got into television for a variety of reasons. There was the money, of course. I got paid $18 for my first short story, an amount insufficient to support me even at the modest lifestyle to which I was then accustomed. Even later, when I made 10 times that amount for a story or an article, I realized that a television script that paid $10,000 was probably a more inviting target for a professional writer.
Then, I'm sort of ashamed to say, there was the fame. Until I was 19 years old, I never met a single person who bought, much less read, a science-fiction magazine. But everyone watched television. Which statement results in a more satisfying social interaction? (A) Me: "I write for Analog." Other Person: "What is that, some kind of engineering magazine?"
Or (B) Me: "I write for Star Trek." Other Person: "The show with that guy with the pointy ears? I know him!"
(You'd have done the same thing, believe me.)
It didn't matter that by the time I was starting to write professionally, Star Trek had been off NBC for a decade. Thanks to its afterlife in syndication, everyone knew it; it was part of our lives in a way that a printed short story or even a famous novel could never be.
The great virtue—perhaps the only virtue—of American network television from 1950 to 1984 (to pick a year made famous by a novel ...) was that it reached tens of millions of people at the same time!
That's what I really wanted: a chance to have my stories appreciated by a massive audience at the same time. To become a topic for thousands of conversations around water coolers the next morning. ("Did you see that show last night?")
I wanted my own little campfire in the heart of McLuhan's global village.
Like so many adolescent dreams—being an astronaut, playing major league baseball, and, for the matter, being tall—I'm going to have to give that one up.
Aiming for an audience as big as a McRib
It is still possible for a work to reach millions of people at the same time. On May 15, the feature film Matrix Reloaded opened on over 8,500 movie screens. This after a torrent of magazine articles, television promos, print ads, billboards and God knows what else. You'd have to have been working in the Homestake mine/neutrino lab in South Dakota to have missed it. Given the grosses, very few of us did.
And last weekend, as I write this, J.K. Rowling's novel Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was purchased by 5 million people in a single day!
A book! As the New York Times pointed out in an article on Sunday, June 29, more people bought and read that book than bought tickets to and saw the movie about that green Marvel hero, what's-his-name.
Making a wild guess, you could say that 10 million people experienced Harry Potter that weekend.
Now, an average network television show still reaches a similar audience on any given Wednesday or Thursday. Last year the one thing the top 50 (out of perhaps 120) network series had in common was a minimum 12 share, or 10 million viewers.
Which is certainly a lot. But it doesn't feel the same to me. As a writer, I have always lived by the reminder Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five) used to scrawl on the blackboard at the Iowa Writer's Workshop: "You are writing for an audience!"
Why not have the biggest possible audience?
I want numbers like those of the last episode of M*A*S*H (50 million viewers on Feb. 28, 1983), or the "Who Shot J.R.?" episode of Dallas (41 million, Nov. 21, 1980), or even a blowout Super Bowl.
Of course, these big numbers are 20 years old. In those far-off days, when there were three networks and a relatively small number of independent stations, a 30 share (30 percent of the television sets in use) was the minimum a series needed to reach in order to survive, sci-fi was considered a niche product. No sci-fi series was going to draw 30 million viewers; no network would air the show in the first place.
So, at one level, the fragmentation of the television audience is not a bad thing: it has allowed all kinds of sci-fi flowers to bloom, including X-Files, Babylon 5 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and even the SCI FI Channel itself.
And there is the argument—valid much of the time—that mass-produced entertainment—like Rowling's work, or Matrix Reloaded, or any network television show—is the intellectual equivalent of junk food. It's bland, it's shallow, it's unsatisfying. Toss in the usual snobbery—"If that many people like it, it can't be good"—and it's no wonder people are zipping through channels as fast as their thumbs can twitch, or Tivoing (I recently learned that's a verb) shows they will never get around to watching.
I like quirky entertainment—the equivalent of a pricy meal in a quaint restaurant.
But I like the occasional McRib sandwich, too.
Cities share a novel sci-fi experience
I miss the magic of a shared experience. One of the attractions of the sci-fi community used to be that everybody in it had read the same books and seen the same movies. You could talk about them.
As our world grows more fragmented, we need more things in common: language and stories.
It's this desire that drives the admirable "One Book, One City" program, in which everyone in a city is encouraged to read the same book in a given month. Recently, for example, the city of Chicago selected Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.
Last year, to circle back to sci-fi, the city of Los Angeles chose Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. I don't know how many people took part—nowhere near a million, I'm sure, but several tens of thousands.
Maybe that's my option. Forget scripts. Novels are the new key to mass shared experiences.
I just have to hold on 40 years until my novel is a classic.
Michael Cassutt calculates that his 50 produced television scripts, for series from Max Headroom to The Dead Zone, have reached half a billion viewers—but only over a period of 20 years. His new novel, Tango Midnight, will be published by Forge Books on Nov. 1, 2003. He does not expect to see expectant readers standing in line the night before.
