Lifelines to Home on the Air

By BRIAN LOWRY

July 2, 2000 12 AM PT

Brian Lowry is a Times staff writer

It’s more than 75 miles from the low-key Mexican restaurant where Lawrence Marotta grabs a late bite on a warm spring day to the bustling power tables at Morton’s and the Ivy, where entertainment industry heavyweights “do lunch,” hashing out deals over $20 entrees and bottles of Pellegrino.

Still, Marotta and his associates have access to a roster of talent unequaled in the television industry. Jay Leno and David Letterman. “Friends,” “The Simpsons” and “Everybody Loves Raymond.” “ER,” “The Practice” and “Touched by an Angel.” Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw--indeed, the whole pantheon of network news stars.

Marotta operates from the distant and unlikely confines of March Air Reserve Base, the oldest military venue in California. Situated at that sprawling site several dusty miles south of Riverside, he works the phones and seeks to gauge what his audience wants to see.

Granted, it’s a captive audience--more than 800,000 U.S. military personnel and their families stationed overseas--to whom Armed Forces Radio and Television Service provides a daily lifeline to home.

For the average civilian, Armed Forces Radio and Television most likely comes to mind in the context of major sporting events, with the announcer intoning that the game is being broadcast to U.S. servicemen overseas.

In fact, AFRTS goes well beyond just sports, approximating a U.S. television network--albeit one free of commercials, instead carrying messages about Department of Defense codes of conduct or family separation during deployments--little things like not giving away information to the enemy if you’re captured--during what would normally be ad breaks.

“It’s very rewarding to know some guy in a guard booth freezing his tuchis off in Korea has something to keep him company and keep his sanity about him,” says Marotta, who is chief of the TV division. “It’s not just TV and radio. It’s sustenance. . . . Radio and television can help minimize the [sense of] isolation people have.”

Relatively sedate during the week, the March base comes to life on the weekends, when reservists engage in various drills. Yet the cavernous office that houses American Forces Network and its staff--a roughly equal mix of civilian and uniformed military personnel--hums along, as workers sift through the vast panorama of American television and seek to distill it down to three 24-hour networks.

Marotta, who didn’t serve in the military, worked at ABC for more than a decade before joining AFRTS in 1987. Unlike domestic broadcasters, his service has the freedom of waiting to see how programs perform in the U.S. before deciding whether to schedule them.

As a result, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”--an established sensation on U.S. television--won’t premiere on AFRTS’ secondary Spectrum channel until next month. U.S. servicemen have also yet to be introduced to the latest TV craze, CBS’ “Survivor,” though they eventually will be.

Marotta, having watched network programmers sweat out how series will perform, understands the pressures of commercial television and concedes he’s somewhat relieved to enjoy the benefit of hindsight in making programming decisions.

“As far as sitcoms and dramas and movies, we wait to see how it’s played here in the States,” Marotta says. “It’s a luxury that we have: We don’t have to commit and make the same mistakes that the network programmers are put in a position of doing.”

Of course, measuring how well American Forces Network succeeds in its mission is mostly anecdotal, since there are no ratings for the service. Those stationed abroad e-mail and write in with suggestions, criticism and praise, and the network draws on Nielsen Media Research data in trying to offer fare that will appeal to its constituency.

“We try to figure out what our audience would be watching if they were back here in the States and had all the channels to choose from,” Marotta says. “We know the makeup of our audience, their genders, their ages, their backgrounds, what their tastes likely would be, by using 260 million Americans as a focus group. Usually the universe is bigger than the sample audience. It’s the other way around with us.”

Those viewers include a combination of military people stationed overseas or on Navy ships at sea, their families (which make up over half the audience) and Department of Defense civilian employees. AFN is not broadcast on military bases in the U.S., which, obviously, can receive domestic channels.

Notably, military policy is not supposed to interfere with programming choices. Though the shows run without commercials and convey information the military wants to disseminate during the breaks, nothing that portrays the government in an awkward or negative light is considered off limits.

While the military still wrestles with its “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, gay and lesbian prime-time characters proclaim themselves freely on AFN, which aired “Ellen” a few years ago and currently runs the popular NBC comedy “Will & Grace.” (There was some minor internal criticism a decade ago when AFN ran “Brothers,” a Showtime series that was one of the first to feature gay characters.)

Nor does AFN shy away from running programs in which the government is seen as a heavy or flawed, meaning “The X-Files” and its conspiracy plots have a place on the service, as will the White House drama “The West Wing.”

AFN’s secondary NewSports channel also carries the gamut of network and cable news programming, including discussion shows and coverage of breaking news events, among them U.S. military actions.

“I’ve never heard from any senior official or senior person in the military,” Marotta says. “We’ll get an e-mail from a viewer who is offended by some program or thinks something else should be on, but we’ve never had that kind of pressure.

“We’re here to represent American television uncensored for the U.S. military, who is defending our rights for free speech. We air all the network newsmagazines, and if they have a story that’s critical of the military, those programs air exactly as they do here in the States.”

Armed Forces Radio and Television has mostly managed to stay away from controversy in recent years, other than a brief skirmish in 1993 with talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh and some conservative legislators before the radio arm agreed to carry his program.

The service came into being in 1942 to combat Axis propaganda such as Tokyo Rose, giving soldiers a taste of home by playing popular music and radio shows. In its infancy, the various Hollywood guilds waved residuals on broadcasts so long as they remained noncommercial, a policy that continues to this day. Half the programming is obtained at no cost and the rest for relatively little, essentially paying program distributors a fee that compensates them for sending tapes.

“Nobody’s making money on this,” Marotta says.

Indeed, while there might be political benefits in maintaining cordial relations with the U.S. military, program distributors characterize the relationship with American Forces Network principally as one of benevolence and duty--established by a decades-old tradition that in most instances predates their birth.

“We have an agreement with them where they have access to all of our programming of which we are the rights holders,” says CBS International President Armando Nunez Jr. “It certainly is goodwill to all the Americans serving in the armed forces.”

That said, dealing with the service represents an odd dynamic for program sellers, whose standard approach--persuading broadcasters to buy their programs for as much as they can--flies out the window.

“I always tell Larry he’s a nightmare client, because he pays you next to nothing and you can’t talk him into taking anything he doesn’t want,” says Marion Edwards, executive vice president at 20th Century Fox International Television. “You tell me anyone else that can just sit back, call the studios and order up the top 10 shows. What a lovely chair to be sitting in.”

With those programming resources at its disposal, AFN seeks to approximate what its audience would have available at home, including the “Today” show (feeds are timed to different zones, including Asia and Europe), soap operas, “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and a block of children’s programming, complete with “Sesame Street.” A second channel, Spectrum, complements AFN, while the third service, NewSports, broadcasts games live or on a briefly delayed basis in addition to news programming.

“Monday Night Football,” for example, runs Tuesday nights as opposed to the wee hours of the morning, and “60 Minutes” plays on Monday nights because Sunday sporting events wind up preempting Europe’s prime time.

Wednesday is a younger-skewing night, with such shows as the WB’s “Dawson’s Creek,” while Thursday is “fairly NBC-ish” in its feel and taste, Marotta notes, with a lot of adult sitcoms (not all of them from NBC) leading into “ER.”

The principal channel, AFN, has the look and feel of a network-affiliated TV station. One feed is timed to the Central European time zone, where most of the audience is stationed, with the other major area--Japan and South Korea--running on an eight-hour delay.

Certain scheduling allowances must be made due to those time differences. A case in point would be NBC’s morning show “Today,” which airs in Europe live at 1 p.m. but is delayed until the next morning in the Far East.

Like an affiliate, news (presented by uniformed military personnel) runs before and after prime time, followed by Leno and then Letterman, a sports recap show, news and movies.

“They go back to their barracks and they turn on the television as if they’re still here,” says Bob Matheson, AFN’s director of programming. “We do what we can to look like a Stateside network.”

Matheson served in the Air Force, while AFN’s head of program planning, Cathleen Booth, was in the Navy, including stints in Spain, Honduras, Saudi Arabia, Greece and New Zealand.

“I did spend a lot of time overseas with our audience,” she says. “When I came back from overseas, I was happy to see a Coke commercial. You do miss that, but we’re able to provide our audience so much more because we don’t.”

The service even feeds two channels to Navy ships under the heading Direct to Sailor. Only in the last few years have ships been able to receive such transmissions via a relatively small satellite dish (42 inches across) positioned on the deck.

“Real estate is precious on Navy ships,” Marotta notes wryly. “They tend to need room for guns and such.”

Efforts are made to represent all the major U.S. networks, with an eye on the particular demographics of the potential audience. Given that the average age of those stationed abroad is late 20s, the programs principally cater to a younger audience, meaning older-skewing shows such as “Murder, She Wrote” or “Matlock” seldom make the cut.

While CBS is therefore somewhat underrepresented in terms of entertainment programs carried, AFN seeks balance--particularly in regard to news, gathering programs from various networks, including the three all-news cable outlets--CNN, MSNBC and Fox News Channel.

“We keep in contact with what’s happening in the television industry,” Marotta says, pointing to the stacks of Hollywood trade papers piled outside his office. “We know what’s airing, what our audience would want to watch if they were back here in the States. We try to provide diversity for all the different tastes on the limited number of channels we have. . . .

“Geographically, we’re in 166 countries, but we’re a company town,” he adds. “Everybody is working for the same employer.”

For Marotta, the job itself came out of nowhere. He was downsized after Capital Cities acquired ABC in 1986, and his wife had a contact who suggested he might want to explore an opening at Armed Forces Television.

“Before that, I knew nothing about it other than hearing [Dodgers announcer] Vin Scully say, ‘This game is being heard on Armed Forces Radio,’ ” Marotta concedes.

At that time, the service was headquartered in Sun Valley, Calif., but later moved to March Air Reserve Base, which also houses massive military archives through the Defense Visual Information Center. Indeed, the facility contains a towering warehouse filled with tapes that, as Marotta points out, bears more than a passing resemblance to the place the Ark of the Covenant was stashed at the conclusion of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

The current location is also equipped with numerous edit bays and broadcasting booths so AFN technicians can do such things as excise commercials and have their own announcer provide live wraparounds during radio broadcasts, which in addition to sports includes regularly heard features such as ABC’s Paul Harvey and Dan Rather’s CBS radio commentaries.

Following the same standards as a broadcast network, AFN usually acquires movies that have been edited for TV. In some instances, if such a copy or an airline version isn’t available, AFN does the editing itself.

“We’ll pass on a movie rather than butcher it,” Marotta says.

In fact, both Marotta and Booth say they are big fans of HBO’s “The Sopranos” but can’t put it on the network until the studio comes up with a broadcast-ready version.

Because AFN doesn’t air any reruns, the service normally begins broadcasting a show late so there is no risk of catching up with its production schedule. If a series premieres in September, it won’t begin running until February, with a new show going into the time slot as soon as all the original episodes are exhausted.

AFN’s programmers have also begun to experiment with garnishes to keep the channels fresh, including a recent test of classic episodes that Booth calls “the biggest programming event in AFRTS history.” Feedback was so overwhelmingly positive AFN has added a regular nostalgia block that will include “The Flintstones,” “Gilligan’s Island,” “The Brady Bunch” and “The Cosby Show” under the heading “Flashback TV.”

It’s the kind of thing that might appear on Nickelodeon or TV Land in the U.S., although in this case, the program lineup will be reported in Stars & Stripes, not TV Guide.

Marotta, however, says he never laments the fact that his own friends and neighbors can’t see the network, rather drawing enormous satisfaction from the sense he is serving that soldier in the guard booth--the one warmed by the sight of a recognizable face, far from home.

“There is not another TV operation in the world that is affiliated with everybody,” he says. “I’ve got the best job in television.” *

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

What’s Playing on the American Forces Network

MONDAY NIGHTS IN KOREA

7 p.m. “60 Minutes” (CBS)

8 p.m. “Touched by an Angel” (CBS)

9 p.m. “The West Wing” (NBC)

10 p.m. “Headline News” (CNN)

LATE-NIGHT BLOCK

10 p.m. “Pacific Report” (news)

10:30 p.m. “Tonight Show With Jay Leno” (NBC)

11:30 p.m. “Late Show With David Letterman” (CBS)