Why Is Television Dominated by Shows Set in the Blue States?

Paul Farhi, in the Washington Post (11-28-04)

... TV dramas and sitcoms for years have extolled blue-city living, and marginalized, condescended to or simply ignored just about everywhere else. Even the fact that TV shows are made in Los Angeles and the business of network TV is conducted in a few square blocks of Manhattan does not explain the blue-centric nature of entertainment television.

Where do TV sitcom writers set their stories when they want to signal urban sophistication? Hint: Not conservative Houston, Charlotte, Nashville or Richmond. The preponderance of sitcoms have been set in a handful of very blue cities. New York, of course, has been endlessly adored as the province of the educated, the stylish, the beautiful and the witty ("Friends," "Seinfeld," "Mad About You," "Will and Grace," "Sex and the City," "The Cosby Show"), but so have Boston ("Cheers"), Seattle ("Frasier") and Washington ("Murphy Brown")....

TV wasn't always so reflexively blue. In fact, red places used to dominate prime time. In the mid-1950s, Hollywood's movie studios, bowing to TV's rising popularity, began churning out made-for-TV westerns (in part employing old western film footage from their vaults). Thematically, as well as geographically, such shows as " Cheyenne," "Gunsmoke," "The Restless Gun," "Have Gun -- Will Travel," "Wagon Train," "Rawhide" and "Bonanza" were red-state shows. They not only featured the wide-open spaces we now think of as red on the political map (it was often, in reality, merely a Southern California backlot), but the implied values of the TV western sound red today, too -- rugged individualism, small government, an aggressive law and order agenda (and don't even ask how they felt about gun control).

These shows were followed by the "hayseed TV" boom of the 1960s. The enormous success of "The Real McCoys" (about a family of West Virginia mountain-dwellers who move to a Southern California ranch) inspired such corn-pone comedies as "The Beverly Hillbillies" and "The Andy Griffith Show," which begat "Mayberry RFD," "Green Acres," "Gomer Pyle USMC" and "Petticoat Junction," "Hee Haw" and "The Dukes of Hazzard." Some of these shows celebrated homespun values and unsophisticated humor outright, but most based their comedy on a kind of red-blue clash of perspectives: Main Street vs. urban modernism.

With the cancellation of "Dukes" in 1985, network TV's red phase was all but over. Urban, largely blue locales have dominated ever since.

The disappearance of red-skewing shows has little to do with politics. As broadcast historian Erik Barnouw has pointed out, the decline of programs with rural themes and settings was not primarily about ratings -- "Gunsmoke" was among the top 20 shows a year before its cancellation -- but about demographics. The audience for these shows was older and less urban, which was the "wrong" audience, as far as advertisers were concerned. Attempts to revive and update the TV western have crashed for similar reasons. CBS's "Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman" mated a blue sensibility (feminist empowerment) to a red genre and place (the western frontier in Colorado Springs), and was a solid performer for five years for CBS in the mid-1990s. But it, too, was canceled because its audience was insufficiently youthful.

Contemporary reality shows offer a mixed take on the red-blue divide. The granddaddy of the genre, MTV's "The Real World," has been mostly blue from its inception (in 13 seasons of choosing domestic locations, it has used only three cities in red states -- New Orleans, Miami and Las Vegas). "The Simple Life," Fox's shortlived reality series starring Paris Hilton, was equal parts red and blue: With its big-city-twits-meet-life-on-the-farm formula, "Simple Life," like "Green Acres" before it, was a red-blue crossover. "Survivor," the most popular reality show, avoids the issue entirely; Vanuatu and the show's other exotic foreign locales are neither red nor blue, as far as pollsters can tell.