By Theo Weldon
A new episode of Survivor goes through months of editing and postproduction before it is broadcast to millions of fans on CBS. When it does hit the airwaves, Jeff Probst has a plan. Jeff knows where to put the commercial breaks. Jeff can draw us in with promises of conspiracy and interpersonal drama before blindsiding us with a bombardment of advertisements for pharmaceuticals, insurance packages, and an endless number of skincare products. Jeff (read: the executives at CBS) has tailored the flow of Survivor to hook viewers on the content of the episode such that they are willing to suffer through seven commercial breaks to see how it all ends.
Watching S46E6 of Survivor live on CBS revealed to me just how well this strategy had been perfected over the last 24 years. The episode, as I understood it, was split into three “parts”: the introduction, the challenge, and the tribal council. Each part led with 10-12 minutes of uninterrupted content to pique the viewer’s curiosity. The latter half of each part was conversely saturated with 2-3 commercial breaks separated by only a few minutes, relying on the viewer’s established interest in the story to carry them through the wall of advertisements. This strategy is not very subtle; when CBS cuts to commercial moments before Jeff reveals who would be voted off the show, I know exactly what’s going on.
Still, I can’t deny the effectiveness of Survivor’s commercial flow. I was thoroughly invested in the show’s drama, and I was willing to watch a few ads to see how things played out. Even so, watching CBS’s meticulous plan unfold left me with some burning questions. What happens when networks don’t have months of production time to plan the flow of a program? In the context of live television, how do networks strategize to keep viewers engaged when they themselves might not know what’s coming next?
In hopes of answering these questions, I spent the evening of April 4th watching a nationally televised NBA game between the Denver Nuggets and Los Angeles Clippers. I’m a pretty big basketball fan, so I didn’t need much convincing to sit down and watch 2 1/2 hours of the best teams in the world competing. It seemed to me that TNT, the network broadcasting the game, realized this fact, taking advantage of my love for the game by sneaking advertisements into every pause in the action. Every time a coach called timeout, a commercial break was coming. Every time a player stood at the foul line to take free throws, the game’s commentators would rattle off a 15-second plug for Nationwide Insurance, Chevrolet, or Wendy’s.
This heavy-handed, abrasive commercialization indicated a major difference in broadcasting strategies between TNT and CBS. I imagine TNT execs did not feel the need to hook me on the NBA product the way that CBS did with its opening sequences in Survivor. My guess is that they assumed their audience started watching the game with the intention of seeing who would win and how their favorite players would perform, something they would have been sold on before the even turned on their televisions. In short, while the flow of Survivor is tailored to captivating new audiences, the NBA broadcast seemed inaccessible to non-basketball fans, aiming instead to inundate a commited, pre-existing audience with as many advertisements as possible.
Because NBA games are live television, this maximization of commercilization can create some dramatic tonal swings that strike me, as Raymond Williams would put it, as “irresponsible.” The Nuggets vs. Clippers game I watched ended up being close down the stretch, with the Clippers leading by just 5 points with 90 seconds remaining. The Nuggets had the ball, bringing it up the floor in a hurry as they tried desperately to close the gap. Reggie Jackson passed the ball to Nikola Jokic, who lined up a three point shot and scored, cutting the lead to 2 points. The crowd erupted. I was only able to process what was happening for a few moments, however, because as soon as the Clippers coach called timeout so that his team could plan their next attack, I found myself listening to a corporate jingle as I stared at a Pfizer ad. I was still excited to see how the game would play out, but by immediately taking me out of the arena the broadcast had killed the momentum of the moment somewhat. Still, the tonal whiplash from this moment didn’t even come close to the egregiousness of the following sequence.
The Clippers missed their next shot, giving the Nuggets the ball with the chance to tie. Nikola Jokic dribbled the ball across half court, the announcers enthusiastically commentating his every move:
“The score is 102-100, Clippers lead. Nikola Jokic brings the ball across half-court. Hands it off to Aaron Gordon. Gordon’s got a lane to the basket–he takes it. Gordon drives! Oh! Gordon is down… he slipped on his way to the basket… and Gordon is holding his ankle, writhing in pain next to the stantion… we’ve got a timeout on the floor…”
Aaron Gordon had slipped on a wet spot as he drove to the basket. His knee had buckled, his ankle had rolled, and head had crashed into the hardwood floor. I had just witnessed someone suffer a potentially serious injury on live television, and the image of Aaron Gordon holding his leg with his face twisted in pain faded to black only to be immediately replaced with a Taco Bell ad. It was a comical as it was disturbing. Thankfully, it turned out that Gordon had suffered only a minor ankle sprain, but in the moment I couldn’t help but reflect on how the callous flow of the broadcast was seemingly oblivious to the actual tone of the content it was showing on screen.
The tonal whiplash of these final minutes revealed to me a potentially critical difference in “flow” between live and preproduced television. No commercial break from Survivor felt nearly as forced or out of place as those from TNT’s broadcast because they were meticulously planned out long before the episode was aired. In a sense, the CBS broadcast accomodated the viewer with the predictable and less disruptive pacing of its advertising. The live NBA game was unpredictable, the progression of its “narrative” could not be planned for ahead of time. Thus, the network has to assert itself onto both the game and the audience, taking advantage of stoppages in play, whatever the context might be, to run advertisements. This approach creates a somewhat jarring and emotionally inconsistent viewing experience, and I’m curious as to whether that exprience extends to other areas of live television, such as concerts or news broadcasts.