It’s useful to be reminded once a year that networks don’t sell shows to audiences; they sell audiences to media buyers.
This year was especially interesting, because Americans have more ways to watch TV today than they ever have. And this trend has clearly thrown the old system of television into disarray — from the scheduling of shows to the counting of eyeballs watching those shows to the selling of those eyeballs to sponsors.
My first clue that something was up was the contest that went on all week to see which network could hold the shortest upfront presentation. These star-studded galas have been known to run well past the two-hour mark in previous years, but this week nobody dared come close to that. By the end of the week, when Fox raced through its upfront in 57 minutes — less time than an episode of “24,” as Jack Bauer himself reminded the crowd — the message was clear: Madison Avenue is tired of the same old song-and-dance. It wants results.
And results have been fleeting. Viewership is down significantly at each of the big four networks, which will finish this season in precisely the same order (CBS, Fox, ABC, NBC) that they did a year ago.
Here is how the networks plan to respond to that troubling trend, based on what I saw this week at the upfronts.
First, the 2007-08 season will move a step closer to finally ridding network TV of the hiatus — those long vacations that many TV shows take throughout the season so that networks can stretch 22 episodes over a 39-week season.
Here’s a number to chew on: “Jericho,” the CBS thriller set in post-nuclear war Kansas, was off the air for three months. When it came back in February, it had lost 3 million viewers. CBS canceled the show Wednesday.
Networks are taking care to make sure viewers don’t lose interest in their programs by cutting down on reruns and hiatuses. That’s why NBC’s “Law & Order” and ABC’s “Lost” and CBS’ “New Christine,” to name three shows, are returning at midseason, so their entire runs can be aired without a break.
That’s why Fox is waiting until January to roll out its most anticipated new show, the “Terminator” spin-off “Sarah Connor Chronicles.” That’s why NBC’s “Heroes,” which also lost viewers after a long hiatus, won’t take a long break next season. (To bridge the gap, NBC will air a companion show, “Heroes: Origins,” in the spring.)
Speaking of serial thrillers, they are officially DOA. Not one was introduced this week at upfronts. The networks threw a lot of them at viewers last fall, each with a huge cast and a tangle of intricate, tune-in-next-week story lines.
Bewildered audiences didn’t tune in next week, and most of these shows were doomed from the get-go. Even the shows whose success sparked the thriller craze — Fox’s “24” and ABC’s “Lost” — are down significantly in the ratings.
Instead, the shows rolled out this week marked a return to the tried-and-true formulas of years past: episodic series that can be watched in any order, with familiar characters. (You will be meeting a lot of new cops and lawyers this fall.)
The one twist is fantasy, which crept into many of the new series, from NBC’s trifecta of schlub-gets-superpowers shows (“Journeyman,” “The Bionic Woman,” “Chuck”) to CBS’ vampire romance “Moonlight” to Fox’s “New Amsterdam,” about a big-city detective who has immortality.
Before I go any further I should confess that last year at this time, I wrote after watching a five-minute preview of NBC’s future breakout hit: “ ‘Heroes,’ a show about teens with superpowers, didn’t make a mark on me.” Indeed, it would take three viewings of the full pilot that summer before I realized “Heroes” was as good as, and perhaps better than, NBC’s much touted “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.”
That said, Fox’s “Canterbury’s Law,” starring Julianna Margulies as the female answer to James Woods on “Shark,” riveted me at its preview. (“Canterbury’s Law” is scheduled to premiere midseason.) NBC’s “Bionic Woman” got a big hand from the advertisers in New York and critics looking in, perhaps because few expected it to be any good. (A producer from “Battlestar Galactica,” a terrific remake of another so-so ’70s show, is involved.)
Over at ABC, all eyes were on the anticipated hit of next season, “Private Practice,” which is being spun off from the network’s monster hit “Grey’s Anatomy.” Honestly, I was more intrigued by “Pushing Daisies,” a brightly painted fantasy about a man whose touch can bring the dead back to life — and with a second touch, send them right back to their eternal reward. It’s Oliver Sacks meets “Dead Like Me” (not coincidentally, a producer from that show is involved).
Every year there seems to be an idea so unique, so special, that at least two different programs are made based on it. This year it’s powerful women who meet for coffee or drinks. NBC’s “Lipstick Jungle,” from Candace Bushnell, the journalist whose columns inspired HBO’s “Sex and the City,” will follow three powerful gal pals and their love lives. Meanwhile, ABC’s “Cashmere Mafia,” from one of the producers of said HBO classic, will follow four women friends (the extra gal pal will have a gay relationship, it appears).
The revival of the great American sitcom remains on hold — NBC didn’t introduce a one — but Fox, encouraged by the success of “Til Death” this season, has brought out another half-hour comedy to appeal to an older audience. However, “Back to You,” with its middle-aged cast of Kelsey Grammer, Patricia Heaton and Fred Willard, may have trouble finding many viewers under 50.
(By the way, mark your calendars for “Watch the Pilots With Aaron 2007.” I’ll be showing the best of the new crop of shows Aug. 23 — and this year we’ve picked a bigger venue in response to the demand from last summer’s “Watch the Pilots” event.)
The announced schedules this week are hardly set in stone. Some shows may be reshuffled after the networks all get a look at one another’s lineups. In particular, ABC needs to move “Women’s Murder Club” to the 9 o’clock hour (Central time) from its current 8 p.m. Friday time slot. It would be a much better fit with “Grey’s Anatomy” than “Big Shots,” the testosterone-overload show scheduled for 9 p.m. Thursdays after “Grey’s.”
So what happens now? The networks and advertisers will have endless meetings. According to ad buyers I’ve polled, this promises to be a long summer as the two sides haggle over prices and how to measure whether sponsors are getting their money’s worth.
Complicating the equation, Nielsen Co. has introduced two new ratings in the last year. One measures commercial performance — it’s just like a half-hour program rating, minus the rating for that pesky program that keeps interrupting the commercials. The other is called “live-plus,” and it measures the audience for a given TV show plus the viewers who watched that program on a time-shifted basis, using TiVo or some other video recording device.
The networks want credit for all those DVR watchers. (To give an extreme example, ratings for “The Office” leaped 31 percent this season when time-shifters were added in.) Advertisers, naturally, want ratings for commercial breaks factored in, especially because they suspect, quite rightly, that viewers are using their DVRs to skip over the ads. The two sides will probably compromise on a hybrid of the two new numbers.
The bottom line: If you record your favorite shows and watch them later, you will be counted, but you won’t count as much as a person who watches live TV.
