Fears of Viewer Desertion

After September 11 TV networks worried that audiences may not be in the mood for the new season of television that was due to be starting (or in some cases had just started). In the immediate time afterwards manufactured entertainment seemed suddenly so irrelevant and unnecessary.
They feared that the public wouldn't accept the shows they had created, that these shows were for a different climate.
However, looking at Google search patterns tells a different story.
It shows enormous gains on 9/11 related issues in the week following it.

Top 10 Gaining QueriesWeek of September 10, 2001
1. nostradamus
2. cnn
3. world trade center
4. osama bin laden
5. pentagon
6. fbi
7. american red cross
8. american airlines
9. afghanistan
10. american flag

These hold throughout September, and only start to decrease in October.
By Novemeber 9/11 related searches had all but dissapeared.

Top 10 Gaining QueriesNovember 2001
1. harry potter
2. xbox
3. gamecube
4. daisy cutter
5. lord of the rings
6. shakira
7. toys r us
8. melbourne cup
9. melanie thornton
10. leonid meteor shower

By November the only part of 9/11 that Americans seemed to care about was the kind of bomb being dropped on Afghanistan.

(inspired by editorial in Dec. 2001 Television Business International by Les Brown)

Confronting Death and Real Violence

Besides a brief period on film in the 1970's Hollywood has never really confronted true violence, and particularly not on television.
Television has almost always followed the path of 'hyper violent PG rated' content. It still gives the exhilarating rush of violence but removes any kind of pain or suffering that real violence, or realistic screen violence would bring with it. It is through this that hundreds and hundreds of Cuban drug barons could be killed in a show like Miami Vice, or faceless officers could be zapped by aliens in Star Trek without the audience having to feel unsettled.
9/11 posed viewers a new set of problems however. People were suddenly aware of pain and anguish, and that removing these images from popular culture could not possibly work in creating saccharine sweet violence this time around. Drama that acknowledges the pain caused by violence are more popular than ever, and people now expect death to be accompanied by suffering. This is seen prominently in 24 Season 6, where Jack Bauer, a man previously seen as being in the vein of John Rambo or John McClane , is now feeling remorse for his actions and now doubts himself, showing the human side of war (this could also reflect the American public's waning appetite for the Iraq war).


(inspired by Larry Gross' 'Letter From Hollywood' in 'Film Comment')

Immediate Effects on the Industry

TV (and particularly film) have been creating dramas with terrorist related plot lines for many years now (1994's True Lies by James Cameron for example). So when the attacks occurred there were many movies ready to be released or at least in development that had some event that could be recognised as being scarily similar to 9/11.
At the time 'Collateral Damage' with Arnold Schwarzenegger was delayed indefinitely.
'Swordfish' was pulled from cinemas worldwide.
'Pearl Harbour' had its international release delayed, and was pulled from British cinemas.
The comedies 'Big Trouble' and 'Bad Company' were both delayed because of the former featuring a bomb on an airplane and the latter Middle-Eastern terrorists.
'Windtalkers' with Nicholas Cage was pushed back almost a year.
Even movies with no terrorism in were pushed back. Martin Scorsese's 'Gangs of New York' was deemed to violent to be released in the wake of 9/11.

These were the immediate after effects of September 11 on the film industry, and for a year or so afterwards film studios were very hesitant about seeming exploitative, Television networks however moved much quicker and pushed development of shows that reflected the feelings of most Americans at the time, so either a sense of fear and insecurity or a desire to fight back and get them 'dead or alive'.

Broadcast Dates (part one)

These are the initial broadcast dates of the shows. It includes when they started, how soon after 9/11 they aired (again) and how obvious the representation of September 11 are.

Sex and the City (started in 1998)-
Season 4. Started on 6/3/2001. (June 3)
Was mid season when 9/11 ocured.
Came back with 'The Good Fight' on 1/6/2002. (January 1) (delayed six months)
Aired 'I Heart NY' (effectively a tribute episode to the city) as season finale on 2/10/2002 (Febuary 2)

24 (started in November 2001)
Less than two months after 9/11 (Season one was assasination attempt. NOT Islamic terrorism) (11/6/2001)
Season Two (just over a year after 9/11). Had time to react. About terrorists attempting to blow up a Nuclear bomb. (10/29/2002)

West Wing (started in 1999)
Special 9/11 episode, was an acknowledgement of 9/11. - 'Isaac and Ishmael' 10/3/2001
Season Three, regular episodes, return on 10/10/2001.(Later episodes of series three reflect the political climate of the time, but from a left view point. Had terrorism at center)

Battlestar Galactica (started 2003)
Intial episode was totally 9/11. End of the world feeling.
Season Three, Iraq insurgency (10/6/2006)

Sex and the City and Love

Sex and the City was obviously always about the quest for love, from its very first episode in 1998. However, when thinking about the final episode (that did have some sort of longing for New York prominently in it, that I suspect may have not be so obvious were it not for the feeling of empathy among New Yorkers for each other after September 11) the idea of complete and utter love was reoccurring. This reminded me of hearing the recordings of the passengers on the United Flight 93 calling their family and friends, knowing that the end was imminent professing how much they loved each other. That idea became somewhat a theme after the event, with love becoming so important with the sudden realisation of mortality.
Perhaps Sex and the City could only ever end in love for all of them, but, the style of the final episodes contain themes so relevant to the mood after 9/11 that it seems the outcome of the series (particularly in the words of Carrie with the 'all consuming love') must have been influenced by the events.

-harry

The Torture of Gaius Baltar

Battlestar Galactica is easily the most post 9/11 of all the shows I am looking at. This video is of human betrayer Gaius Baltar being tortured by the Cylons. In a confusing way it is extremely unclear who is who. Are the Cylons Americans or terrorists? Is Gaius an Iraqi in Guantanamo, or an American kidnapped by insurgents?



-harry

Nations on the Enterprise

Star Trek (Enterprise) isn't a show I had previoulsy thought of doing, but it is an example of a show that fared less sucesfully in a post 9/11 world. It did try a Battlestar Galactica 'end of world' act of babarism, but in particulaly Star Trek way (i.e. nothing too violent, at a time when Americans had become accustomed to death).

The logic of representation in Star Trek implies a kind of domination as well,
yet one marked by an increased abstraction. Representation involves a higher
level of mediation than the direct management of corporeality. In the
represntational world system, representation, like a virus and with little
regard for purity of form, dominates through colonization and conceals its
parasitic nature by asserting older forms of domination and replaying them over
and over, welding them together, creating fantastic, contradictory hybrids.
Captain Kirk's bravado, then, his aforementioned regression, might be taken,
then, as a feature of the concealing logic of representationalism itself: a
re-telling, an attempt to hold what is decayed and gone--a sense of a unified
nation in America in the 1960s-- and the barbarism that presupposes it in the
face of the internationalizing, levelling impulse of the universal broadcast.
The logic of representation invites us to substitute 'thought-
transmissions' or representations for concrete existence. In practical terms,
the moment at which we accept 'thought-transmissions' in the form of the
televisual is the moment at which identity as such-- both national and
individual--becomes unimportant and simply a moment in the unfolding of Western
representationalism/capitalism and the moment, therefore, in which nationalism
becomes merely an anachronism and therfore itself a fiction.

- Concerning Star Treks ideas of no nations, and no racial differences, and whether that by watching we invariably accept these ideas.

-harry

[link:http://cinemaspace.berkeley.edu/Papers/Walden/walden.toc.html]