How Can Europeans Reverse The Trend of This American Cultural Domination

So how can Europeans reverse the trend of this American cultural domination? One route might be to take a page from the European music industry. European music producers have been increasingly having artists record songs meant just for a European audience in English, right from the start with no local language version. Take German singer Sarah Connor, for instance. She is unknown outside of continental Europe, and yet she sings in English to be played on radio stations across the continent. A radio station in France will play a song in English, but not in German. Perhaps the same strategy could eventually be employed by European television producers. If you’re making a show about the police force in Berlin, and you want it to be watched by people across Europe, you might have a better shot if the German actors speak in English. It may be humbling to have to produce a homegrown TV series in a foreign language, but the language remains the biggest barrier for European television producers wanting to make big-budget shows. If Europeans are concerned about the increasing Americanization of their television programming, filming European shows in English, with a target pan-European audience in mind, could be the way of the future.

Even in the UK, a television producer has no hope of exporting a British fictional TV series to the American audience, which is the only way one could make returns from a huge investment in a production. So, the most high-quality programming will likely continue to come from the US, where the money for television is invested on shows that not only make returns from the American audience but then from the global audience through exportation. Over the past decade though there has been one popular European TV format that has been imported to America – the reality show. Of course, Americans aren’t watching the reality shows of other countries, but they are watching American reality shows based on concepts that originated in Europe. These kinds of low-budget shows have been produced for years in Europe, and as American TV networks’ budgets have shrunk in recent times they’ve gravitated toward that same low-expense format.

Examples include American Idol (from Pop Idol in the UK), Survivor (from Expedition Robinson in Sweden) and Big Brother (from its namesake in the Netherlands). These examples are limited to the cheap-to-produce game show/reality format. Examples of American fictional TV series based on European ones are few and far between – and are all from the UK. The historical list of successful examples is relatively limited: The Office, Dear John, Three’s Company, All in the Family, Queer as Folk. But in these instances, a new American version was made and the format was drastically altered. Only one of these shows, The Office, is currently on American air. So why exactly are the world’s (and particularly Europe’s) television sets so dominated by American TV series? Well, of course, it isn’t just television, it’s all aspects of popular culture.

Movies, music, products, games – they all come from America. Is it just that Americans are so much more creative than everyone else? The answer probably has more to do with the fact that the US is such a large and developed common market. It was also the earliest developed market to speak just one language, which meant that as the new technologies of TV, film and recording were developed (initially mostly in Europe, incidentally), the US had the golden combination: a large amount of capital, and a huge population speaking one language. That huge American audience holds the prospect of big monetary returns for television producers, which makes it worth the risk to shovel tons of money into a series. With more money comes higher quality, with higher quality comes a higher audience, with a higher audience comes more money, Another example: the multi-platform sensation Transformers. Originally a Japanese toy bought, redesigned and rebranded by American firm Hasbro, it is now a multi-billion-dollar film franchise whose latest installment was filmed in China and partially financed by the Chinese. The film has no artistic merit but has provided a field day for commentary on the growing soft-power rivalry between the US and China.

The American-based, Chinese media scholar Zhing Yu notes in Foreign Policy magazine that the film depicts the Chinese as bystanders in a struggle on Chinese soil to save the world. It is a rough-and-ready group of American individualists, led by Mark Wahlberg, who “save the day”. That message of individualism, in Mr. Yu’s view, seeped through in China, where more people saw the film than in the US. An example: Grand Theft Auto is one of the world’s most popular video games. It was developed in Edinburgh, but it is played in fictional cities that are recognizably American. Why? Not just because the American market is huge, but because “American” is a global visual language. American popular culture remains pre-eminent, not just through its creativity, but through its business nous. Stalin may or may not have said: “If I could control the medium of the American motion picture, I would need nothing else to convert the entire world to communism.” But totalitarian leaders have long been envious of Hollywood’s extraordinary ability to tell stories that speak to the entire planet. The secret of Hollywood’s success has a lot to do with it having been founded by immigrants – Goldwyn, Mayer, Warner was all just off the boat. Their cultural frame of reference was a synthesis of new world optimism and old-world culture. The stories their studios told and the way they told them meant the films appealed well beyond America’s shores.

US film and television exports earned $16.2 billion in 2012. By comparison, British film and television exports, riding a wave of popularity, were $1.2 billion. Having invented personal computing, the US is the primary shaper of the fast-growing market for video and computer games. It is hard to find comparable export figures to those of film and television in this area of the cultural industries because of the globalized nature of production of both games and machines to play them on. But clearly, America is the primary influence on these products. One interesting effect of the dominance of American culture in films and other media is that many people who have never been to the country nonetheless feel they have a good idea of what it is like to live there. The stereotypes that American film and TV sell to their domestic public become the stuff of international opinion. For example, the action heroes of movies like the Rambo and Die Hard series are regularly referred to when discussing American foreign policy. (In that connection, the image of the Texas cowboy has been particularly popular recently.)

Equally, people may feel that they know what it is like to live in New York after seeing several years of episodes of Friends or Seinfeld. Depending on what you watch, you can easily conclude that most Americans are gun-happy or girl-happy or simply slap-happy. And, as much as these stereotypes may annoy Americans when they travel abroad, they have only themselves to blame for spreading them around the world. America’s cultural influence through movies has been particularly strong. Just the word “Hollywood” itself conjures up visions of movie stars and Oscar nights and Western gunslingers getting ready for the shootout. Motion pictures may not have been invented in the US, but modern movies were perfected there. The figures are imposing.

For example, in 2006, 64 % of all movies shown in the European Union were American. In comparison, only 3% of the movies shown in the USA were from Europe. In addition, all the twenty movies earning the most money worldwide in 2006 were American or were made in partnership with an American film company. This included the year’s number one hit, Walt Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest which raked in over one billion dollars, most of it from an international audience. This is what led former President Jacques Chirac to support putting a limit on the number of American films that could be shown in French cinemas because he did not want to see “European culture sterilized or obliterated by American culture for economic reasons that have nothing to do with real culture.” Turn on the radio, check the TV listings, look what’s playing at the local cinema, pull out a computer game or just go online and search for a nice chat room – do any of these things and within a short time you will run into American cultural influence. Why does America have such reach in these media? One answer is the market. The United States has a domestic market of over 300 million people in addition to a potential global market of more than two billion English speakers. That means Americans can profitably produce a great many TV programs, films, songs, computer games and other products for use at home and then export the same programs abroad at very low prices. No other country has this advantage in both numbers and language. Another reason is innovation. It is often in the United States that new forms of communication have either been invented or perfected. TV broadcasting is a good example of this.

In the 1950s American TV networks created a zoo of new program types including game shows, soap operas, mystery shows, westerns and, of course, situation comedies (sit-coms) that were later exported internationally. Later, cable TV expanded the variety and quality of American shows creating such international bestsellers as The Sopranos, Sex and the City and Heroes. And it also set the foundation for the first international news network, CNN (Cable News Network). Perhaps the easiest example to recognize is the phenomenal rise in the use of personal computers and the World Wide Web over the last decades. Both were pioneered in the US and eventually spread worldwide, carrying American cultural influences with them. One wit went so far as to claim that cyberspace was American territory – an exaggeration, but only barely. Yes, economics and innovation have their place in the story, but – hey! – so does style and quality. The fact is that American programming is popular. It successfully appeals to the emotions and interests of a global audience. Sit-coms like “King of Queens” or “Everybody Loves Raymond”, hospital dramas like “ER” or “House” have made fans around the world because they stick to the basics – they portray regular people everyone can recognize and identify with, however dramatic or fanciful the situation they may find themselves in. American culture celebrates the commonplace, the average, the universal and as a result, it has gained a universal audience. In the 1800s the American author Mark Twain once remarked, ‘There is no such thing as the “Queen’s English”. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares.’ (Mark Twain, "Following the Equator", 1897) Today, native English speakers have up to 70% American influence speech due to a constant stream of American media such as film, TV, and music that has spread Americanisms to all corners of the world. Because of this American English has been slowly integrated into the British language replacing words such as “stupid” with “dumb” and “angry” with “mad”. Due to the popularity of American Television, the younger generation is more likely to pick up these American terms through songs, films, and TV.

However, this American English and culture does provide a common ground for communication and a point of reference for people all over the world. ‘An estimated 2 billion speak some form of English, and most of those have the American variety as their model, now that is a cultural influence.’ (America's Cultural Role in the World Today, Cappelen Damm University, 28th August 2008) Many critics have said that ‘American television is currently undergoing a modern golden age due to the surge of popular and critically acclaimed television series during the 2000s and the 2010s.’ ("Welcome to TV's Second Golden Age". CBS News. CBS Interactive. Retrieved July 9, 2014.) It is the same for expensive, blockbuster American movies that are a dominant force around the world but are seen to represent ‘a type of homogenous, uniform culture permeated by western capitalistic values… full of elaborate technical effects and focus on stunts, action, and violence instead of character and emotion’. (2009 Dr. Deborah Swallow – Global Cultural Diversity)

For this essay, I will be looking at how the global dominance of North American television has impoverished media cultures and cultural identities of less favored countries. I will be discussing how as a whole in the United States the television networks that are broadcasted are ‘the largest and most distributed in the world, and the programs that are produced specifically for U.S.-based networks are the most widely syndicated internationally.’("FCC V-Chip Fact Sheet". Federal Communications Commission. July 1, 1999.) In some countries, American television constitutes for ‘50% of the programs, as the host country does not have the resources to fund the cost of production and distribution of their own.’(2009 Dr. Deborah Swallow – Global Cultural Diversity)