Further Reading

· Keeping Up to Date

· Exercises

Katherine, a freelance script writer, had waited three weeks to get an appointment with the vice president of Prestige Films & Entertainment Company so she could pitch her idea for a television movie. If the vice president liked her idea, he would green-light the project, which would mean she would get paid to write the script. Prestige would then likely produce the two-hour movie that could turn into a pilot for a television series.

Katherine was very nervous as she began her pitch. “This is a story about family values as seen through the eyes of a brother and sister who are suddenly orphaned. Chloe is 10 years old and Tony is her 14-year-old brother. The story opens with Chloe, Tony, and their parents on the run from some evil corporation thugs who are trying to track down the father for being a whistleblower and exposing some illegal practices of the company where the father worked. The thugs find the family but the children narrowly escape the thugs who kill their parents. Now orphans with no family or friends, the children have to keep moving around so that the thugs don’t find them. Most of the movie is about how the brother and sister form a strong bond as they take care of each other. There is a series of scenes showing how they struggle to find transportation, shelter, and food as they evade the thugs chasing them. There are also some tender scenes where Chloe and Tony talk about their grief and fear. Finally, in the climax, the kids figure out a way to trick the thugs into an ambush, where they are able to kill the thugs. They take the thugs’ car and discover that its trunk is full of cash. So, the movie ends on a high note.”

The vice president smiled broadly, “I love your idea. It’s got so many great story elements. It’s got tragedy. It’s got action and suspense. It’s got kids fighting to survive. It’s got family values. It’s got violence and retribution. I love it!”

“So, you’ll green-light the project?” Katherine couldn’t believe that after two years of pitching various film projects, she finally had a winner.

“Yes. Definitely yes! But I’d like to see one change—one small, tiny change. If you agree to that, it’s a go.”

“What kind of change?”

“Could you make Tony a porpoise?

“A porpoise?”

“Yeah, let’s make Tony a fish! Television viewers love animals!”

WHAT IS ENTERTAINMENT?

There are many speculations about what makes something entertaining. From a media literacy perspective, the most fundamental way to think about entertainment is that it is a creative blend of reality and fantasy elements designed to trigger pleasant emotional experiences in audiences. Entertainers include reality elements in their messages in order to attract audiences with familiar settings, characters, and experiences; these make it easy for audiences to identify with characters who engage with challenges that resonate with the audience’s real-life experiences. Then entertainers introduce fantasy elements into their messages in order to surprise and delight audiences; these fantasy elements sweeten the messages by making characters more attractive and experiences more dramatic. For example, entertainers produce situation comedies that present problems that people experience in their everyday lives but with characters who are a bit more witty than real people. Entertainers can move several steps into fantasy, similar to action/adventure stories in which the bad guys are more evil, smarter, and more aggressive on a larger scale than bad guys are in real life. Entertainers can move even more steps into fantasy with science fiction, in which the settings and some characters are very different than audiences can experience in their everyday lives. And some entertainers can go far into fantasy with farces that move further into fantasy step by step until audiences enter the realm of total silliness.

Why is this blend of reality and fantasy so important? Let’s answer this question from both an audience’s perspective and the programmers’ perspective.

Audience’s Perspective

Why do people expose themselves to entertainment messages? At the most fundamental level, we want to encounter experiences that we can easily understand but that also take us step-by-step out of our everyday routines and give us the ability to feel more emotions than our real lives provide. If we were getting all the messages we needed in real life, we would have no motivation to go to the expense (money and especially time) to search through the media for these messages.

There are two reasons why people are motivated to get certain messages but go to the media rather than get those messages in real life. One reason is that it is impossible for them to get those messages in real life. For example, entertainment messages make it possible for us to experience what it was like to live on a farm during the American Civil War or to be a knight of the Round Table in medieval England. Entertainment messages can trigger our imagination about what it would be like to travel in outer space or to be a Columbian drug lord. Entertainment messages can bridge over the deficiencies that trouble us in our everyday lives by giving us the opportunity to identify with characters who fall in love or who rise rapidly in their careers.

A second reason that motivates people to get messages from the media instead of real life is that the costs of getting those messages in the media are far lower than the costs required in real life. For example, it is easier to watch a one-hour travelogue on France than it is to pay the money to travel there for a week. It is far easier to watch a presidential news conference on television than it is to go to journalism school, get a job with a major newspaper or television service, get credentialed as a White House reporter, and attend the press conference in person. And it is less costly emotionally to watch characters in a movie try to meet each other, establish relationships, break up, and learn from their mistakes than it is to go through all of that in real life to learn the same social lessons. And when those messages trigger pleasant emotions in audiences, people find them entertaining.

Entertainment messages that present a high degree of reality are attractive to audiences because those messages are presented as being easy to process. When an entertainment message presents familiar characters who find themselves in situations that audience members frequently encounter, it is easy for the audience to process meaning; audiences can easily identify who are the good characters, who is causing trouble, and what consequences to expect from various actions. The action in the story resonates with the audience because they have experienced similar situations and problems. But if entertainment messages do not move beyond strict reality, then audiences can get bored because characters are too predictable and there are no surprises in the action. Entertainment messages must present something more than everyday reality. Without this something extra, there is no reason to search out the media message because the person is already getting those experiences in their real life. Therefore, people do not want media messages that are so real that they are identical to the experiences in their everyday lives and nor do they want media messages that are so far removed from their experiences that the messages have no immediate relevance. Attraction to entertainment messages requires a continual blend of reality and fantasy so that audiences can easily grasp the meanings from the messages while continually being surprised.

Programmers’ Perspective

Programmers intuitively know that to attract audiences, they must take their audience’s sense of reality and tweak it a bit to make it seem more interesting. Thus, the producers of media messages typically keep the elements of their messages anchored in the real world as much as possible so those depictions can resonate with the audience’s experiences in real life. But producers of media messages also know they cannot simply reproduce those messages; there would be no point to this because it would be easier for people to stay with their own real-world experiences.

Peter Weber, the winner of The Bachelor is seen holding out a single rose as he stands smiling in a suit, against a backdrop with the logos of ABC and Winter TCA on it.

Peter Weber was the eponymous Bachelor in the popular reality show’s 24th season. The show uses a reality contest format to present highly fantastical messages about love and romance.

MediaPunch Inc/Alamy Stock Photo

Producers of fiction know that the essence of their challenge is to tell stories that are bigger than life in some way. Producers typically start with ordinary setting and a standard plot (boy meets girl) and then sweeten the story by making it more dramatic. They make their characters a little more attractive or a little more interesting than people in real life. They make plots unfold at a faster pace than real-life events and put their characters in situations where their decisions are tougher and the consequences of those decisions are more serious. Skilled producers can take the audience on a journey by removing the audience from actual reality one step at a time until they have taken them willingly to an absurd place. This is the formula with farce. The story begins with what looks like an ordinary situation; then, step-by-step, the producer takes the audience far away from that reality but does it in a way that the audience is not lost but willingly awaits each new step. Thus, producers depend on viewers’ willing suspension of disbelief. To make people willing, producers must take it one step at a time.

Patterns

Media researchers often look for patterns across media messages so that they can monitor how much fantasy is being presented. These researchers are typically concerned that because people spend so much time exposed to entertainment messages, they will rely on those messages to tell them about how the real world works. If entertainment messages are constructed from reality elements and no fantasy elements, then people can use these exposures to learn valuable lessons about the real world. But if entertainment messages are dominated by fantasy elements, then people will likely come to believe that the fantasy patterns they perceive in the entertainment messages are accurate reflections of the real world and this will cause problems for them when they apply these beliefs in their everyday lives.

Content Analysis Method

When media researchers want to document patterns of elements across a media message, they use a method called content analysis. For almost a century, media scholars have been analyzing the content of media messages to generate answers to questions: Are characters in entertainment stories portrayed in a realistic manner in terms of gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, professions, and so on? Is there more crime and antisocial behavior (e.g., violence, irresponsible sexual behavior, bad language, illicit drug use) portrayed in the media compared to real life?

The validity of the findings generated by content analysis relies on samples of shows that are analyzed as being representative of larger populations of shows. This method worked well until around the end of the 20th century. Throughout the 1900s, most people went to the same movies, listened to the same music, and watched the same television shows, so it was relatively easy to identify the mainstream media messages and sample them in a representative way. For example, in the early days of television broadcasting, content analysts knew that over 95% of all television viewing was on shows offered by three broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC). If they sampled from the shows broadcast by those three networks, they could construct a sample that was representative of what almost all Americans were watching on television. But over time, the audience has been fragmenting so that by the early 1990s, the content analysis conducted by the National Television Violence Study (NTVS) had to sample from 23 television channels to capture even what 50% of the viewing audience was watching. Since then, the audience has fragmented even more with internet providers of video. In 2018, the top television network (CBS) averaged about 8 million viewers, which is a rating of about 2.4% of the total audience. Only four providers (CBS, NBC, HBO, and ABC) average as much as a 1% rating (Schneider, 2019). Now if researchers wanted to conduct a content analysis that could document patterns across the entire television landscape, they would have to include several hundred television channels in their sample, which no one has attempted to do. Furthermore, with the fragmentation of the television viewing audience and the proliferation of so many different sub-sub-subgenres, it is unrealistic to expect any research study to be able to present patterns that represent the entire television entertainment landscape. Instead, scientific studies now attempt to see if there are patterns within tiny slivers of television programming, such as body image themes in rap music videos (Zhang et al., 2010), indirect aggression in animated Disney films (Coyne & Whitehead, 2008), or how characters on two television series talk about gender (Van Damme, 2010).

It is still useful, however, for you to understand what dominant patterns content analysts found in the past. This will sensitize you to issues about gender and ethnic equality, about the prevalence of antisocial behaviors, and about the underlying values that may still be influencing media content. Therefore, I will present a brief overview of some of the more important patterns that have been found to include fantasy elements that differ from real-world patterns.

Character Patterns

Content analyses of the television landscape in the 1970s to 1990s showed that producers were featuring patterns of characters that were very different from patterns of people in the real world (see Table 9.1). The patterns of gender, ethnicity, age, marital status, socioeconomic status (SES), and occupations have been very different in the television world compared to the real world over the years. If we notice these demographic patterns in the television world and assume that they are the same in the real world, we will be creating faulty information for ourselves. For example, look at Table 9.2 to see the differences by occupation between television and the real world.

Table 9.1

Sources: Comstock, Chaffee, Katzman, McCombs, and Roberts (1978); Davis (1990); Glascock (2001); Greenberg, Edison, Korzenny, Fernandez-Collado, and Atkin (1980); Mastro and Greenberg (2000); Signorielli and Kahlenberg (2001)

Table 9.2

Source: Adapted from Medich, R. (2002, Oct. 18). Flashes. Entertainment, p. 16

What could account for this dominance of males, Whites, and youthful adults? Perhaps it is due to the demographics of the people who are television writers. Turow (1992) pointed out that according to the Writers Guild of America, White males accounted for more than three-quarters of the writers employed in film and television. Minorities accounted for only 2% of all writers. In a survey of the age, gender, and ethnicity of writers working in Hollywood’s television and film industries in 1985, it was reported that it was dominated by White males. In 2002, the same pattern was found as far as gender and ethnicity (Bielby & Bielby, 2002), and Glascock (2001) reported that males outnumber females 3.6 to 1 among creative personnel, which includes producers, directors, and writers.

Furthermore, the characters typically portrayed in television were two-dimensional stereotypes. Stereotypes are positive from the point of view that they are easy for viewers to recognize. But stereotypes can also have a negative effect because they are often inadequate as well as biased, they often serve as obstacles to rational assessment, and they are resistant to social change.

We use stereotypes in dealing with real-world information, not only media portrayals. For example, when we meet a new person, we try to type that person based on the characteristics we can immediately see, such as age, gender, appearance, how they talk, and so on. Once we have typed someone, we have a set of expectations for that person. For example, if we see a five-year-old girl in a fancy dress playing with a doll on the steps of a church, we would immediately call up a specific set of expectations. In contrast, if we see a middle-aged man with a beer belly straining through his dirty T-shirt chewing tobacco and cleaning a rifle, we would call up a very different set of expectations. Stereotypes provide us with a set of expectations that we can access quickly as we encounter people and events. They are a necessary mode of processing characters, especially when there are thousands of messages coming at us quickly every day and we need to create order out of “the great blooming, buzzing confusion of reality” (Lippmann, 1922, p. 96).

Characters in the television world are developed as stereotypes according to certain formulas, which make the characters easily and quickly recognizable to viewers. Look at the examples of stereotypes in Table 9.3. For each of these stereotypes, a clear image likely comes into your mind. You have seen each of these characters many times. When one of them appears in a story, it only takes a few seconds for you to recognize who that character is.

Table 9.3

Stereotypes, however, can be harmful when they lead audiences to believe that all people of a given type share certain negative characteristics. This is why two groups—African Americans and women—have been especially vocal in their complaints about how their demographic groups are stereotypically portrayed in television stories. Stereotypes in some other areas, such as occupations, families, the elderly, and body images, can also be harmful.

Controversial Elements

In the world of media entertainment, everything can be forgiven except dullness. When television was being criticized for having so much violence, Howard Stringer, the president of CBS, argued against standards to clean up television by saying, “We don’t want to turn the vast wasteland into a dull wasteland” (Lichter, 1994). And that is the key—television and all the entertainment media must avoid being dull, so they titillate audiences by playing with the line of acceptability on controversial topics such as sex, homosexuality, violence, and language.

Sexual activity on television has been prevalent since the 1970s (Buerkel-Rothfuss, 1993; Cassata & Skill, 1983). If we limit our definition of sex to visual depictions of intercourse, the rate fluctuates around one (Greenberg et al., 1993) or two (Fernandez-Collado et al., 1978) acts per hour of prime time. In soap operas, the rate is even higher.

If we expand the definition to include all visual depictions of sexual activity, such as kissing, petting, homosexuality, prostitution, and rape, the hourly rates go up to about three acts on prime-time television and 3.7 acts per hour on soap operas (Greenberg et al., 1993). And when the definition is further expanded to include talk about sex as well as sexual imagery, the rate climbs to 16 instances per hour on prime-time television (Sapolsky & Tabarlet, 1990). Most of this talk about sex is in situation comedies in the early evening, when it is presented in a humorous context.

The most recent major set of studies was conducted from 1997 to 2002, which analyzed 2,817 programs across 10 channels and found that about two-thirds of all shows (64%) contain some sexual content and 14% have sexual intercourse. Among the 20 top-rated shows among teens, 83% contained sexual portrayals. The overall rate was about three scenes per hour. Two-thirds (67%) of all network prime-time shows contain either talk about sex or sexual behavior, averaging more than five scenes per hour. And the rates of sexual portrayal continue to increase. Over that five-year time span, the percentage of shows portraying sexual intercourse doubled from 7% to 14% (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2003; Kunkel et al., 2007). However, when we take a longer time span, the opposite pattern is revealed. To illustrate, Hetsroni (2007) conducted a meta-analysis of the findings from content analysis about sexual portrayals on television. After examining the findings derived from 2,588 hours of broadcasts from 18 seasons, Hetsroni concluded that the frequency per hour of most of the sexual content had decreased over the years. This is particularly notable for dialogues about sex and normative heterosexual conduct, but it is also true for illegal sexual interactions and messages about risks and responsibilities in sexual behavior.

A scene from FX’s American Horror Story with five people in dark clothes and clown-like make up. The man in the middle holds a rod in both hands and stands with his knees bent.

While spooky shows are nothing new, FX’s American Horror Story used sex, gore, and violence to up the ante—and the ratings.

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Which conclusion should we believe? Are sexual portrayals increasing or decreasing on television? It appears that the best way to answer these questions is to acknowledge that the rates of sexual portrayals change over time and that these changes go in cycles. Across some time periods, there appear to be an increase in portrayals as producers push the line of acceptability, while across other time periods, there appear to be a decrease in portrayals as producers cut back in response to public complains. The bottom line here is that sexual portrayals will always be a part of media entertainment messages because humans have always been—and will always be—interested in sex.

Try conducting your own content analysis of some media entertainment by doing Exercise 9.1. As you work through the challenges in setting up and conducting a content analysis, think about the implications of your decisions on the eventual patterns you will find.

Violence was the most studied form of content in all of the mass media from the advent of television as a mass medium around 1950 to the turn of the century. Scholars continually monitored the amount of violence on television, producing at least 60 major content analyses (see Potter, 1999) before interest waned.

Depending on the definition used, violence has been found in 57% to 80% of all entertainment programs (Columbia Broadcasting System, 1980; Greenberg et al., 1980; Lichter & Lichter, 1983; “NCTV Says,” 1983; Potter & Ware, 1987; Schramm et al., 1961; Signorielli, 1990; Smythe, 1954; Williams et al., 1982).

The most comprehensive analysis of violence on television has been conducted with the NTVS (1996), which analyzed the content of a total of 3,185 programs across 23 television channels for day shows from 6 AM to 11 PM, 7 days a week, over the course of a television season. NTVS researchers reported that 57% of all analyzed programs had some violence and that one-third of programs presented nine or more violent interactions.

The numbers in the above paragraphs are limited to physical forms of violence, and they do not include verbal violence. Verbal violence is even more prevalent on television than is physical violence. For example, Williams et al. (1982) reported finding a rate of 9.5 acts of verbal violence as well as nine acts of physical violence per hour on North American (United States and Canada) television. Potter and Ware (1987) found about eight acts per hour of physical violence and an additional 12 acts of verbal violence on American television. Also, Greenberg and his colleagues (1980) reported that an average prime-time hour of television contains 22 acts of verbal aggression and 12 acts of physical aggression. In a comparison of rates of violence on television from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, Potter and Vaughan (1997) found that the rates of physical violence remained stable but the rates of verbal violence had increased dramatically. They reasoned that programmers were wary of increasing physical violence because such an increase would trigger a public outcry, but the substantial increase in verbal violence was tolerated by the public, so the increase continued.

Health

The television world is a generally healthy one when we look at patterns across all kinds of shows. While some of this pattern of health portrayals is very responsible in presenting healthy messages to viewers, other parts of this pattern are deceptive; that is, some portrayals present a very misleading message about health.

Although there are many indicators of deceptive health, I’ll present only five in this section. First, although most characters are not shown as having particularly healthy habits (eating responsibly, regularly exercising, and getting medical checkups to prevent illnesses), most characters appear healthy, fit, and thin. It has been estimated that 64.5% of the American population is overweight or obese (American Obesity Association, 2004), but on television, only 6% of the males and 2% of the females are. Furthermore, characters do not gain weight from their high-caloric diets, although eating and drinking are frequent activities on entertainment programs. About 75% of all shows display this activity. But eating is usually unhealthy. The traditional meals of breakfast, lunch, and dinner combined account for only about half of the eating; snacking accounts for the rest. Fruit is the snack in only 4%–5% of the episodes.

Second, although there is a high degree of violence on many shows, few characters are portrayed as suffering any harm (NTVS, 1996) In fact, most characters are portrayed as being healthy and active. Only 6%–7% of major characters are portrayed as having had injuries or illnesses that require treatment. Pain, suffering, or medical help rarely follows violent activity. In children’s programs, despite greater mayhem, only 3% of characters are shown receiving medical treatment. Prime-time characters are not only healthy but are also relatively safe from accidents, even though they rarely wear seat belts when they drive. And they are rarely portrayed as suffering from any kind of impairment as a result of an accident.

A third indicator of deceptive health is that everyday normal health maladies are rarely shown. Most health problems that are portrayed are serious and life threatening. When help for medical problems is portrayed, it is not in a preventative or therapeutic manner but in a dramatic and social way. Hardly anyone dies a natural death on television.

Prime-time characters are not shown with any kind of physical impairments. Rarely does a character wear glasses; even in old age, only one out of four characters wears them. Only 2% of characters on prime-time television shows were found to exhibit any kind of physical handicap (Greenberg, 1980). When they do appear, they tend to be older, less positively presented, and more likely to be victimized. Almost none appear on children’s shows.

Fourth, mental health is portrayed in a dangerously stereotypical manner. In real life, mentally ill people are usually passive, withdrawn, frightened, and avoidant. But on television, mentally ill characters were found to be 10 times more likely to be a violent criminal than non–mentally ill characters (Diefenbach & West, 2007). In television stories, mentally ill characters are typically shown to be active, confused, aggressive, dangerous, and unpredictable.

Fifth, doctors are greatly overrepresented on television compared to their numbers in real life. Health care professionals dominate the ranks of professionals, despite the paucity of sick characters on television. They are five times their number in real life proportionally. Only criminals or law enforcement officers are more numerous. Also, many of these doctors are shown making house calls and devoting far more time to individual patients than real-life doctors are able to.

Body Image

The human body as presented in media messages is typically glamorized. For example, a content analysis of three magazines from 1967 to 1997 found that male bodies were portrayed as more lean, muscular, and V-shaped. This fits with the male body image ideal of thin and athletic. “Sociocultural standards of beauty for males emphasize strength and muscularity” (Law & Labre, 2002, p. 697).

A man in a suit stands holding a woman in a dress made of flowers in his left arm and pours water from a small watering can in his right hand on her. The woman arches away from him with her hand posed near her left ear. Flowers are around her feet.

Hollywood is often criticized for creating unrealistic and unattainable standards of beauty and body image.

iStock.com/egorr

Hollywood movies are also a target of critics of the media’s obsession with a certain type of body image. Alexandra Kuczynski wrote Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession with Cosmetic Surgery, in which she argued that Hollywood has created a standard of beauty that does not exist in nature. “This standard is pert, symmetrical features atop a skinny body with large breasts (also called ‘tits on sticks’)” (Kantrowitz, 2006). She says that Hollywood creates celebrities with perfect bodies and then floods the media with these images, making them the standard that everyone tries to meet. When people cannot meet this standard, they undergo surgeries or get depressed. Also, Himes and Thompson (2007) conducted a study to examine how overweight characters were presented in movies and television shows. They found that fat characters were typically stigmatized; that is, characters who were not overweight used humor to put down overweight characters, often to their face. They also found that male characters were three times more likely to engage in fat stigmatization commentary or fat humor than female characters.

TELLING STORIES AS A BUSINESS

Humans have been telling stories for over 100,000 years. As Haven (2007) points out, “Every culture in the history of this planet has created stories: myths, fables, legends, folk tales” (p. 4). He says that not all cultures have created a written language, developed codified laws, or created logical argumentation, but all cultures have developed and used stories. These stories have served as a primary form of entertainment since the beginning of civilization.

When media companies create entertainment messages, they do so for business reasons. That is, they attempt to attract a sizable audience in order to generate sufficient revenue to support the running of their business. In this section, I will show you how they use story formulas as a guide in constructing their messages. Then we will explore some of the major challenges that these businesses face.

Story Formulas

On the surface, it appears that the media present a wide variety of entertainment messages. But when we analyze those messages, we can see that they follow standard designs. For example, popular music follows standard musical formulas. None of those songs is a purely random sequence of notes. Musical formulas tell musicians which notes are played in sequence (melody progressions) and which notes are to be played together (chords). There are a small number of standard rhythms. All of the songs are creative variations on the standard formula.

Also, all entertainment stories on commercial television are designed to fit into standard time blocks (30 minutes, one hour, or two hours), begin with teasers and story credits, and have interruptions for commercial messages. While entertainment videos on other platforms (such as commercial streaming services like Netflix as well as interactive platforms such as YouTube) do not need to conform to all the constraints of commercial television, they still must follow story formulas in order to attract audiences and hold their attention.

Story formulas are the guides; that is, they tell storytellers what elements are available to put into their stories and how those elements should be assembled. These formulas tell producers how to begin their stories in a way that grabs the attention of the audience, how to keep the story going in a way to hold audience attention, and how to deliver a satisfying payoff to audiences so they will find the experience pleasurable and therefore want to experience more stories. Because we as the audience also understand these formulas—albeit unconsciously and intuitively—we can easily follow the progression of the action.

Story formulas are guides for producers of media messages as well as for audiences. These formulas help producers navigate the process of making decisions as they select story elements and structure those selections in a meaningful sequence. They help audiences quickly process their ideas about characters and efficiently follow the unfolding action.

Analogy: Constructing a House and Constructing a Story

The process of constructing a house and constructing a story are similar in many ways.

When constructing a house, architects know that all houses must have a foundation, an outer shell with windows and at least one door, and a roof. The foundation can be made of many different materials (poured concrete, cinder block, etc.) and size (footing, half basement, full basement), so architects have options, but they know they must have some kind of a foundation. The outer shell is required but again, architects have options for building materials (brick, stone, wood, aluminum, etc.).

Houses can be of different styles (such as ranch, two-story colonial, craftsman, Cape Cod, etc.) Each of these styles must conform to the basic requirements for a house but each also comes with its own set of guidelines that build on the basic requirements for a house.

While all houses conform to architectural guidelines, there are so many options available (down to lighting fixtures and the color of paint on the walls) that no two houses are exactly the same.

When constructing an entertainment message, storytellers know that all stories must have a beginning hook to grab the attention of the audience, interesting characters, and a plot that audience members want to follow as characters struggle with conflict. The choice of characters offers many options (by age, ethnicity, personality characteristics, etc.). The conflict can be between two characters, a character and society, or a character and an idea.

Stories vary by genre (such as drama, comedy, romance, etc.). Each of these genres builds off the general story formula but still must conform to the basic requirements of that formula.

While all stories conform to storytelling formulas, there are so many options available to storytellers that no two stories are exactly the same.

There are many different storytelling formulas, depending on the constraints of different media and the conventions of different types—or genres—of stories. Think of the arrangement of these formulas in a tree structure. The trunk of the tree is composed of the most general entertainment storytelling formulas. These include guidelines about how to attract any audience, how to hold that audience’s attention while the story unfolds and the audience is pulled into the action and forms relationships with the story’s characters, and how to resolve the action with a satisfying conclusion. Branching off this central trunk of guidelines are formulas about different genres of stories, such as mystery, action/adventure, romance, and comedy. Each of these major branches has its own subbranches, and each of these has its own sub-subbranches and twigs until we get out to the leaves, which are the different individual stories. Thus, each individual story is a product of how a story producer has worked their way through all the design decisions from the general trunk outward.

General Story Formula

The most general of all storytelling formulas provides guidelines for what all stories must have. Such a formula says that all stories must begin with a problem for at least one character. The character struggles to overcome obstacles along the path of achieving what they want, and this involves the character coming into conflict with other characters, institutions, and ideas. This conflict is heightened throughout the story to a point of climax, where the conflict is resolved either by the character finally achieving the long sought-after goal or by the character adapting to the conflict in some way.

Thus, the general storytelling formula exhibits three essential guidelines. First, all stories must generate conflict. This pulls audiences into the action; audiences continue to follow the story to see how the conflict will be resolved. Second, all stories are told through the point of view of a character; this is the protagonist. Audiences experience the action through the protagonist’s point of view. Third, all stories need to trigger emotions in the audience. The more vivid the elements in the story, the more likely that strong emotions will be generated. The emotional journey is the payoff for audiences who want to be entertained.

This general formula is used not only by the creators of media messages; the formula is also used by us—the audience—to help us easily recognize the good and bad characters and to quickly find where we are in the story. Stories that follow the formulas the closest usually have the largest audiences because they are the easiest to follow. The more experience we have with entertainment messages, the more we learn the story formula. We are conditioned to expect certain plot points, certain pacing, certain types of characters, and certain themes.

There is a very large scholarly literature that examines how media entertainment stories attract the attention of audiences, how they process those stories, and how they are affected by them. Story producers can find a lot of useful information in this research literature, even though the findings are more suggestive than definitive because the results of many of those empirical studies present complex or equivocal results. For example, the research shows that violence is typically a story element that attracts and holds audience interest, but this does not hold for everyone, and it appears that it is not the violence per se but the arousing nature of violent portrayals that is the active element (Zillmann, 1991). Also, the research shows that humor is a desirable element to put into media stories. However, there are many different types of humor and because humor is personal, not all audience members understand all types of humor (Boxman-Shabtai & Shifman, 2014). Suspense has been found to be a useful characteristic, but not all audience members enjoy suspense the same way (Shafer, 2014). Research has shown that, in general, people more enjoy stories that have a higher degree of realism, but realism can be assessed along at least six different dimensions (Cho et al., 2014). While disgust repels and offends us, it has functionally evolved over time to compel our attention—both to core disgusts (i.e., blood, guts, bodily products) and socio-moral violations (i.e., injustices, brutality, racism)—making it a quality of many entertainment messages that may keep audiences engrossed and engaged; however, not all people like to feel disgusted when being entertained (Rubenking & Lang, 2014).

Genres

The overall entertainment story formula is elaborated in different ways across different genres of entertainment. Let’s examine the story formula in the genres of comedy, drama, and romance.

Comedy

With the comedy formula, minor conflict situations flare up and set the action in motion. The conflict is heightened verbally, usually through deceit or insults. Characters are developed by displaying their unusual foibles and quick wit. The action is neatly resolved at the end of the show, and all the main characters end up happy because the tension created by their problems has been eliminated. Humor is essential and is typically triggered by the telling of jokes or witticisms, but it can also be generated by putting characters into situations that reveal their foibles and silliness.

One subgenre of comedy is the character comedy or comedy of manners. Here, the humor arises out of character quirks that illuminate the craziness of everyday situations. Characters find themselves in difficult situations that we all encounter every day. As characters try to work their way through these situations, the absurdity of certain social conventions is illustrated, and this makes us laugh. Examples include Seinfeld and Big Bang Theory. Another subgenre of comedy is the put-down comedy, where certain characters have power over other characters and exercise that power in humorous ways. Examples include Two and a Half Men and The Office.

A scene from The Big Bang Theory with all the characters sitting or standing around the couch watching the TV.

The popular sitcom The Big Bang Theory followed the lives of a group of stereotypical nerds, whose quirks and awkwardness, contrasted with their girl-next-door neighbor Penny. This contast provided the basis for much of the humor.

AA Film Archive/Alamy Stock Photo

Drama

Dramas require storytellers to put their characters in serious situations where they must make tough decisions. The outcomes from these decisions are not always pleasant; that is, unlike comedy stories, drama stories typically do not end with all characters being happy.

The drama genre has three basic subgenres that illuminate three types of drama entertainment: tragedy, mystery, and action/horror (Sayre & King, 2003). Tragedy must have characters that are perceived by the audience as noble and good. However, bad things happen to these characters either because they have a fatal flaw they cannot get around (as is the case in Shakespearean tragedies) or because fate has conspired against them (as in the movie Titanic). What audiences enjoy about tragedies is the opportunity to compare themselves with the tragic characters and feel better off than those unfortunate characters.

With the mystery formula, an important element of the plot is missing. For example, in a whodunit mystery, the who is missing. A serious crime usually triggers the story, and a focal character must uncover information in order to figure out who committed the crime. Audiences are drawn into the story as they try to solve the mystery for themselves. In her book, Talking about Detective Fiction, best-selling novelist P. D. James (2009) says that “the formula for a successful detective story is 50 percent good detection, 25 percent character and 25 percent what the writer knows best” (p. 115).

The action/horror formula is primarily plot driven as good and evil fight it out in ever-deepening conflict. Characters are stereotypes or comic book types. Within several seconds after being introduced to a character, we know whether that character is a hero, a villain, or a background-type character. Characters are static and don’t change. The plot relies on fast-paced action that maximizes arousal in the audience. The primary emotions evoked are fear, suspense, and vengeance. Violence is a staple in almost all of these stories. The formula of violence tells us that it is okay for criminals to behave violently throughout a program as long as they are caught at the end of the show. This restores a sense of peace—at least until the commercials are over and the next show begins. Also, we feel that it is permissible for police officers, private eyes, and good guy vigilantes to break the law and use violence—as long as it is used successfully against the bad guys.

Romance

A romance story begins with a person experiencing loneliness from a lack of a relationship or a relationship that has gone bad due to betrayal, jealousy, or fear. As audience members, we are led to identify with the main character and feel their pain. But they are full of hope for what seems like an unattainable goal. Through hard work and virtue, they get closer and closer to their goal—even though they experience frequent heart-wrenching setbacks—until the story climaxes with the fulfillment of the goal, which transmits intense emotions to the audience.

Writers who have mastered this romance formula are very successful. For example, among all paperbacks sold in the United States, about half are in the genre of the romance novel. One romance novelist who has really understood the formula is Barbara Cartland. She has published 723 romance novels, all following the same basic romance formula. She is so successful that she has sold almost one billion books. Has she produced a body of great literature that will be read for centuries? No, of course not. Has she recognized a market for a particular kind of story and manufactured many products to meet that need? There is no doubt of this.

After years of watching stories on television and in the movies, we have become adept at following the formulas about characters, plots, and themes. We know these formulas so well that many of us think we can write and produce our own shows. Perhaps some of us can, but producing a successful entertainment message for the mass media is very challenging. While the formulas are deceptively simple, making them work well is difficult.

Compare & Contrast General Story Formula and Genre Story Formulas

Compare: The general story formula and genre story formulas are the same in the following ways:

· Both are guidelines that are used by creators of media entertainment messages when they are making decisions about how to tell their stories.

· Both are templates that audience members use to make sense of the media stories during their exposures; these formulas set the expectations about who the characters are and what they are likely to do.

Contrast: The general story formula and genre story formulas are different in the following ways:

· The general story formula presents the elements that all media stories should have to attract audience attention and hold that attention throughout the exposure whereas genre story formulas build off the general story formula by providing more specific elements that are characteristic of a particular genre.

Challenges

Although these formulas are relatively simple for audiences to understand, they are exceedingly difficult for producers to follow well when creating entertainment messages. The challenges arise from using different media, changing public taste, and dealing with risk.

Different Media

Telling an entertaining story presents a different challenge as you move from one medium to another. If you plan to tell a story in print, you have only one perceptual channel (eyes) and you need to use words to trigger vivid images in the minds of the readers. If you plan to tell a story in song, you again need to trigger vivid images and strong emotions but you must do this through the audience’s ears, not their eyes. With a song, you need to use words that sound good, not just look good on a screen. That is, the words must have a certain cadence that goes along with the rhythm of the music. Often the song has a rhyming pattern, which presents a special challenge to songwriters. With popular music, songs must tell their full story in two or three minutes.

Commercial television is one of the most challenging media for telling stories. At first, it might seem the least challenging because it appears to have few perceptual constraints; that is, you can use audio as well as video elements. Also, you are not dependent on the reading abilities of audience members. But it is very difficult to attract an audience on commercial television because there are so many competing channels of broadcast, cable, and video on demand. It is a huge challenge to hold onto an audience once it is initially attracted because commercial television interrupts stories frequently for commercials, and some of these breaks have a dozen or more ads and last for four or more minutes. Viewers can forget about the story or lose their motivation to stay tuned unless that story has really intrigued them. Therefore, storytellers on television must do things to catch the audience’s interest right from the beginning, they must build the action to a high point before each commercial break so that the audience will want to stay tuned throughout the commercials to find out what happens when the show returns, and they must keep the action interesting every minute so that people who are flipping through channels will want to stop and watch the show.

With television programs, not only must producers use the well-known formulas but they must also be creative enough to break with the story formula to keep their stories fresh for viewers who have seen the same plot hundreds of times. These two tasks seem impossible to attain at the same time, and this is why the percentage of television series that have lasted more than several dozen episodes is very small.

Entertainment messages on internet platforms (such as videos on YouTube and Hulu) do not have the constraints of timing that videos on traditional television channels have (they can be any length and accessed at any time). However, internet platforms face a great deal more competition. Every month, 20 million videos are uploaded to Facebook; if you wanted to view the videos uploaded to YouTube last week, it would take you more than 40 years of viewing with no breaks. If you want your uploaded video to attract a significant audience, then you have a huge challenge of breaking through the clutter from all the competition.

Changing Public Taste

Storytelling formulas must evolve as public tastes change over time. People get bored with too much repetition and are continually looking for something slightly different. Producers of entertainment messages know that while they should analyze messages that have been most successful in the past, they cannot simply copy those messages and expect to achieve equal success.

The public has certain expectations about what it will and will not tolerate in entertainment. We can see where this line of acceptability is when the public gets offended and complains—particularly in the areas of bad language, sexual portrayals, and violence. Television programmers are essentially conservative and fearful of offending viewers, so they present content that they believe reflect mainstream American values.

This line of acceptability, however, changes over time as people get over their shock at a new kind of portrayal and eventually get used to it. For example, writing in the late 1980s, Comstock (1989) pointed out,

Much of what is on television today would not have been considered acceptable by broadcasters or the public 20 or even 10 years ago. Public tastes and social standards have changed, and television has made some contribution to these changes by probing the borders of convention accompanying each season. . . . These conventions of popular entertainment provide television, as they do other media, with rules that minimize the possibility of public offense. (p. 182)

Since Comstock wrote that, television has continued to push the line of public acceptance, and what offended viewers in the 1980s hardly gets their attention today.

The same evolution of a formula has been occurring with popular music. The basic formula of popular songs is a story about love or sex. For example, Christianson and Roberts (1998) conducted a content analysis of 60 years of popular music. While they found that 70% of all songs dealt with the topics of sex and love, the way those topics were treated had changed over time. They noticed that in the early decades of their study, love was treated as an emotion, and the lyrics were symbolic; that is, the words suggested actions but left it up to the listeners to imagine the sex. In contrast, the later decades of their analysis found that love was treated as a physical act and the lyrics were much more explicit in describing those acts.

Dealing with Risk

Producers of entertainment messages realize they are taking on a huge risk because using the media to tell entertainment stories typically consumes a great deal of resources and the chance of earning back one’s initial investment is very small. For example, videographers might spend several months shooting and editing a story, then put it on an internet platform where it attracts only several hundred visitors, which is too small of an audience to attract advertisers. If they choose stories that are too standard and formulaic, they risk boring viewers who will not return to view subsequent episodes in a series. But on the other hand, if they break with the formulas too much, they risk confusing viewers or worse, offending them.

When television programmers guess right about breaking with entertainment formulas, they can attract fairly large audiences. The FOX television network rose to prominence in the 1990s by pushing the envelope of acceptability in television storytelling with shows such as When Good Pets Go Bad, World’s Scariest Police Shootouts, and Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? While these shows drew a lot of criticism, they also attracted large audiences, and FOX grew to rival the big three dominant television networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) at the time.

Compare & Contrast Spin-Off Series and Knock-Off Series

Compare: Spin-off series and knock-off series are the same in the following ways:

· Both are television shows in a series, which is a progression of episodes using the same settings and characters (or real people) and where some plot lines are resolved within a single episode and other plot lines are played out over multiple episodes in the series.

· Both are new television series that substantially copy the formulas used by a previously successful television series.

Contrast: Spin-off series and knock-off series are different in the following way:

· A spin-off series is produced by the same people who produced the previously successful television series on which the spin-off is based whereas a knock-off series is produced by people who are copying the formula used by a different successful television series (produced by other people).

Television network programmers are usually very conservative with risk and typically force others to share the risk with them. For example, the major television networks typically pay producers of new programs only about 80% of their production costs. This puts a great deal of pressure on producers to demonstrate to the television programmers that they can attract a large audience from the beginning. If producers are successful in attracting a large audience with their new show, then the networks offer the producers a contract that covers all their costs plus a profit. But if the new show does not attract a large audience, programmers cancel the show and the producers are left in debt. To illustrate, let’s say you have developed a new television show and the audience loved the pilot. The network contracts with you to produce a full season of 22 episodes. At this point, you would be feeling extremely successful because few producers are offered such an opportunity compared to the thousands of producers who are constantly pitching story ideas to network programmers. However, you are still facing a huge challenge. It will cost you about $40 million to produce those 22 episodes. Because the network pays a fee of only about 80%, you will lose about $8 million by the end of that season. If your show is cancelled after one season, you have a huge loss. You feel a high degree of pressure to attract a large audience so that your contract will be renewed for a second season. If you are able to do this, you have the power to negotiate a much more favorable contract and you will start to make money. The more times you get your show renewed for an additional season, the more you are demonstrating your ability to attract a large audience and your profit grows larger each year.

Hollywood films are another very challenging medium because they cost so much to produce, and the risk of failure is so great—most Hollywood films fail to earn back their basic production costs at the box office. Producers continually analyze the most successful movies to try to find the magic formulas that made them so successful. For example, screenwriter Sue Clayton analyzed successful and unsuccessful Hollywood films to try to figure out which elements are most associated with success. From this analysis, she discovered a formula that she calls the genetic blueprint for a successful movie. This blueprint calls for 30% action, 17% comedy, 13% good versus Evil, 12% love/sex/romance, 10% special effects, 10% plot, and 8% music. This formula shows that Titanic and Toy Story 2 were perfect movies (Baker, 2003). While it is doubtful that we could ever reduce the formula for a successful movie or story to a precise mathematical formula, there are certain characteristics all stories must have in order to appeal to audiences.

BECOMING MEDIA LITERATE WITH ENTERTAINMENT MESSAGES

I’d like to leave you with two ideas that can make the biggest difference in helping you increase your level of media literacy with entertainment messages. First, continually think about how producers are blending reality and fantasy together in their entertainment messages. Second, frequently analyze the entertainment messages you enjoy to see how producers used story formulas to attract your attention and hold it throughout their storytelling. For more information, see Table 9.4.

Table 9.4

Appreciate the Blend of Reality and Fantasy

We all live in two worlds: the real world and the media world. Attaining higher levels of media literacy does not mean avoiding the media world. Instead, it means being able to tell the two worlds apart as they merge together under pressures from newer message formats and newer technologies that seem to make the boundary between the two worlds increasingly fuzzy.

Avoiding all fantasy elements in the media—even if this were possible—would not help you to become more media literate. Most of us feel that the real world is too limited; that is, we cannot get all the experiences and information we want in the real world. To get those experiences and information, we journey into the media world. For example, you might feel that your life is too boring and you want to experience some exciting romance. You could read a novel, go to a movie, or watch a television program to get this kind of experience. Or you might be curious about what happened in your city today, so you watch the evening news, where reporters take you to all the places of the day’s actions—crime scenes, fire locations, courthouses, and sporting arenas. Although these are all real-world locations, you are not visiting them in the real world. Instead, you enter the media world to visit them, which means that even when all the elements in a message look real, there are still elements that are fantasy.

As genres change and the line between reality and fantasy programming becomes even more blurred, we must avoid falling into the trap of debating which shows are real and which are fantasy. The question should not be How real are media messages? Instead, the question should be Which elements in this message reflect reality and which elements are removed from reality in some way? As you increase your ability to tell the difference, you will achieve greater power to avoid constructing your beliefs about the world on fantasy elements. See Table 9.5 for more information.

Table 9.5

All of us must continually decide how closely media messages reflect real life and what the implications of those differences are on our beliefs about reality. Sometimes, these decisions about what is real are relatively easy; it is simple for most of us to understand that there is nothing in real life anything similar to Gilligan’s Island. But some of the decisions are harder to make accurately—especially when they are subtly shaped over a long period of time by the accumulation of thousands of journeys into the media world. Over time, we have come to accept much of the media world as the real world. For example, who is the president of the United States? Are you sure? Have you ever met him? If you have not met him, how do you know he really exists? If you have met him, how do you know he is who he says he is? I am not trying to make you paranoid. I am only asking you to consider the degree to which you trust the information and experiences you bring back from the media world into your real world. When encountering some of that information, you should have a high degree of skepticism, but other information should be accepted by you with a feeling of trust. Are you sure you know which is which?

There are often many layers of meaning. Some of those layers are highly unrealistic (never actually happened, never will happen, and never could happen) but they are interlaced among layers of realistic elements that could transform the overall message in your perception from fantasy to it might happen to it is likely to happen to I need to try this. The more you are aware of the layers of meaning in messages, the more you can control the selection of which meanings you want. Being more analytical is the first step toward controlling how the media affect you. If you are unaware of the meanings, then the media stay in control of how you perceive the world.

Increasing our level of media literacy needs to be oriented more toward recognizing which elements are real and which are fantasy so that you can appreciate the blend of both elements by skilled storytellers. Increasing one’s level of media literacy is not only about the dry cognitive task of analysis; it also involves the enjoying of emotions that are triggered by developing a stronger appreciation for the amazing creative achievements of many message producers.

What Were They Thinking?

In 1964, Sherwood Schwartz produced a show called Gilligan’s Island. This was a farcical comedy in which seven characters who had been on a pleasure cruise encountered a storm that left them shipwrecked on an island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. After about six episodes had aired, Schwartz was contacted by the Coast Guard and told that they had received several dozen telegrams from people who were complaining that the military should send a ship to rescue these seven people. Those telegrams were serious. Schwartz was dumfounded, calling this the “most extreme case of suspension of belief I ever heard of.” He wondered, “Who did these viewers think was filming the castaways on that island? There was even a laugh track on the show. Who was laughing at the survivors of the wreck of the S. S. Minnow? It boggled the mind” (Schwartz, 1984, p. 2).

Appreciate Story Formulas

During exposure to the media, remember that entertainment messages follow a formula.

When producers create entertainment messages, they are guided by a general story, which outlines what all entertainment stories must have: a genre formula, which builds on the general story formula by adding elements specific to a genre and knowledge about which particular storytelling elements (such as elements for arousal, types of humor, degree and type of realism, suspense, and triggers for emotional reactions) work with particular types of audiences. Thus, entertainment messages within a particular genre share a lot of commonalities that differentiate them from messages within other genres. The more that we as audience members understand these formulas, the more effectively and efficiently we can follow their action and process their meanings.

Viewers want formulaic characters and plots so that the entertainment messages are easy to follow. Look at how closely stories follow formulas by working on Exercise 9.2. As you progress through the exercise, keep these questions in mind: How do stories follow standard patterns and how do they deviate from them? How much can a story deviate from standard formulas before you are likely to become confused and lose sense of what is happening?

Keep asking questions about these stories. Be skeptical. Take nothing for granted. If you stay active during your exposures, you will be increasing your media literacy and will thus gain more control over setting expectations for life that are both realistic and special to you.

SUMMARY

All media messages are necessarily a blend of reality and fantasy elements. Also, all entertainment messages follow story formulas. These two ideas are the primary tools you need to help you analyze entertainment messages in enough depth for you avoid risks of negative effects and increase your appreciation of the amazingly creative accomplishments of many storytellers.