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It will keep coming, and spreading, as the networks cover a few bets with incursions into alien territory. ABC has joined in various video enterprises with Getty Oil, Cox Cable and the Hearst Corp. CBS is teamed with A T & T in a field test of videotext, and with HBO and Columbia Pictures in the formation of a major Hollywood studio. NBC's parent, RCA, is co-owner of the Entertainment Channel, a pay cable service, and involved with Columbia to produce and distribute programming. "The networks will benefit from this proliferation of technologies," Anthony Hoffman predicts. "They could stock a decent cable channel just with series ideas they turn down each year due to insufficient popular appeal. And by competing with themselves, they'll simply be executing the Procter & Gamble philosophy: if you have two or three products in the same category, your combined market share will be bigger than if you have just one."
Steven Bell of KTLA, the leading independent station in Los Angeles, believes the rule applies in reverse to the prime-time competition. "There aren't three networks," he argues. "There's only one, pushing the same bland product under three different names. It's an entertainment vacuum that cable and the independents can't help filling." For three decades, the networks have relied on the home viewer's receptive passivity to keep him hypnotized in front of the blue haze with only three choices that are often no choice at all. Now, with everything from high art to the stupefying banalities of Access Amateur Night available to him, the viewer is free to scan the frequencies for programs that enter his private universe. The next generation—the one growing up now in 20-channel cable homes—may not even have a network habit to break. If that happens, the networks will have lost not only share points but their crucial role in shaping America's entertainment tastes and social beliefs.
Grant Tinker wonders if it has not happened already. "People may simply have lost patience with network fare," he says. "Maybe they're looking for something new on cable, or something old and good on the independents. Maybe they're reading books or going to sleep or doing things in the privacy of their bedrooms—something other than watching Cheers. Yeah, you could worry about that. I do." Tinker knows what the other network chiefs may be coming to fear: the set clicks off too. By Richard Corliss. Reported by Peter Ainslie/New York and Alessandra Stanley/Los Angeles