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SCMP Reporter

THE sitcom Seinfeld may be history, but it is fondly remembered at the NBC network as a television phenomenon and huge money-spinner.

 Until its final episode last May, the show was consistently ranked No 1 in the United States.

 But wait a minute - ranked by whom? If by 'Americans', you mean 'whites', then Jerry Seinfeld was certainly king of the ratings.

 But among black households, Seinfeld 's maverick brand of New York humour was barely a blip on the radar screen - ranking as only the 50th most-watched programme last year.

 What about ER, which now reigns supreme in the ratings? Among African-Americans, it is only the 15th most popular show. And Friends, America's No 2 programme, gets a big thumbs down from black viewers, who rank it only 91st.

 Turn the tables, and the results are the same - but even more striking. The most-popular show among blacks, The Steve Harvey Show, is a pathetic 118 places down the list for white households, while the No 2 black broadcast, The Jamie Foxx Show, ranks as only the 124th most-popular show for whites.

 The only show that figures in the top 10 for both blacks and whites is the regular Monday night football game. And if the basketball season had not been curtailed due to a labour dispute, that would be the only other kind of programming to repeat the feat.

 The numbers, researched by The New York Times, prove an interesting sociological point: that even as America slowly but surely integrates in the workplace and the classroom, its television sets are havens of racial segregation. And the irony is it never used to be this bad.

 In the 1970s and 80s, the big networks discovered that shows with a black theme, such as The Cosby Show, or with integrated casts, like The Jeffersons, could reach a big audience. But primetime on the major networks in 1999 has the milky-white appearance of an Alabama schoolroom in the age of segregation, while some upstart new stations, such as Black Entertainment Television and the WB network, have wall-to-wall black sitcoms which most whites surf past at the speed of sound.

 Integration is better in dramas, such as NYPD Blue or Homicide, which do well with (or despite) racially-mixed casts. But in sitcoms - which make up most of primetime programming and which bring in the lion's share of advertising revenues - the situation is one of extreme polarisation.

 The problem stems from a mixture of laziness among network executives - most of whom are white - and the advertising industry's over-reliance on demographic profiles in spending their dollars. Despite the increasing spending power of middle-class blacks, the truth is advertisers are overwhelmingly in search of white viewers (especially younger ones), and programme makers have found that most shows with a strong black theme turn white viewers off.

 'It is definitely more difficult in primetime to bring whites to black shows than it is to bring blacks to white shows,' according to Doug Alligood, a senior executive with the BBDO agency. 'A show doesn't stand a chance once it's been labelled a black show.'  Even as the networks shy away from anything above black tokenism in their 'white' sitcoms, producers of black-oriented shows complain their bosses are forever prodding them to introduce more white characters into their scripts.

 Media watchers believe this slide into segregated black and white niche programming began in the 80s when Rupert Murdoch's fledgling Fox network made a concerted effort to win viewers in the black audience by making shows appealing to African Americans. Although Fox won praise for caring about an ethnic grouping that had largely been ignored, the approach has degenerated into a situation where channels aim their shows at pleasing either blacks or whites, with very little crossover.

 As for Hispanic viewers, they are also left short-changed by the networks, and prefer to watch Spanish-language channels. Asian-Americans have to watch whatever the major stations choose to show; one recent sitcom about a Korean immigrant family, starring comedienne Margaret Cho, fared so badly among the predominantly white audience, it was scrapped after a handful of episodes.

For much of the recent past, Fire Island has been the San Francisco of the East Coast - in terms, that is, of its role as a mecca for gay men and a symbol of their struggle against AIDS.

 A beach community on Long Island, New York, Fire Island was a homosexual gathering place and party town which was hit badly when HIV came along and decimated many of the partygoers along with the party spirit.

 Gay activists, who made AIDS a political issue and are some of the nation's most dogged campaigners, then decided to keep Fire Island's spirit alive by holding an annual bacchanalia there to raise money for AIDS causes.

 The event, called the Morning Party, has for 15 years been one of the biggest AIDS fundraisers, bringing in nearly US$500,000 (HK$3.87 million) last year.

 But its success has been its undoing, and organisers have decided to abandon it for good amid bad publicity that it was attracting drug abuse and, ironically, a resurgence of unsafe sex. Incidences of drug deaths and overdoses in the past three years and greater police scrutiny caused party planners to pull the plug last week.

 The blow comes at a time when AIDS fund-raising is suffering due to an increasing lack of interest from the public and a wide-spread belief that AIDS is yesterday's crisis. The largest AIDS charity, the Gay Men's Health Crisis, raised only US$23 million in 1998 compared to US$31 million the year before.



The TV facts in black and white