The Language of Popular Culture: Daytime Television as a Transmitter of Values

Abstract

WATCHING DAYTIME TELEVISION is a sin people never confess, I suspect not even to their priests. And why should they? Daytime programming is a melange of variety shows, game shows, soap operas, and re-runs-nothing you'd call grist for the life of the mind. Yet these shows are watched by large segments of the non-working population, and even by employed people who work irregular hours or can watch while they work. According to market research statistics, in the viewing audience are housewives, preschool children, retired adults, people confined to hospitals and nursing homes, men working the night shift, college students, their professors, and otherwise responsible adults who happen to have the flu. In other words, at one time or another, nearly everybody. In the light of demographics about the viewing audience, you would expect daytime programming to reflect the values of at least as varied a market as prime time evening shows do. And so it does. But since daytime shows are produced with smaller budgets and simpler concepts, they are easier to analyze than prime time programming, in which fancier sets, plots, and productions often obscure the values being marketed through the programs. Daytime programming is out front about its values. It is also almost totally consistent and repetitive. Whether you watch a game show or a variety show, whether you are entranced by the program itself or merely the twelve to fifteen commercials that pepper each half-hour segment, the values presented are the same. Daytime television tells what we Americans believe in the 1970s and tells it clearly. Judging from the month of daytime programming I watched about a year agoonly as a scholarly exercise, of course-there are three predominant clusters of values marketed to morning viewers: love and sex, money and materialism, shame and guilt. These values are presented thematically, formally, and-for good measurecommercially. What is most revealing, however, is that these three sets of values, joined together in apparent perpetuity by daytime programming, are like partners in a bad marriage complicated by an unsatisfactory affair: they seem mutually incompatible at one time or another, but are capable of endless co-existence because of the way they feed unhealthy needs. The five shows I watched were the major network offerings in my area during the