On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television ANOTHER SEASON By REUVEN FRANK From the New York Times, July 15, 1992: "The stew of news-magazine programs, so-called reality programs that mix actual events with 're-creations,'...
...The true sound of TV trade talk...
...they redress "damaged" advertisers with commercials in other programs until the guarantee is made up...
...not because of intrinsic merit, but because it comes from the makers of Murphy Brown and occupies the slot following it...
...Television is a seasonal business...
...The opening of the new season is not, however, the time of decision...
...No hope...
...Lindsay (Drew Barrymore) is an aspiring starlet left at the altar by her fiance...
...Lemmon paused, grimaced, and said: "Another season...
...Thus, while the public may not be served, everything possible is done to entice it...
...All hope to capitalize on advertisers' seemingly insatiable appetite for 18-to-34-year-old women...
...They are called on to commit large sums of other peoples' money to shows whose popularity is untested, sometimes even to an idea that is not yet a physical program...
...Treating television as a game is fun, but misleading...
...What it sells, its product, is audiences...
...Although Fox will, for the first time, have network programs all seven nights of the week, it is not yet deemed a major leaguer...
...Of course, "up front" advertising purchases are not quite the blind gamble they appear to be...
...The aim is to build up the numbers...
...he asked...
...Among network salespeople, a smaller swarm, and network managers, an even smaller one, there is always resentment that their work stands or falls by the group opinion of the ad agency people...
...Out of this the shape of the coming season developed...
...For example, Murphy Brown makes an audience that is both large and chock-full of the kind of viewer the biggest paying advertisers covet, adult women who are not old...
...It is the machine that makes the product...
...At $310,000 per 30-second commercial Murphy Brown is this season's highest priced weekly program...
...In little more than a decade, the three-network monopoly has been shattered and its audience reduced by the spread of cable television across most of the country, by the enormous increase in the number of nonnetwork stations that live off syndicated programs, and by the addition of a fourth network, Fox...
...So, as it must to all years, another season came to American network television...
...Twenty years ago, in an underappreciated movie called Save the Tiger, Jack Lemmon was struggling to rescue the dress factory he had inherited...
...The consensus-builders went into this spring's colloquies convinced that the wave of traditional situation comedies let loose a decade ago by the success of the Bill Cosby show had exceeded logic and should be cut back...
...From Inside Media, September 9, a synopsis of the pilot episode of a CBS series called 2000 Malibu Road: "Jade (Lazy Hartman Black) is a $3,000-a-night-hooker who was abused by her stepfather, an aspiring Presidential candidate...
...Headline, the Wall Street Journal, September 1: "The One-Hour Drama Stages a Comeback on TV After Being Pre-Empted by Sitcoms...
...The prime purpose of the consensus is not to feed the press...
...Add the VCR and the rented movies, which, on Saturdays, attract more people than any network and have undermined what used to be a prime night for the networks...
...half-hours expand to hours, hours to 120 minutes...
...Knowing the schedules, one participant explained to me, a buyer knows what the other networks have on at the same time, as well as what precedes and what follows a show and recruits its audience...
...Networks Pursue Hip, Young Viewers...
...Most, as we've said, will bomb in the Nielsens...
...Are such programs expected to be popular this season, like dramas about young people, or played out, like situation comedies...
...In the parlance, Coach goes to the bottom line...
...The sellers described to the potential buyers ingenious "strategies" in which programs are not entities but elements of a larger system, the pieces on the chessboard...
...Covington Cross...
...No dreams...
...On Television ANOTHER SEASON By REUVEN FRANK From the New York Times, July 15, 1992: "The stew of news-magazine programs, so-called reality programs that mix actual events with 're-creations,' movies, and miniseries billed as based on a true story...
...Finally, everyone knows what category each program fits...
...But what the heck, it's all show business...
...Commercial network television is not a sport, it is a competitive manufacturing business...
...The '92 season has the usual number of new programs...
...From Broadcasting magazine, August 10: "Love and War is the closest thing to a breakout hit predicted, although there's a three-share-point difference between the 27 forecast by the agencies and the 30-share network consensus...
...When that happens, the agency mavens who bought the losers in advance will not be totally out on a limb...
...The older man was incredulous...
...Just survival...
...Another season...
...Entertainment Weekly predicts "the hardest-fought Nielsen contest in years," implying a game where the winner receives something shiny to put on the mantle and the Nielsen ratings are the scoreboard...
...Headline, Macleans magazine, Toronto, Canada, August 31: "SEDUCING YOUTH/The U.S...
...Jade's efforts to make a career change have resulted in her being framed for a murder she didn't commit...
...No fooling...
...Will anyone take a chance on the revival of the long-dormant Western, in its current disguise as a show about medieval knighthood...
...No one would take in a nickel without them...
...Rather, the advertising buyers use it to help them make decisions, especially about programs they haven 't seen...
...New and "returning" programs salute the autumn with double-sized inaugural chapters...
...This year's early book has CBS winning, while ABC and NBC duke it out for last place...
...They must guess what audiences a new show will command, because getting in early on a hit is a tremendous bargain—therefore a victory big enough to make the risk worth taking, notwithstanding the fact that the vast majority of new shows fail...
...They are all different...
...Is this one different...
...People in seasonal businesses let seasonality govern their lives...
...A "new season" is part of the enticement—it provides an occasion for gossip column items, inside stories and picture spreads in dailies, weeklies and monthlies at every level of American journalism, and indeed on the tube itself...
...None...
...Publicity staffs send kits and cassettes to critics and editors, and offer leading players for inter-views...
...By statute, American broadcasting operates "in the public interest, convenience and necessity...
...Past performance is as important a guide as at the race track?and perhaps as unreliable...
...This was true long before Dan Quayle denounced the show...
...Networks now guarantee audience size and makeup...
...will be stirred even more aggressively [this season] by network programmers who have concluded that the television audience finds fact—or at least the suggestion of it?more enticing than fiction...
...Once in a while, a new program strikes everyone so strongly that there is a rush to buy into it, regardless of the formulas that are supposed to govern these decisions...
...But it is a difference without a distinction...
...As early as March or April, the networks faced advertisers' agencies to present the fall schedule...
...Perry (Jennifer Beals), traumatized by the death of her fiance, perpetually tran-quilizes herself with wine...
...Since Coach is less costly than any of the top five to produce, because it doesn't have mega-stars who are being paid megasalaries, it heads the profit charts...
...That's why the "new season" has become winter's herald...
...Its customers, those who pay gobs of money for the audiences, are the advertisers...
...The institutionalization of the new season continues, despite the changes in television that modify the landscape each year...
...Furthermore, success is prophesied for Love and War (CBS, Mondays, 10:00 p.m...
...Fox' success with supple underdressed youth had provided a beacon...
...Schedules are shuffled to air programs at unaccustomed times, to trap the unwary into "sampling" what they had not intended to watch...
...All of the new shows star impossibly good-looking, mostly white twenty-somethings, and seem to take place near a beach...
...Moreover, programs are not its product, nor are viewers its customers...
...Researchers with 12 or more undergraduate credits in statistics pore over the first Nielsen ratings like druids over chicken bones...
...This past summer, as every summer, there was a buzzing as the men and women on both sides of the conference table circled in larger or smaller swarms, revising, adapting, interacting...
...It pulls its biggest audiences in winter, its smallest in summer...
...Not that the networks refund the money...
...That's why we get repeats in the summer...
...That is also how the new season is reported throughout the media—as a sporting event, with winners and losers, standings and percentages, and preseason betting that is often wrong...
...Her life is totally controlled, in ways she isn't even aware of, by Joy (Tuesday Knight), her well-fed, frowsy, New Age, scheming, manipulative, borderline psychotic agent-manager-sister...
...That's all...
...Even if viewers are not customers, though, they are as important as shoes are to shoe stores...
...Advertisers wrung this painful concession from them once new competition made them vulnerable...
...In addition, he/she knows the players in any new program?how famous they are, how handsome, how articulate—not to mention the writers and producers...
...Two years ago, I was told, Home Improvement was such a "breakout hit.' And this year...
...How does the program fit into this manufacturing process...
...To be specific, from the ultimate buzz at the swarm of the dozen or so advertising agency representatives there emerged the vaunted annual "consensus...
...That was months ago, when the people who do the deciding enacted their own new season rituals...
...ABC, Saturdays, 7:00 p.m.] Landowning widower with four children...
...In the real world, a network must deliver the audience it has been selling...
...The next most expensive show is Cheers at $300,000 for half a minute, then Roseanne at $290,000, Coach at $280,000, and Monday Night Football at $265,000...
...She's falling in love with old acquaintance Roger, the object of a deranged woman's potentially fatal attraction...
...From the Wall Street Journal, September 8: "The fall television season is upon us—and with it comes an onslaught of clones of 90210, Fox' runaway hit about Beverly Hills High teens who never seem to suffer from acne or bad hair days...
...Bonanza with broadswords and chain mail...
...The mandatory cutter/philosopher who had been his father's friend asked him what he truly wanted...
...I asked for an example...
...The networks were already looking to revive the hour-long drama, which had been elbowed aside for the half-hour comedy...
Vol. 75 • September 1992 • No. 12
