Grave days at the network upfronts

by Glenn Garvin

McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

19 May 2008

The upfronts - the annual ritual when broadcast television networks present their fall lineups to advertisers - have a weeklong festival of Barnumesque bluster lubricated by liquor and advertising dollars. But the party lights were much dimmer at this year’s edition, which ended Thursday.

A palpable cloud of anxiety hangs over a broadcast industry that’s down five million viewers from last year, just crawled out of the wreckage of one disastrous strike and now faces the real possibility of another. Even the invincible “American Idol” is showing wear and tear with its lowest ratings in five years.

“Obviously there’s something to worry about,” said Fox chairman Peter Liguori. “There’s two instinctive reactions: Fight or flight. We are going to fight ... We refuse to let broadcast television shrink, and we’re going to take some bold moves to try to offset that.”

But the upfronts resembled less a resounding battle cry than a white flag of surrender. “There’s an air of defeat hanging over the upfronts this year,” mourned the trade journal Hollywood Reporter. Everything seemed to be downsized, from the bacchanalian network blowouts that once filled glam spots like Tavern on the Green to the programming schedules themselves.

Because the 100-day writers’ strike that ended in February coincided almost exactly with the time frame when networks shoot pilot episodes of prospective new shows, hardly any were made. Network bosses found themselves forced to gamble millions of dollars based on a few film clips - or even just a script. “The strike certainly hit the majority of the development,” admitted chief ABC programmer Stephen McPherson, who decided to pick up only two new shows rather than play hunches.

Most of his colleagues did the same. The networks only added 17 new series, down from as many as 35 in some recent seasons. Making a heavy investment in shows that are barely more than a conceptual glimmer in a producer’s eye “didn’t make a lot of sense to us,” said Fox programming chief Kevin Reilly. “We thought that was going to lead to more failure.”

Of the shows that were picked up, many were either remakes of foreign series or spinoffs of existing programs. (NBC even managed a two-fer with the frankly titled “The Office Spinoff,” a clone of a remake of a British sitcom.)

The rest seemed derivative, sometimes nearly to the point of outright theft. The summary of the new CBS drama “The Mentalist” - a phony psychic turns cop, solving crimes via the same sharp skills of observation he once used to dupe his victims - could be used for the USA cable network’s “Psych” without changing a comma.

Being derivative does not mean the shows can’t be good, of course. (Nor vice-versa, as the Spanish-language network Telemundo seems bent on proving with a new telenovela it announced during the upfronts: “Sin tetas no hay paradise” - “Without Breasts, There Is No Paradise” - about a teenage hooker who gets implants to spur new business.) Fox’s new showcase drama, “Fringe,” about FBI agents investigating an airliner that lands in Boston with no one aboard but corpses, sounds like a lost episode of the network’s 1990s hit “The X-Files,” but it still piqued considerable interest during the upfronts.

But building the entire fall season around retreads seems a chancy bet at a time when broadcast audiences are sharply down. ABC and Fox both suffered double-digit declines in viewers this season, dropping 15 and 11 percent respectively. CBS lost 8 percent of its audience, while fourth-place NBC broke even.

Network executives blame most of the decline on the writers’ strike, which reduced TV to reruns and cheesy reality shows from December through April. Even after original programming resumed, they say, it was hard to lure viewers back.

“It’s very, very tough in the greater landscape to reset even hit shows in the late spring,” said Fox’s Reilly. “People have made their decisions; their viewing patterns are set. Daylight savings time kicks in three weeks earlier now. That always has an effect on viewership.”

There are signs the audience apathy may continue even past the summer, traditionally a low ebb for TV viewing. An Entertainment Weekly poll released last week shows nearly 60 percent of viewers aren’t looking forward to the new fall season.

“The fall is a big challenge for us all now,” said ABC’s McPherson. “I think we have to come back and launch in a big way. There’s no question that the interruption of the strike was destructive.”

They’ve got several schemes to accomplish that. Both The CW and Fox plan to debut some shows the last week in August, hoping to catch the attention of the bumper-crop of viewers expected for coverage of the Beijing Olympics. Another possibility is to air fewer commercials while charging advertisers more. Fox is experimenting with that approach with both Fringe and Dollhouse, a sci-fi drama scheduled to debut in January.

But none of these plans will work if Hollywood’s actors go on strike. Their contract ends next month, and so far negotiations with producers have been rocky. The prospect scares Hollywood even more than a mysterious airliner full of bloody corpses.

“There’s been an air of depression around here since the strike,” said Cynthia Cidre, producer of the canceled CBS drama “Cane,” who is waiting to see whether the A&E cable network will buy her new show about a female detective. “But everybody’s been sort of thinking we’re about to get back to business. When June 1 rolls around, doors will open and everybody will be listening to 1,001 pitches to sell another pilot ... But everybody’s also preparing for another strike. It will be awful if it happens.”