“Very Special Episodes,” a staple of network TV in the 80s and 90s, attempted to turn already schmaltzy sitcoms and family dramas into Important Works of Art. On a “very special episode” of Saved by the Bell, for instance, Jessie Spano caffeinated herself into a psychotic break. On a VSE of Full House, Stephanie Tanner nearly went for a joyride-gone-bad with some other kids. Laughable in hindsight (and even at the time), yes — but clearly memorable.
Did these very special messages actually work? Did any viewers just say no to coffee or dangerous joyrides? Probably not, according to a new study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, in which psychologists inserted messages into three telenovelas (primetime Spanish soaps) and then analyzed viewer behavior.
As a Neuroskeptic blog post explains, researchers teamed up with a TV network for the study, and injected eight types of messages into the programs (which pull in around 1.2 million viewers each week). Keeping in line with the very special messages of yore, researchers focused on health and safety (e.g., heart health, drunk driving) and civic responsibility (e.g., voter registration and scholarships for Hispanic students). “In total,” Neuroskeptic wrote, there were 23 scenes, featuring 16 minutes and 51 seconds of footage. The scenes were “not central to the shows’ plots” but “many involved the shows’ main characters.”’
The psychologists then followed up to see if, and how, the messages influenced viewers. After the episodes aired, for example, researchers analyzed Google search activity and drunk-driving arrests. Their findings suggest that TV network should stop the fingerwagging: Stories with morals hardly inspire any action. While the Hispanic Scholarship Fund website saw a sizeable-but-fleeting traffic spike after the scholarship scenes aired, researchers saw no evidence that Hispanics were moved to action by pro-voting messages. And they saw no bump in Google search tems associated with the messaging themes.
“In our study,” the authors wrote, “the airtime devoted to the suite of messages would have been worth millions of dollars, but the cumulative effect of these messages on the general population was small and short-lived.”
As Neuroskeptic points out, this is far from the first time telenovelas have been used to push policy on the people. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Mexican government interspersed pro-family-planning messages into storylines to aid population control efforts. While the state’s experiment apparently succeeded, the duplicitous mind control tactics, once revealed, also hurt the shows’ credibility with viewers.
More to the point, I’m not convinced the experiment was a failure. It was just poorly designed. Telenovelas are soap operas — by their very nature, they’re packed with melodrama and social hyperbole that’s taken with a grain of salt by viewers. Given access to a broader array of programming, researchers might have arrived at different results. After all, there’s no denying that current primetime television programs and streaming shows like Orange Is the New Black are effective at starting dialogues that lead to social change. Consider just the issue of trans-shaming — without Netflix’s Orange and Amazon’s Transparent, trans issues might still be back-burnered and underrepresented in the popular dialogue.
Very Special Episodes may be a relic of the past, but conversation-creating television certainly isn’t. Psychologists just need to get in the writers’ rooms of Veep, Game of Thrones or You’re The Worst, and viewers will be putty in their probability-crunching hands.
This article originally published by Van Winkle’s, vanwinkles.com, the editorial division of Casper Sleep