Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/060892/06089933.000

Text File | 1992-09-22 | 6KB | 133 lines

                                                                                TELEVISION, Page 81

Why Shows Live or Die


The fall schedules reveal that new rules are guiding the networks
as they compete more fiercely for a shrinking audience. But
is the viewer benefiting?

By RICHARD ZOGLIN -- With reporting by William Tynan/New York


    Johnny Carson and Bill Cosby may be gone, but who says
network television will never be the same again? Every spring
the familiar rituals are repeated: the well-hyped fall-season
announcements; another batch of new shows competing for
attention (a record-high 35 this season, when Fox is added to
the Big Three); a fresh onslaught of optimistic projections from
chipper network executives.

    It's a tougher game than it used to be, however. The three
networks' share of the TV audience showed a slight gain this
past season, but the long-term trend has been down, down, down.
To compete for a smaller pool of viewers, the networks are
learning to live by a new set of rules.

    1. Young viewers are better than old. The networks are
increasingly looking for shows that appeal to the audience most
valued by advertisers: young adults. Fox has spearheaded TV's
youth movement with a string of hip young hits like The
Simpsons, In Living Color and Beverly Hills, 90210. Joining them
next fall will be such newcomers as Great Scott, about a
daydreaming 15-year-old; The Class of '96, set in a small New
England college; and The Heights, focusing on a fledgling rock
band.

    Now the other networks are catching youth fever. NBC is
undergoing an almost complete face-lift, dumping several of its
proven but aging hits (Matlock, In the Heat of the Night, Golden
Girls) and repopulating its schedule with shows aimed at the
magic 18-49 age group. Among the new entries: Here and Now, with
former Cosby kid Malcolm-Jamal Warner as a graduate student
working at a neighborhood youth center; Rhythm and Blues, about
a white disk jockey at a black radio station; and The Round
Table, featuring young law-enforcement professionals in
Washington. "At eight o'clock across the board, we have a
demographic renaissance," programming chief Warren Littlefield
told advertisers. "We're young and we're fun."

    ABC -- which has been relatively young, and sometimes fun,
for several years -- has added such shows as Hangin' with Mr.
Cooper (a junior high teacher with two female roommates) and
Camp Bicknell (a multi-kid household that is a hangout for
neighborhood teens). Meanwhile, it is moving The Young Indiana
Jones Chronicles, George Lucas's kid-oriented adventure series,
to Monday nights, supplanting two older-skewing reality shows,
FBI: The Untold Stories and American Detective. In fact, viewers
over 50 have only two places left where they are really welcome:
on CBS, which still has a healthy roster of older shows (Murder,
She Wrote; Knots Landing) along with newcomers like Bob, the
umpteenth Bob Newhart comedy; and on Saturday night, where
stay-at-homes can flip between all three networks and find such
anachronistic offerings as Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (Jane
Seymour as a doctor on the American frontier), Covington Cross
(a medieval knight and his family) and Crossroads (Robert Urich
traveling the country in a reprise of Route 66).

    2. The duds you know are better than the duds you don't.
The biggest surprise on the fall schedules is the number of
shows that weren't canceled. Steven Bochco's drama Civil Wars,
ABC's post-World War II soap opera Homefront, CBS's nostalgic
sitcom Brooklyn Bridge, and NBC's family drama I'll Fly Away
were all marginal performers in the ratings. But all will be
back in the fall. They are upscale, critic-friendly shows that,
the networks hope, could catch on with a little patience.

    But the strategy is at least partly born of necessity. On
the overcrowded TV dial, establishing new hits has become
increasingly difficult -- and expensive. It is cheaper to try
to build a following for an existing show than to start from
scratch with a new one. Despite their unfashionable
demographics, most of the oldies cast aside by NBC were picked
up by other networks: Golden Girls (redubbed The Golden Palace)
and In the Heat of the Night by CBS, and Matlock by ABC. "The
main thing that guides the network schedules nowadays is the
bottom line," says Joel Segal, an executive vice president of
McAnn-Erickson advertising. "They're trying to save money,
either by cutting the cost of programming or by reducing risk."

    3. Let's make a deal. Another way of reducing risk is to
depend on proven hitmakers. CBS and ABC in particular have
signed a number of top creators to exclusive long-term deals.
These favored producers not only are virtually assured of
getting their shows on the air; they seem to have a lock on the
best time periods as well. Diane English's new CBS comedy Love
and War, for example, will have the all-but-foolproof spot
following English's current hit, Murphy Brown. Hearts Afire, the
new series from Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, will also get an
enviable time period: after Bloodworth-Thomason's Evening Shade.
Over at ABC, Tom Arnold's new sitcom The Jackie Thomas Show was
surprisingly left off the fall schedule. But it has been
promised a midseason spot, in the time period following -- what
else? -- Mrs. Arnold's hit show, Roseanne.

    Obviously, it behooves the networks to keep their valuable
producers happy. But more and more, the shows picked for the
schedule are the product of a complex web of commitments,
promises and old-fashioned horse trading. Lorimar, the biggest
supplier of programming to the three networks, loses a spot on
ABC's Friday schedule (Perfect Strangers, shelved until
midseason), but gains one (Hangin' with Mr. Cooper) on Tuesdays.
Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner, the highly regarded producers of
Roseanne and The Cosby Show, have their only CBS show canceled
(Davis Rules), but get a new one (The Little Woman) as
compensation.

    Do the best shows make it on the air? Network programmers
insist they do; viewers will have to wait until the fall to
decide. But between demographics and dealmaking, the chance for
diversity seems to be shrinking along with the network audience.