12 ms·

Rural purge

ipnon 5y ago
Another phenomenon that accelerated in the early 1970s is the bifurcation of the American public into a cognitive elite and cognitive normal. Colleges became exceedingly efficient at filtering entrants by IQ, with the typical college student 1 standard deviation above the mean IQ, and with some prestigious colleges like Harvard having an average student multiple SDs above the mean. Simultaneously business administration became the purview of the same cognitive elite. Could the rural purge have been the result of network executives alienated and at odds with the viewership they were nominally at the behest of? Urbanization did not increase significantly at this time, so it seems cultural factors are the better explanation.
- kingsuper20 5y ago
  That doesn't explain earlier network television. There was something of a push for high-quality stage drama, jazz, avant-garde comedy in addition to urban situation comedies (I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners). My guess is that somebody does a successful show and everyone else jumps in the pool.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    That article (and a couple of articles/blogs it references) tries to coherently explain why TV changed like it did during that period. The better explanation is probably that network programming--probably even more so than other aspects of culture--was very much a fashion business. It may also reflect the personal preferences of a handful of network execs. Furthermore, the 70s were definitely not a back to the city period so its hard to use that as an explanation.
    - kingsuper20 5y ago
      There's always the pachinko effect of network executive tastes, it's not unlike the music business, but I think that the article is trying to find patterns in clouds. To refresh my memory, I just looked at a bunch of years of network programming. The 'rural' comedies don't seem to make that much of a footprint. If anything, a person could probably build a more convincing, invented-from-whole-cloth, essay about the birth and death of Western TV shows.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        Or private detective--outside of British imports of course. Medical dramas. Etc. I think I probably agree with you though that Westerns (both on TV and film) are probably the almost stereotypically American genre that used to be hugely popular and is largely non-existent today. But I'm not sure I'd assign any great significance to the fact other than shifting tastes and, perhaps, sensitivities.
- lmohseni 5y ago
  Cognitive elite? Or cultural elite. Given that IQ scores purport to measure cognitive faculty but instead measure cultural fluency. (Changed pretend to purport)
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    That's not as true as one would hope. There's not a lot of "cultural fluency" involved in matching squares, unless you're from the jungle and have grown up never seeing any squares. (The theory that people who grew up not looking at corners would be less able to perceive square shapes has received some attention, but we have to admit that doesn't have much relevance to people living in modern countries like America or India .) Now, cultural fluency questions have appeared on IQ tests, especially in the past. However that's not so much an attack on the idea of "g" as it is a problem with antiquated methods of measuring it. That's not to say that IQ tests are that accurate. The biggest confounder I know of is ADHD, which causes the tests to come out five whole points lower on average. I'm sure there are others.
    - the_local_host 5y ago
      > There's not a lot of "cultural fluency" involved in matching squares There are a lot of cultural factors involved in believing a seemingly pointless exercise like matching squares is worth doing. You have to believe that something good can come out of it in general; and you have to believe that something good can come out of it specifically for yourself.
      - whatshisface 5y ago
        Accurately measuring the performance of someone who is not interested in demonstrating their performance seems like an impossible task for anyone but GLaDOS from the Portal series. ;) More seriously, random pattern matching questions are the best you can do to control for the not-caring factor, because they eliminate the advantage of test prep. The SAT has a significant test prep factor, which I agree is highly confounded by "culture" (a byword for how much your parents make you study) and the circumstances and opportunities related to test prep, including the motivation of the student, and the availability of a place to study and study materials. IQ tests are significantly more meritocratic than algorithms interviews or the SAT.
- glaukopis 5y ago
  A nitpick orthogonal to your main point, but I would argue anecdotally that there's no way elite schools have an average undergraduate IQ "multiple standard deviations" above the mean - unless by multiple, you mean "two". Any integer over that, and at 4,000,000 students graduating high school a year, and 3sigma working out to ~1/1000, there literally wouldn't be enough smart kids to go around, especially considering a majority of those students probably don't go to T10 schools anyways due to the fact that college isn't an idealized market. Having gone to an elite school for undergrad, I'd argue most students were around 2sigma or slightly below, but almost universally also had 2sigma levels of work ethic, self-discipline, and goal-seeking.
  - ipnon 5y ago
    What I meant is that elite universities like Harvard and Stanford are capturing something like 90% of those 3 sigma high school graduates, not that all Harvard and Stanford students are 3 sigma. That was not the case 100 years ago, and in the 1970s it was a rapidly increasing trend. Thank you for calling out this ambiguity.
    - Glyptodon 5y ago
      It seems pretty hard to believe for that Harvard and Stanford, or even just the more "elite" universities capture 90% of circa 3 sigma high school students. My experience is that desiring to go to Harvard, Stanford, or other "prestigious" schools is way more correlated to the socialization of valuing prestige than anything, and that many of the very smart folks I've met value particular interests or other concerns much more than status signaling. I'm also not sure the most common admissions tools have great usefulness or accuracy into measurement above 2 sigma. (Though I'm sure people are pretty smart at these schools.)
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    I did not go to an elite university though I have family members who did. The eye general attitude seems to be that “the smart kids at your high school were probably just as smart as the kids at [Harvard], but at [Harvard] all the kids are that smart”.
- cafard 5y ago
  I'm not getting into the whole IQ thing, but have you watched some of what was on TV in the later 1970s? Treat yourself to a binge viewing of "Love Boat", "Lenny and Squiggy", or "Three's Company" or even ostensibly serious stuff like "Marcus Welby" or "Lou Grant". When you have recovered, tell me again about the cognitively elite at the network executive level.
cdot2 5y ago
Basically the studios realized that catering to older audiences was not a good long-term strategy.
- _hyn3 5y ago
  > Basically the studios realized that catering to older audiences was not a good long-term strategy. Or perhaps believed instead of realized, but that conclusion was not necessarily borne out in the data. Fox News' later success (absolutely dominating cable news both in the demo and out, more or less since its inception) seems to demonstrate that the demise of all of these shows at the same time left a vacuum for a certain type of programming that probably still persists to this day.
  - akiselev 5y ago
    Which would make sense if there's an X:1 ratio of younger to older audiences - probably relative to future potential disposable income rather than size - and the two groups prefer vastly different content from each other. The former group is large enough to support several large competitors but competing over the latter might have been a losing proposition for the major networks since none of them could get enough critical mass to turn a profit off that market. For example, take major brands like Pepsi, Coca Cola, GM, and Ford that have tons of money to throw at everyone and a niche company like Lear Capital that sells gold and silver. Some content draws enough big advertisers to fill up 100% of the ad slots while running up the price but if Pepsi/Coca-Cola/GM do not think running ads during "Little House on the Prairie" is worth the marginal benefit, that leaves Ford and Lear Capital to make the show profitable. Before Fox cornered their market, Lear Capital might not reach enough eyeballs in their target demographic to be able to buy enough ads on "Little House on the Praire" to make the show profitable because its in the same time slot as "Antiques Roadshow". Obviously Ford won't pick up the rest of the tab for one show so the major networks end up dropping the older audiences' shows one by one when there isn't enough advertiser demand. All the while, bidding up the cost of ads on popular shows depletes the big brands' ad budgets even further. Then, Fox comes along, and since most of the big brands need to push brand awareness their TV ad budgets grow (it's a new major network!). They buy their usual ads and all of those niche players who wanted to advertise to that demographic on TV but couldn't because it was spread too thin can come together on a major network that caters just to their needs.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
majormajor 5y ago
> Both Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies had dropped from the Nielsen top 30 by the 1970–71 season, yet both shows continued to win their respective time slots and had loyal followings, warranting renewal for another season. Lotta editorializing here for a wikipedia article. Continually declining popularity seems like it could easily also be said to warrant cancellation.
- _hyn3 5y ago
  > Lotta editorializing here for a wikipedia article. Wikipedia has changed a lot in the last decade.
  - eesmith 5y ago
    That text was added 11 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rural_purge&diff=365375693&oldid=365246504 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rural_purge&diff=...
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Flipping over to the "Talk" tab, I think it's clear that this isn't a good example of a Wikipedia article. Multiple comments about lack of neutral tone, and it's been flagged twice for removal (the first time, the decision was keep; the second, the decision was "no consensus.") I don't know that this article has a long life ahead of it.
- lazyasciiart 5y ago
  That article doesn’t even convince me that “rural purge” is a phrase ever used outside it.
thrower123 5y ago
There are still networks (MeTV for example) that make a living off of re-airing those shows. The popularity of all of the "Jane Goodall studying the gorillas" redneck porn on Discovery and National Geographic and History Channel, along with more prestigious dramas like Yellowstone or Justified or Longmire would indicate to me that this is still a very profitable demographic to target, albeit distasteful to the major television executives.
- noir_lord 5y ago
  It helps that in the case of Justified and Longmire both where excellent shows that happened to have a country/rural setting - Yellowstone is merely a decent show by comparison. Justified should be talked about like the Soprano's/Breaking Bad or The Wire - it really was that brilliantly done.
  - floren 5y ago
    Longmire gets a lot of credit purely for showing lots of beautiful New Mexico countryside! I also recall that the story was pretty good, but it's been a while.
    - davidw 5y ago
      The books are better than the TV shows, and the main character is not a "hillbilly" by any means. Agree that Justified is a very well done show. I have also been enjoying Wynonna Earp, which is kind of like Justified meets Ash vs Evil Dead.
    - freebreakfast 5y ago
      I cannot recall exactly where it was mentioned, but I remember one of the producers saying that they purposely wanted to highlight the beauty of New Mexico. Also, Longmire's cabin is located in Valles Caldera National Preserve[0]. It's a little outside of Los Alamos, and it's an amazing place to visit especially if you enjoy hiking. And don't forget the Bradbury Science Museum[1]. 0. https://www.nps.gov/vall/index.htm https://www.nps.gov/vall/index.htm 1. https://www.lanl.gov/museum/ https://www.lanl.gov/museum/
SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
I think this kind of thing is ultimately what I like most about new media. A Youtube series doesn't need to be concerned about skewed audiences or the network's branding: as long as it has a loyal following and an enthusiastic creator, it'll keep coming out. A lot of my favorite content probably wouldn't make it if they had to air on CBS.
- duxup 5y ago
  > A Youtube series doesn't need to be concerned about skewed audiences or the network's branding Is there a reason to think this is the case? I find YouTube to be the land of copycats and homogenization just as much as anywhere else. If anything the desire to attract clicks, views, thumbs seems more immediate than TV.
  - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    I'm surprised it's a question, to be honest. My favorite Youtube series include: * funny Mario Maker levels * pop history comedy videos * teardowns of random historical firearms * cooking from reconstructed historical recipes So it's hard for me to look at this and see homogenization.
    - duxup 5y ago
      I'm thinking homogenization across a given category / scene / community. It seems like any group of similar videos are heavily influenced by each other and often copy each other if they see another creator got a lot of response from their video. Are reaction videos getting views? Blamo, everyone does some reaction videos, and so on.
      - derefr 5y ago
        IMHO with YouTube niche content, it’s not so much the sort of “by external observation, that seemed to work out for them; so let’s cargo-cult it” that network television / movie studios do; but rather that content-creators within a niche are all part of the niche’s community — and the even-smaller community of “people who film themselves talking about that niche.” They might even all be personal friends. (Even if they’re not at first — someone who both shares your interests, and your videography side-hustle, is someone you’ll have a lot in common with! If you follow multiple channels on the same niche hobby, you’ll often find that they start to refer to one-another more and more, and then eventually there’s collabs, etc.) As such, obviously, they talk with one-another a lot; and usually trust one-another enough to make each-other moderators/admins in their Twitch/Discord/etc. (I mean, often they attend one-anothers’ weddings. There’s a lot of trust there!) And so there’s a lot of “hey, this did work for me, and made me a lot of money! You should try it too!” advice going back and forth. With the television networks / movie studios, the aping is the recipient’s idea. But with independent creators, it’s usually an external, unsolicited suggestion from another creator. The recipient of unsolicited advice will usually put a lot more thought into whether it really applies well to their situation, than they would if they came up with it themselves. (Unless they’re a channel whose whole “thing” is just copying what’s popular. But that doesn’t happen much in these niches, as you can’t really content-farm a niche.) Mind you, within the “everyone in the niche is friends” paradigm, you do sometimes see newer creators seemingly aping others a lot — but what’s frequently happening there is that the creator has some experienced creators as patrons/producers for their videos, where the experienced creators have the goal of “bootstrapping” the channel quickly into success, and so are guiding the new creator into these cliche-but-popular video formats (and the new creator is going with it, because 1. they’re inexperienced and don’t know better; and 2. their channel doesn’t yet have a brand to tarnish — that’s something they can build after they have followers.)
duxup 5y ago
I'm always curious about what is featured in entertainment vs reality. This was mostly because of my contact / travels with younger folks outside the US who I would talk to. I was supersized by how may other younger people seemed to have their view of America heavily influenced by imported TV shows / movies. A surprising number seemed to assume that everyone was a TV 'type', school life was like a TV show, and the assumption that most everyone was wealthy like the shows at the time. This was well before the age of the internet. As far as the actual media trends, I think it usually just follows fads and trends. I don't think there's a real 'motivation' behind it outside getting eyeballs on TV.
- CountDrewku 5y ago
  Anecdotally I've found this to be true when discussing the US with European friends I have. They think our schooling looks exactly like the sitcoms (e.g. Boy Meets World, Fresh Prince). They also seem to think we're all partially cowboys or at least like John McClane in Die Hard. They also take every bit of media coming from the major networks as absolute truth and tend to believe things that are really quite rare here happen on a constant basis.
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    To be fair everyone makes this mistake with every culture they are familiar with yet not experienced enough to understand the variety and nuance. We go with the stereotypes because there's some truth to it. For example, there is still to this day a big cowboy subculture in America, it's just not everyone. And no not everyone in West Philadelphia born and raised shoots bball after school but quite a few do.
  - philwelch 5y ago
    > They also take every bit of media coming from the major networks as absolute truth and tend to believe things that are really quite rare here happen on a constant basis. To be fair, Americans also believe this.
    - CountDrewku 5y ago
regnull 5y ago
Lots of things went wrong in 1971: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
- jcranmer 5y ago
  You do have to admire the chutzpah of someone pointing bold arrows to the data points in 1971 when the graph in question shows a clear inflection point in 1980 instead (or in many cases near the end, no clear inflection point at all).
- st_goliath 5y ago
  Says a company that wants to sell me Bitcoin and ends the data dump with a quote vaguely implying that the evil government is to blame. In other news, smoking cigarettes is good for your health, says this old study I have here. Please just ignore where the data is from and who funded it, it's totally trustworthy!
- imtringued 5y ago
  If you were to ask me the arrow should point at 2000. It's a much more interesting date than 1971.
Simulacra 5y ago
I grew up watching Nick at Night, and I wish we still had shows like that today. They were idealized versions of Americana, but I think it was closer to what viewers wanted believed about America. I wish there were more shows today about rural communities, it might help us understand one another better.
- floren 5y ago
  > I wish there were more shows today about rural communities, it might help us understand one another better. You'd have to get TV writers that want to understand rural communities first, instead of painting dumb-shit broad strokes from fuzzy memories of watching Green Acres as a kid. Mostly, though, they just do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k9_N4k5IQI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k9_N4k5IQI
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  There was Parks and Recreation, I guess.
- litoorachure 5y ago
  Oh, this sounds like fun. It depends on how you define 'rural', but off the top of my head: Parks & Recreation, Schitt's Creek, Breaking Bad, Ozark, Sons of Anarchy, Dallas, and that's without even looking at the Discovery Channel. IMO we need to talk to each other more if we want to understand each other better, though. Not through dehumanizing screens, but in person and in good faith. When was the last time you had a meaningful conversation with a stranger in a train, airport, store etc?
  - philwelch 5y ago
    Breaking Bad takes place in Albuquerque and I’m pretty sure Dallas takes place in Dallas. Those are cities.
    - litoorachure 5y ago
      Yeah, they're not perfect examples, but those shows' characters live in the suburbs and spend most of their time even farther afield. The cities seem to serve as somewhat jarring juxtapositions to the places where the action and drama occur.
mywittyname 5y ago
It seems like this was more driven by a desire to have television shows that addressed real world problems. "Rural" here is basically a euphemism for "sterile world where nothing bad actually happens." It's just easier to sterilize a cabin in the woods. Plus, the country has always been idyllic in American culture. This was an era where pregnancy was a forbidden topic (among so much more) and where parents were shown sleeping in separate beds. It's not surprising that people eventually grew to hate this fantasy world.
Ishmaeli 5y ago
"[...]ratings indicate that the American public prefer hillbillies, cowboys, and spies." This kind of correlation has always seemed specious to me. It's the streetlight effect—it's hard to quantify why a show is popular we'll just assume it's because of the genre, since that's easy to identify. I remember when Desperate Housewives took off in 2004, and studio execs assumed that viewers suddenly wanted prime time soaps. And they released a bunch more prime time soaps that were lousy and flopped. I think viewers want quality content, regardless of genre. Genre is just a heuristic device.
splithalf 5y ago
Costs and returns matter to money people.

Another phenomenon that accelerated in the early 1970s is the bifurcation of the American public into a cognitive elite and cognitive normal. Colleges became exceedingly efficient at filtering entrants by IQ, with the typical college student 1 standard deviation above the mean IQ, and with some prestigious colleges like Harvard having an average student multiple SDs above the mean. Simultaneously business administration became the purview of the same cognitive elite. Could the rural purge have been the result of network executives alienated and at odds with the viewership they were nominally at the behest of? Urbanization did not increase significantly at this time, so it seems cultural factors are the better explanation.

kingsuper20 5y ago
That doesn't explain earlier network television. There was something of a push for high-quality stage drama, jazz, avant-garde comedy in addition to urban situation comedies (I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners). My guess is that somebody does a successful show and everyone else jumps in the pool.
- ghaff 5y ago
  That article (and a couple of articles/blogs it references) tries to coherently explain why TV changed like it did during that period. The better explanation is probably that network programming--probably even more so than other aspects of culture--was very much a fashion business. It may also reflect the personal preferences of a handful of network execs. Furthermore, the 70s were definitely not a back to the city period so its hard to use that as an explanation.
  - kingsuper20 5y ago
    There's always the pachinko effect of network executive tastes, it's not unlike the music business, but I think that the article is trying to find patterns in clouds. To refresh my memory, I just looked at a bunch of years of network programming. The 'rural' comedies don't seem to make that much of a footprint. If anything, a person could probably build a more convincing, invented-from-whole-cloth, essay about the birth and death of Western TV shows.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Or private detective--outside of British imports of course. Medical dramas. Etc. I think I probably agree with you though that Westerns (both on TV and film) are probably the almost stereotypically American genre that used to be hugely popular and is largely non-existent today. But I'm not sure I'd assign any great significance to the fact other than shifting tastes and, perhaps, sensitivities.
lmohseni 5y ago
Cognitive elite? Or cultural elite. Given that IQ scores purport to measure cognitive faculty but instead measure cultural fluency. (Changed pretend to purport)
- whatshisface 5y ago
  That's not as true as one would hope. There's not a lot of "cultural fluency" involved in matching squares, unless you're from the jungle and have grown up never seeing any squares. (The theory that people who grew up not looking at corners would be less able to perceive square shapes has received some attention, but we have to admit that doesn't have much relevance to people living in modern countries like America or India .) Now, cultural fluency questions have appeared on IQ tests, especially in the past. However that's not so much an attack on the idea of "g" as it is a problem with antiquated methods of measuring it. That's not to say that IQ tests are that accurate. The biggest confounder I know of is ADHD, which causes the tests to come out five whole points lower on average. I'm sure there are others.
  - the_local_host 5y ago
    > There's not a lot of "cultural fluency" involved in matching squares There are a lot of cultural factors involved in believing a seemingly pointless exercise like matching squares is worth doing. You have to believe that something good can come out of it in general; and you have to believe that something good can come out of it specifically for yourself.
    - whatshisface 5y ago
      Accurately measuring the performance of someone who is not interested in demonstrating their performance seems like an impossible task for anyone but GLaDOS from the Portal series. ;) More seriously, random pattern matching questions are the best you can do to control for the not-caring factor, because they eliminate the advantage of test prep. The SAT has a significant test prep factor, which I agree is highly confounded by "culture" (a byword for how much your parents make you study) and the circumstances and opportunities related to test prep, including the motivation of the student, and the availability of a place to study and study materials. IQ tests are significantly more meritocratic than algorithms interviews or the SAT.
glaukopis 5y ago
A nitpick orthogonal to your main point, but I would argue anecdotally that there's no way elite schools have an average undergraduate IQ "multiple standard deviations" above the mean - unless by multiple, you mean "two". Any integer over that, and at 4,000,000 students graduating high school a year, and 3sigma working out to ~1/1000, there literally wouldn't be enough smart kids to go around, especially considering a majority of those students probably don't go to T10 schools anyways due to the fact that college isn't an idealized market. Having gone to an elite school for undergrad, I'd argue most students were around 2sigma or slightly below, but almost universally also had 2sigma levels of work ethic, self-discipline, and goal-seeking.
- ipnon 5y ago
  What I meant is that elite universities like Harvard and Stanford are capturing something like 90% of those 3 sigma high school graduates, not that all Harvard and Stanford students are 3 sigma. That was not the case 100 years ago, and in the 1970s it was a rapidly increasing trend. Thank you for calling out this ambiguity.
  - Glyptodon 5y ago
    It seems pretty hard to believe for that Harvard and Stanford, or even just the more "elite" universities capture 90% of circa 3 sigma high school students. My experience is that desiring to go to Harvard, Stanford, or other "prestigious" schools is way more correlated to the socialization of valuing prestige than anything, and that many of the very smart folks I've met value particular interests or other concerns much more than status signaling. I'm also not sure the most common admissions tools have great usefulness or accuracy into measurement above 2 sigma. (Though I'm sure people are pretty smart at these schools.)
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  I did not go to an elite university though I have family members who did. The eye general attitude seems to be that “the smart kids at your high school were probably just as smart as the kids at [Harvard], but at [Harvard] all the kids are that smart”.
cafard 5y ago
I'm not getting into the whole IQ thing, but have you watched some of what was on TV in the later 1970s? Treat yourself to a binge viewing of "Love Boat", "Lenny and Squiggy", or "Three's Company" or even ostensibly serious stuff like "Marcus Welby" or "Lou Grant". When you have recovered, tell me again about the cognitively elite at the network executive level.

cdot2 5y ago

Basically the studios realized that catering to older audiences was not a good long-term strategy.

_hyn3 5y ago
> Basically the studios realized that catering to older audiences was not a good long-term strategy. Or perhaps believed instead of realized, but that conclusion was not necessarily borne out in the data. Fox News' later success (absolutely dominating cable news both in the demo and out, more or less since its inception) seems to demonstrate that the demise of all of these shows at the same time left a vacuum for a certain type of programming that probably still persists to this day.
- akiselev 5y ago
  Which would make sense if there's an X:1 ratio of younger to older audiences - probably relative to future potential disposable income rather than size - and the two groups prefer vastly different content from each other. The former group is large enough to support several large competitors but competing over the latter might have been a losing proposition for the major networks since none of them could get enough critical mass to turn a profit off that market. For example, take major brands like Pepsi, Coca Cola, GM, and Ford that have tons of money to throw at everyone and a niche company like Lear Capital that sells gold and silver. Some content draws enough big advertisers to fill up 100% of the ad slots while running up the price but if Pepsi/Coca-Cola/GM do not think running ads during "Little House on the Prairie" is worth the marginal benefit, that leaves Ford and Lear Capital to make the show profitable. Before Fox cornered their market, Lear Capital might not reach enough eyeballs in their target demographic to be able to buy enough ads on "Little House on the Praire" to make the show profitable because its in the same time slot as "Antiques Roadshow". Obviously Ford won't pick up the rest of the tab for one show so the major networks end up dropping the older audiences' shows one by one when there isn't enough advertiser demand. All the while, bidding up the cost of ads on popular shows depletes the big brands' ad budgets even further. Then, Fox comes along, and since most of the big brands need to push brand awareness their TV ad budgets grow (it's a new major network!). They buy their usual ads and all of those niche players who wanted to advertise to that demographic on TV but couldn't because it was spread too thin can come together on a major network that caters just to their needs.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

majormajor 5y ago

> Both Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies had dropped from the Nielsen top 30 by the 1970–71 season, yet both shows continued to win their respective time slots and had loyal followings, warranting renewal for another season. Lotta editorializing here for a wikipedia article. Continually declining popularity seems like it could easily also be said to warrant cancellation.

_hyn3 5y ago
> Lotta editorializing here for a wikipedia article. Wikipedia has changed a lot in the last decade.
- eesmith 5y ago
  That text was added 11 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rural_purge&diff=365375693&oldid=365246504 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rural_purge&diff=...
shadowgovt 5y ago
Flipping over to the "Talk" tab, I think it's clear that this isn't a good example of a Wikipedia article. Multiple comments about lack of neutral tone, and it's been flagged twice for removal (the first time, the decision was keep; the second, the decision was "no consensus.") I don't know that this article has a long life ahead of it.
lazyasciiart 5y ago
That article doesn’t even convince me that “rural purge” is a phrase ever used outside it.

thrower123 5y ago

There are still networks (MeTV for example) that make a living off of re-airing those shows. The popularity of all of the "Jane Goodall studying the gorillas" redneck porn on Discovery and National Geographic and History Channel, along with more prestigious dramas like Yellowstone or Justified or Longmire would indicate to me that this is still a very profitable demographic to target, albeit distasteful to the major television executives.

noir_lord 5y ago
It helps that in the case of Justified and Longmire both where excellent shows that happened to have a country/rural setting - Yellowstone is merely a decent show by comparison. Justified should be talked about like the Soprano's/Breaking Bad or The Wire - it really was that brilliantly done.
- floren 5y ago
  Longmire gets a lot of credit purely for showing lots of beautiful New Mexico countryside! I also recall that the story was pretty good, but it's been a while.
  - davidw 5y ago
    The books are better than the TV shows, and the main character is not a "hillbilly" by any means. Agree that Justified is a very well done show. I have also been enjoying Wynonna Earp, which is kind of like Justified meets Ash vs Evil Dead.
  - freebreakfast 5y ago
    I cannot recall exactly where it was mentioned, but I remember one of the producers saying that they purposely wanted to highlight the beauty of New Mexico. Also, Longmire's cabin is located in Valles Caldera National Preserve[0]. It's a little outside of Los Alamos, and it's an amazing place to visit especially if you enjoy hiking. And don't forget the Bradbury Science Museum[1]. 0. https://www.nps.gov/vall/index.htm https://www.nps.gov/vall/index.htm 1. https://www.lanl.gov/museum/ https://www.lanl.gov/museum/

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago

I think this kind of thing is ultimately what I like most about new media. A Youtube series doesn't need to be concerned about skewed audiences or the network's branding: as long as it has a loyal following and an enthusiastic creator, it'll keep coming out. A lot of my favorite content probably wouldn't make it if they had to air on CBS.

duxup 5y ago
> A Youtube series doesn't need to be concerned about skewed audiences or the network's branding Is there a reason to think this is the case? I find YouTube to be the land of copycats and homogenization just as much as anywhere else. If anything the desire to attract clicks, views, thumbs seems more immediate than TV.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  I'm surprised it's a question, to be honest. My favorite Youtube series include: * funny Mario Maker levels * pop history comedy videos * teardowns of random historical firearms * cooking from reconstructed historical recipes So it's hard for me to look at this and see homogenization.
  - duxup 5y ago
    I'm thinking homogenization across a given category / scene / community. It seems like any group of similar videos are heavily influenced by each other and often copy each other if they see another creator got a lot of response from their video. Are reaction videos getting views? Blamo, everyone does some reaction videos, and so on.
    - derefr 5y ago
      IMHO with YouTube niche content, it’s not so much the sort of “by external observation, that seemed to work out for them; so let’s cargo-cult it” that network television / movie studios do; but rather that content-creators within a niche are all part of the niche’s community — and the even-smaller community of “people who film themselves talking about that niche.” They might even all be personal friends. (Even if they’re not at first — someone who both shares your interests, and your videography side-hustle, is someone you’ll have a lot in common with! If you follow multiple channels on the same niche hobby, you’ll often find that they start to refer to one-another more and more, and then eventually there’s collabs, etc.) As such, obviously, they talk with one-another a lot; and usually trust one-another enough to make each-other moderators/admins in their Twitch/Discord/etc. (I mean, often they attend one-anothers’ weddings. There’s a lot of trust there!) And so there’s a lot of “hey, this did work for me, and made me a lot of money! You should try it too!” advice going back and forth. With the television networks / movie studios, the aping is the recipient’s idea. But with independent creators, it’s usually an external, unsolicited suggestion from another creator. The recipient of unsolicited advice will usually put a lot more thought into whether it really applies well to their situation, than they would if they came up with it themselves. (Unless they’re a channel whose whole “thing” is just copying what’s popular. But that doesn’t happen much in these niches, as you can’t really content-farm a niche.) Mind you, within the “everyone in the niche is friends” paradigm, you do sometimes see newer creators seemingly aping others a lot — but what’s frequently happening there is that the creator has some experienced creators as patrons/producers for their videos, where the experienced creators have the goal of “bootstrapping” the channel quickly into success, and so are guiding the new creator into these cliche-but-popular video formats (and the new creator is going with it, because 1. they’re inexperienced and don’t know better; and 2. their channel doesn’t yet have a brand to tarnish — that’s something they can build after they have followers.)

duxup 5y ago

I'm always curious about what is featured in entertainment vs reality. This was mostly because of my contact / travels with younger folks outside the US who I would talk to. I was supersized by how may other younger people seemed to have their view of America heavily influenced by imported TV shows / movies. A surprising number seemed to assume that everyone was a TV 'type', school life was like a TV show, and the assumption that most everyone was wealthy like the shows at the time. This was well before the age of the internet. As far as the actual media trends, I think it usually just follows fads and trends. I don't think there's a real 'motivation' behind it outside getting eyeballs on TV.

CountDrewku 5y ago
Anecdotally I've found this to be true when discussing the US with European friends I have. They think our schooling looks exactly like the sitcoms (e.g. Boy Meets World, Fresh Prince). They also seem to think we're all partially cowboys or at least like John McClane in Die Hard. They also take every bit of media coming from the major networks as absolute truth and tend to believe things that are really quite rare here happen on a constant basis.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  To be fair everyone makes this mistake with every culture they are familiar with yet not experienced enough to understand the variety and nuance. We go with the stereotypes because there's some truth to it. For example, there is still to this day a big cowboy subculture in America, it's just not everyone. And no not everyone in West Philadelphia born and raised shoots bball after school but quite a few do.
- philwelch 5y ago
  > They also take every bit of media coming from the major networks as absolute truth and tend to believe things that are really quite rare here happen on a constant basis. To be fair, Americans also believe this.
  - CountDrewku 5y ago

regnull 5y ago

Lots of things went wrong in 1971: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

jcranmer 5y ago
You do have to admire the chutzpah of someone pointing bold arrows to the data points in 1971 when the graph in question shows a clear inflection point in 1980 instead (or in many cases near the end, no clear inflection point at all).
st_goliath 5y ago
Says a company that wants to sell me Bitcoin and ends the data dump with a quote vaguely implying that the evil government is to blame. In other news, smoking cigarettes is good for your health, says this old study I have here. Please just ignore where the data is from and who funded it, it's totally trustworthy!
imtringued 5y ago
If you were to ask me the arrow should point at 2000. It's a much more interesting date than 1971.

Simulacra 5y ago

I grew up watching Nick at Night, and I wish we still had shows like that today. They were idealized versions of Americana, but I think it was closer to what viewers wanted believed about America. I wish there were more shows today about rural communities, it might help us understand one another better.

floren 5y ago
> I wish there were more shows today about rural communities, it might help us understand one another better. You'd have to get TV writers that want to understand rural communities first, instead of painting dumb-shit broad strokes from fuzzy memories of watching Green Acres as a kid. Mostly, though, they just do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k9_N4k5IQI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k9_N4k5IQI
Apocryphon 5y ago
There was Parks and Recreation, I guess.
litoorachure 5y ago
Oh, this sounds like fun. It depends on how you define 'rural', but off the top of my head: Parks & Recreation, Schitt's Creek, Breaking Bad, Ozark, Sons of Anarchy, Dallas, and that's without even looking at the Discovery Channel. IMO we need to talk to each other more if we want to understand each other better, though. Not through dehumanizing screens, but in person and in good faith. When was the last time you had a meaningful conversation with a stranger in a train, airport, store etc?
- philwelch 5y ago
  Breaking Bad takes place in Albuquerque and I’m pretty sure Dallas takes place in Dallas. Those are cities.
  - litoorachure 5y ago
    Yeah, they're not perfect examples, but those shows' characters live in the suburbs and spend most of their time even farther afield. The cities seem to serve as somewhat jarring juxtapositions to the places where the action and drama occur.

mywittyname 5y ago

It seems like this was more driven by a desire to have television shows that addressed real world problems. "Rural" here is basically a euphemism for "sterile world where nothing bad actually happens." It's just easier to sterilize a cabin in the woods. Plus, the country has always been idyllic in American culture. This was an era where pregnancy was a forbidden topic (among so much more) and where parents were shown sleeping in separate beds. It's not surprising that people eventually grew to hate this fantasy world.

Ishmaeli 5y ago

"[...]ratings indicate that the American public prefer hillbillies, cowboys, and spies." This kind of correlation has always seemed specious to me. It's the streetlight effect—it's hard to quantify why a show is popular we'll just assume it's because of the genre, since that's easy to identify. I remember when Desperate Housewives took off in 2004, and studio execs assumed that viewers suddenly wanted prime time soaps. And they released a bunch more prime time soaps that were lousy and flopped. I think viewers want quality content, regardless of genre. Genre is just a heuristic device.

splithalf 5y ago

Costs and returns matter to money people.