"It's still a white world out there": the interplay of culture and economics in international television trade

Abstract

Drawing on interviews with more than thirty international television executives from around the world, this article provides a case study of how distribution and acquisition practices in international television trade extract profit from television culture. While previous research in international television has tended to ignore or to oversimplify the importance of the distribution industry, this article demonstrates how studying distribution gives us insights into the contents and directions of transborder television flows that other methods and research foci miss. Specifically, the article explores how economic and cultural forces intersect to shape the global flow of African American situation comedies. As the television industry continues to globalize, cultural differences such as race will prove pivotal in attracting multinational viewers, and this article calls for more research into how such differences are commodified by the international distribution industry.