 Starring: Sally Field, Calista Flockhart, Rachel Griffiths, Matthew Rhys, Dave Annable, Balthazar Getty, Rob Lowe
Director: Various
Year Of Release: 2006-2007
Plot: Brothers & Sisters opens with Kitty Walker returning to California from New York after being estranged from her mother, Nora, for three years. However when the father of the family, William, dies, it causes all sorts of stresses and strains for Nora and her five children, not least that William left behind all sorts of financial irregularities, as well as a long-term mistress. |
Brothers & Sisters is a very unusual US programme in that it doesn’t fit into any of the boxes that shows normally have to tick in order to get onto TV screens. For a start it’s a relatively straightforward family drama, which isn’t desperate to be comic, OTT or sexy like Desperate Housewives, nor does it involve the investigation of murders, people working in a hospital or any of the other things that usually excite TV execs.
Perhaps even more unusual is that it’s a drama with a cast where the most important thing isn’t that they are incredibly young and beautiful. Instead of just going the normal route and finding very young people who look like models, the people behind Brothers & Sisters rounded up the most talented actors they could find, including double-Oscar winner Sally Field, Golden Globe winners Rachel Griffiths and Calista Flockhart, Tony award winner Ron Rifkin, as well as the very talented likes of Balthazar Getty, Dave Annable and Britain’s very own Matthew Rhys, with Rob Lowe joining shortly after the series began. It really is an astonishingly good cast.
However perhaps the most surprising thing is that it’s a cast made up almost exclusively of people over 30, with a good chunk of the main players being over 40. This really is incredibly unusual, as while US shows often have one or two older people, it’s seen as nearly compulsory to have at least a couple sexy teens or 20-somethings in a US TV show, but Brothers & Sisters doesn’t have any.
There is a reason for this youth bias in American TV though. While you’d expect US network advertising rates to be based purely on the ratings, this isn’t what actually happens. Advertisers don’t want to hit just anyone, and the highest value viewers are generally men aged 18-39, with women in the same age group next, and older people coming way down the list.
This means that networks can make more money from lower rated shows that attract an audience that’s almost exclusively in their 20s and 30s than a much higher rated show with a predominantly older viewership. In American TV it’s not just a race for ratings, but a race for particular high value demographics. As a result very few US shows are made that are specifically designed to appeal a truly adult audience (e.g. those over 35), as generally to make the same amount of money these shows needs a proportionately larger audience than a lower rated show full of sexy men and women that will appeal to a younger audience.
The result of advertisers’ apparent disdain for the older audience has resulted in some odd things in American TV in the past few years. For quite a while now, CBS has had the highest overall ratings of all networks, however it lagged behind ABC in advertising revenue because the latter network nabbed more younger viewers. CBS was hoovering up huge ratings, but largely in demographics that advertisers didn’t particularly want, and so overall the network made less money than ABC. Now CBS has also overtaken all others in the all important 18-49 age group – and therefore makes the most cash as well – but it just goes to show that the perceived youth bias of American TV is real and based on solid economics.
Well, it is the solid economics of how it actually does work, but it’s not necessarily how it should work. Numerous studies have shown that not only do older people have more disposable cash than their younger counterparts, but that they’re actually more likely to be influenced by advertising. Over 50s now have a huge amount of buying power, but major advertisers still want the youngsters.
There is some sort of logic to this. Many brands are trying to get young people into buying patterns that they hope will continue throughout their lives and there’s also a prevalent opinion that it’s the young folk that set the trends and there’s then a trickledown effect for other age groups (i.e. they think older people are more likely to be influenced to try new things by young people than vice versa).
The perception is that all age groups wants to be seen as young and beautiful, so you advertise to young people and then trust everyone else just falls into line as they buy these products in the hopes that youth and beauty will rub off on them. Indeed The CW network basically lives on this paradigm, as all of its shows have low ratings, but they’re all designed to appeal to teens and young adults (they show things like Gossip Girl, Smallville, 90210 and Supernatural), and so the network attracts far more advertising revenue than you’d expect.
However while that’s the logic, or part of it at least, it is rather myopic, and means that shows like Brothers & Sisters are rare on US network TV, simply because they’re unlikely to attract the desired very young audience (not to mention that without the hook of being about crime or a hospital, it makes them more difficult to ‘sell’ to potential viewers).
Indeed many have seen the fact that Brothers & Sisters has survived into its fourth season as rather surprising, as it generally has an older audience and has only ever ranked in the mid 30s of the highest-rated shows on US network TV. Indeed several shows with more viewers have been dropped since Brothers & Sisters started airing, simply because they weren’t attracting the right audience.
Some have suggested that the reason the show has survived is that while in recent years ABC (the network that airs Brothers & Sisters) has had great success attracting a young audience with the likes of Lost, Grey’s Anatomy, Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives, it has very few programmes for older views, other than Brothers & Sisters. As the only programme on that network hitting that particular demographic, it can actually make a decent amount of money from advertising, because companies looking to hit these older middle-class viewers have nowhere else on the network to show off their wares. Brothers & Sisters may also the ABC’s token attempt to assuage accusations that they’re obsessed with youth and dumbing down TV (it’s a far more sophisticated show than most of what comes out of America).
At the moment the series is still going strong, although it can’t be said to be a sign that American TV is starting to value the older audience more, as Brothers & Sisters certainly hasn’t started a rush of more adult dramas on network TV, designed to appeal to those looking for more sophisticated drama (you have to go to cable for that). At the moment, the fact is that while the economics are there for a few shows for older viewers to survive, networks still need to concentrate on comparatively simple entertainment designed for a mass of young people in order to make as much money from advertisers as possible. While that’s true, Brothers & Sisters, with its slightly older cast and adult oriented drama, will remain a comparative rarity.
TIM ISAAC
PREVIOUS: The Broken Hearts Club - Or, gays on film, a history - Part 2
NEXT: Bubba Ho-Tep - Or, the wonders of an old Elvis fighting a mummy, and the legend that is Ossie Davis
CLICK HERE to see the index of 909 films and TV shows the Movie-A-Day Project will be covering
CLICK HERE to find out more about the idea behind The Movie-A-Day Project
CLICK HERE to follow Movie_A_Day on Twitter
