Watching CSI: a study of British audiences watching Channel 5 and Five USA Abstract Despite consumption patterns gradually changing, the notion of flow (Williams, 1974) remains a key concept drawn on by scholars (e.g. Kompare, 2006, Johnson, 2013, Kackman et al., 2011) to understand television. As a concept ‘flow’ is connected to an understanding of the difference of television from other media as far as the viewing experience is concerned: rather than a single film, audiences encounter a number of small units that are combined in the process of audiences’ sense making. In this understanding, ephemera become as important as programmes as they interlink to create a meaningful whole. On the other hand, John Ellis (1992/1982) argues that the more typical form for television is actually the segment which contains a separate meaning within itself. Using an audience ethnography, this article argues that in the experience of audiences, the concepts of flow and segmentation are both in evidence. Rather than seeing them as opposing, 1
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Watching CSI: a study of British audiences watching Channel 5 and Five USA
Abstract
Despite consumption patterns gradually changing, the notion of flow (Williams, 1974)
remains a key concept drawn on by scholars (e.g. Kompare, 2006, Johnson, 2013, Kackman
et al., 2011) to understand television. As a concept ‘flow’ is connected to an understanding of
the difference of television from other media as far as the viewing experience is concerned:
rather than a single film, audiences encounter a number of small units that are combined in
the process of audiences’ sense making. In this understanding, ephemera become as
important as programmes as they interlink to create a meaningful whole. On the other hand,
John Ellis (1992/1982) argues that the more typical form for television is actually the
segment which contains a separate meaning within itself. Using an audience ethnography,
this article argues that in the experience of audiences, the concepts of flow and segmentation
are both in evidence. Rather than seeing them as opposing, therefore, they must be
understood as complementary in order to fully account for audiences’ experiences and sense
making of television.
Keywords: Flow, segment, ephemera, audience ethnography, watching television
Raymond Williams’s Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974) is often understood
as foundational for television studies (Corner, 1999: 64). Undergraduate courses as well as
text books (see for example Bignell, 2013; Creeber, 2006) introduce students to his concept
of ‘flow’ which occupies the best part of one chapter of the book. The term is often evoked
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when scholars aim to define what makes television different from other media, and in
particular cinema. This is despite the fact that television as a cultural form and practice is
clearly changing, requiring some rethinking in regards to industrial practices (Kompare,
2006) and audience experiences (Kackman et al., 2011). However, as scholars such as
Catherine Johnson (2013: 24) have highlighted, ‘we need to be wary of suggesting that
broadcast television is dead’, a point driven home by several studies by Elizabeth Evans
(2011, 2015) who highlights that new media operate in conjunction with and complementary
to television, rather than replacing them. In Britain at least, this is also evidenced in the data
provided by the annual Ofcom Communications Market Report (2016a) which highlights a
trend away from devices and a slowing down of the decline of average minutes a day spent
watching broadcast television, bringing consumption back to the same average as in 2006 (at
216 minutes/day). Considering the enduring appeal of broadcast television, scholars continue
to argue that television remains different because unlike cinema and other media, audiences
encounter television programmes within the flow of other texts: be that other programmes or
ephemera such as trailers, idents and, for commercial television, adverts (Bignell, 2013: 19;
Creeber, 2006: 14-16; Corner, 1999: 60-69).
Although Williams himself was moved to define flow on the basis of his own encounter
of watching television in a different national context than he was used to, it is surprising that
the concept has so far hardly been investigated from an audience’s point of view. One notable
exception is Klaus Bruhn Jensen (1995) who uses the concept to measure audience flow.
Unfortunately, he focuses primarily on what they see and does not provide audiences the
space to articulate how they experience this flow in terms of their meaning making. In the
end, what he describes is a textual experience had by audiences, but not their understanding
of it. In addition, several other scholars (e.g. Ang, 1985; Gillespie, 1995) do introduce the
concept in order to discuss the experience of watching television. However, it is notable that
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most of them draw on the topic primarily in order to emphasise the primacy of the
programme text. Thus, Ang (1985: 22-23) discusses the concept of flow in order to indicate
how the television text has been theorised in the past, but then goes on to write that ‘[the
socio-cultural characteristics of television do] not mean that the programme does not occupy
a special place within those limits: the very fact that so much has been said and written about
it proves that Dallas plays a prominent role in the cultural consciousness of society’ (1985:
23; see also Gripsrud, 1998: 28). In other words, she (and others that follow her) make a case
for the academic necessity to look at audience perceptions of one specific programme. It is
partially as a result of these early justifications to study audiences’ reactions to specific
programme texts that flow as a concept to understand how audiences perceive television texts
has so far not attracted enough attention.
This article, as the title indicates, emphasises one programme, CSI (2000-2015), but
within the specific cultural context of watching it in Britain on a small free-to-air channel, in
other words within the context of its specific flow that combines adverts, trailers and idents.
Channel 5, the final terrestrial channel to be introduced to the British broadcast landscape in
1997, developed its brand in the early 2000s strongly around the CSI franchise which became
its break-out success in terms of audience figures (Knox, 2007). This continued as Channel 5,
like the other terrestrial television channels, broadened out into the digital landscape: its sister
channel, Five USA, is largely built around American crime drama, including CSI, but also the
Law & Order and NCIS franchises. As such, the channels’ brand identities have always
negotiated the relationship between US imports and its place in British television culture
(Knox, 2007; Weissmann, 2010). The relationship of CSI to Channel 5 and Five USA’s brand
identities and, hence, idents in particular, makes the series in its British context a useful case
study for the way that ephemera might ‘brush up’ (Kackman et al., 2011: 2) against
programme texts, and how they are experienced as part of a flow by audiences.
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In addition, I aim to understand CSI itself as a flow of segments (Ellis, 1992/1982)
which audiences need to actively combine in order to create a coherent story. Although often
discussed as relatively conservative in terms of its narrative structure as it follows an episodic
form of storytelling with only limited character development (Allen, 2007: 4), CSI is clearly
part of the televisual turn described by John T. Caldwell (1995): it prioritises audio-visual
spectacle, which often punctuates the narrative (Cohan, 2008), creating a ‘quality of the
surface’ (Goode, 2007), which requires significant activity by audiences to bring together as
coherent whole. Using a small-scale audience ethnography of viewers watching CSI on either
Channel 5 or Five USA, I will argue that rather than understand the two concepts of flow and
segment, as is usually done, in opposition, they need to be seen as complementary in relation
to audiences’ experiences: thus, for audiences, the text consists of segments which are largely
read quite separately, and yet recombined in order to make sense of what the programme is
about. The article will begin with a detailed analysis of Williams’s concept of flow and
theoretical responses to it, before moving into a discussion of the literature about how
audiences engage with ephemera as well as other aspects of flow. It will then explain why the
methodology of audience ethnography was chosen before analysing its results. Central to the
analysis will be a distinction between planned flow provided by broadcasters and experienced
flow that audiences make sense of.
Flow versus segment: The theoretical debate
Williams (1974: 78) defines his concept of flow as a dynamic counterpart to ‘distribution’.
Distribution, here, perhaps counter-intuitively, is understood in terms of what kind of
programmes can be found on different channels, so can be deduced from a statistical analysis
of types of programmes. As Williams highlights, although useful, such an analysis doesn’t
replicate what viewers actually experience. Instead they are offered a ‘programme’ which he
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indicates is more than a single text: derived from the use in theatre and music hall, a
programme is actually ‘a series of timed units’ (1974: 88). These units can be understood to
be separate, but, as he highlights ‘problems of mix and proportion became predominant in
[British] broadcasting policy’ (1974: 88). Indeed, broadcast policy in the UK, driven by the
wish to bring the nation together, was centrally concerned with the impact of what it meant to
combine different kinds of ‘items’. As a result, he argues, we need to understand that there
was a significant shift from ‘the concept of sequence as programming to the concept of
sequence as flow’ (1974: 89, italics in original).
The decisive change for television, Williams argues (1974: 89-90) came with the
disappearance of the interval and the introduction of adverts into these spaces on commercial
television. In other words, Williams sees the beginning of ‘flow’ precisely with the increased
visibility of ephemera. As Williams writes:
What is being offered is not, in older terms, a programme of discrete units with particular
insertions, but a planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of
programme items, but this sequence is transformed by the inclusion of another kind of
sequence, so that the sequences together compose the real flow, the real ‘broadcasting’.
Increasingly, in both commercial and public-service television, a further sequence was
added: trailers of programmes to be shown at some later time or on some later day, or more
itemised programme news. This was intensified in conditions of competition, when it
became important to broadcasting planners to retain viewers – or as they put it, to ‘capture’
them – for a whole evening’s sequence. And with the eventual unification of these two or
three sequences, a new kind of communication phenomenon has to be recognised. (1974:
90-91)
This quote highlights his full understanding of flow: first of all, it is planned – people make a
decision about what kind of sequences to combine. Secondly, there is an impact of the
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combination of different sequences: the main sequence is transformed into something else,
into the ‘real broadcasting’. Importantly, and thirdly, this transformation is closely connected
to broadcasters’ understanding of audiences, and so the sequence becomes meaningful not
just in terms of what it represents, but also what kind of audiences it attracts or is aimed at. In
this respect, Ellis’s assertion that ‘Scheduling [was] the last creative act on television’ (2000)
can be understood as offering further insight: Ellis argues that schedulers are gaining
increasing control over what kind of programmes are commissioned for a channel, precisely
because they oversee the planned flow of audiences.
But even in terms of its content – what the sequence represents and how this is
experienced by audiences – is the ‘programme’ transformed. Thus, the planned flow of the
broadcaster has a direct impact on the experience of television flow by audiences. Williams
highlights this in terms of his confusion when he watched television in America where fewer
signals are given to highlight the transition from ‘programme’ to ephemera than in the UK.
He indicates how trailers and adverts all started to impact on his understanding of the main
programme as he could no longer distinguish what was part of the film he was watching and
what wasn’t. This highlights that there is another level of impact of flow: as audiences make
sense of what they see, they do potentially combine programme and ephemeral texts to form
their understanding of the overall meaning. It was for this reason that Williams argued that
significant focus should be given to the analysis of schedules, but also how programmes are
intersected by ephemera. Some of this call has been heeded: Tony Wilson’s book (1993)
includes a consideration of schedules and how they are used to regulate time for both
broadcasters and audiences, while Annette Hill and Ian Calcutt (2001) indicate how
scheduling proved to be contentious for British viewers of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. In
addition, Catherine Johnson (2005) argues that meanings around particular scheduling slots
are established gradually over a period of time. What is missing, so far, is the focus on the
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micro-level that Williams describes in his own encounter with US broadcasting, particularly
from an audience’s perspective.
Williams’s concept, although widely picked up by researchers and teachers, has not
remained uncontroversial. Ellis, in his Visible Fictions (1992/1982), expresses the most
obvious opposition. In his eyes, rather than sequence and flow the segment is the defining
practice of broadcasting. He writes: ‘However, the vast quantity of broadcast TV’s output,
usually the critically neglected part, conforms to a different model. Its basic unit is the
segment, with segments following on from each other with no necessary connection between
them’ (1992: 116-117). Ellis charges Williams with prejudice towards a ‘cinema-style text’
(1992: 118), and argues that adverts are perhaps most typical as broadcast text. They are
separate, meaningful-in-themselves units which are clustered together. However, crucially:
they demand short bursts of attention, producing an understanding that rests at the level of
the particular segment involved and is not forced to go further, is not made to combine as a
montage fragment into a larger organisation of meaning. Thirty seconds by thirty seconds,
the “spot” advertisement expands but does not combine: it is the furthest development of