Hollywood and Public Health Join Forces: Engaging TV Viewers In Stories That Can Improve Health and Well Being Worldwide

Background: What makes health storylines on television compelling for viewers?  Often, these stories cause viewers to lose track of time, forget their surroundings and care deeply about the characters.  In this state of engrossment in a storyline, viewers experience greater knowledge gains and changes in behavioral intentions. 

Program background: This presentation will explore how Hollywood, Health & Society (HH&S), a program of the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center, in partnership with the CDC, provides Hollywood writers with inspiration and information on health topics through proactive outreach, overseas trips, local story bus tours, and access to expert health resources for their scripts.  This approach generated 221 aired health storylines resulting from HH&S consultations in 2011 alone. 

Evaluation Methods and Results: Research shows that health content depicted in TV narratives is associated with changes in knowledge, attitudes and behavior. Six out of ten primetime viewers learn something new about a disease or how to prevent it from a TV show, and almost one-third of those viewers take action on what they learn (Porter Novelli, 2005).  Therefore, inspiring scriptwriters to develop accurate and timely health storylines can help millions of viewers to become better informed about their health.  Additionally, results of the HH&S TV Monitoring Project, designed to survey health content in the most popular primetime entertainment television shows in the United States, will be shown.  The project analyzes the depictions of health and climate issues, health outcomes, and social determinants of health.

Conclusions: This presentation will show how Hollywood and public health have joined forces in a partnership that leads to greater accuracy of health content in television storylines and in content of the TV shows’ web sites, Facebook and Twitter. Scenes from award-winning TV episodes and content on Facebook, Twitter and TV show web sites will be shown, and impact evaluations will be presented.

Implications for research and/or practice: TV storylines with accurate health content can have profound impact on knowledge and behavior of viewers worldwide.