Newly established commercial stations, operating without the burden of societal legitimacy, focused solely on profitability.
In her article Schumacher mentions Amusing Ourselves to Death by an American cultural critic Neil Postman, who formulated the thesis of television programming as a derivative of advertising, creating "a species of information that might properly be called disinformation—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing".
Like Postman, Schumacher notes that contemporary television advertisement often chooses to reinforce brand loyalty rather than promoting product.
[1] As an example, Schumacher mentions Real Personal, a talk show about human sexuality that was televised by NBC five times a week during 1990s.
Mentioning the highly successful entertainment programs of David Letterman and Jay Leno, Schumacher proclaims that a talk show host, seen daily on the television screen, becomes almost a part of the family.
"Appeals to viewer emotions and the active participation of the consumer enhance the ability of 'B-TV' to exploit the market", concludes Schumacher.
The concept of personalization and dramatization was not lost on the creators of BuzzFeed a quarter century later, when they got interested in why some internet videos become viral.
[2] While Schumacher and Postman regret the prevalence of "advertisement television" with low informational and social value on commercial TV stations, BuzzFeed intentionally produce personalized videos with capacity for sharing.
Erik Henriksen from Portland Mercury used the term "B-TV" when he reviewed Stargate Atlantis television series to describe the kind of show that is not "genuinely great", but one that "just works—albeit in a vaguely embarrassing and silly way—at entertaining the audience, at stringing along the same characters from week to week, at churning out boilerplate plots that are nonetheless peppered with just enough originality and uniqueness to make them enjoyable and fun and distracting.