On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television ONE MORE SEASON BY REUVEN FRANK The rite of spring called the New TV Season has not varied for a half-century. After months of ideas being bandied between network program...
...starring the very tall, moonfaced lawyer from Night Court...
...But they're a hell of a money machine...
...When net works capsulize the plots of their programs they resemble the summaries of fictitious operas that Robert Benchley used to do 60 years ago...
...Last year something changed...
...Ah, there, Mr...
...For reasons having nothing to do with the programs themselves, the up-front spring sales were not very good...
...Later in the year, ABC stunned professionals with the audience for the Academy Awards and the still bigger one for Oprah Winfrey interviewing Michael Jackson...
...In other words, they make for bigger ratings...
...Although viewers are no less prone to stay prone, most of them have remote control devices and choose programs by moving a finger...
...Murphy Brown's baby may even be given a father...
...But, having no idea what to do about it, they ignore the problem...
...For the first time, the new boys seem to have decided that networks are a viable business, that their obituaries, like Mark Twain's, were premature...
...Yet in recent years one sensed fingers crossed behind backs...
...Everybody knew it couldn't happen often, yet once more would be enough...
...Some of them have a feel for what they are looking at, some merely preen in the glow of being insiders, but the deciding includes them all: the programmers, the budgeteers, the chief press agents, the chief lawyers (to whom network censors and Washington lobbyists report), the ratings readers, and the vice presidents who keep affiliated stations docile—and affiliated...
...After two years of bemoaning the erosion of the combined three-network audience from its high of more than a 90 Nielsen rating?0 per cent of Americans owning TV sets—to its new low of 60, the network proprietors realized that the number was leveling off at 60 and remains a lot of people...
...This year's consensus has the networks ending in the same order as last season: CBS, ABC and NBC...
...Suddenly, the networks were seeking "big" events to duplicate that audience pulling power...
...Announcing a new schedule is itself an act of faith, of confidence in tomorrow being dependably like today or better...
...It may be metal, allowing magnetized cards bearing the names of programs to be affixed, as to your refrigerator door...
...The fate of the Jackie Thomas Show may only prove that the days of flow are over...
...whose heroine is "a single mother working in an oil refinery...
...The ratings winner, CBS...
...they ain't Goethe or Shakespeare...
...You couldn't predict when there would be another intersection of orbiting stars to match Oprah and Jackson...
...For all the public denials, during the '80s networks were thought to bedying, while the buying and selling of famous old corporate names flourished...
...Then the arguing begins, about which new programs will be added, and where...
...It's the economy...
...There is less ambient cigarette smoke than in the past, but otherwise it's the same sodden paper coffee cups, the same golf shirts, the same short tempers, the same arguments...
...No one had anything specific in mind, except that what had been done could be done again...
...The comedienne, whose program was already a hit when she married Arnold, got ABC to star him, too, and run his show right after hers...
...Nielsen ratings expert—to predict how the proposed program would do in the proposed time slot...
...scheduled the fewest new entries, six and a half hours...
...But what was important about the June fanfare was not the program ballyhoo or the up-front sales or even the ultimate victory of Dan Quayle...
...the new dramatic series from Steve Bochco...
...And there have been rumblings about NYPD Blue (ABC, Tuesdays, 10 p.m...
...One of the new offerings will be the John Larroquette Show (NBC, Mondays, 9 p.m...
...One of them set up a separate department with no other function...
...Advertisers will kill for 60...
...It illustrates the network programmers' most cherished belief: Audiences "flow" from program to program...
...As the season wore on, Arnold kept fewer and fewer of the viewers he thus "inherited...
...Network officials know that couch potatoes sit there flicking their remotes, and that this has shattered audience behavior profiles...
...Dan Quayle, you can comeout now...
...For along with announcing their new lineups, the networks hope to sell as many commercials as possible...
...The big three ain't the Great Books...
...A series the network considers special will be given a good spot, a "hammock," between two shows that scored high the previous season...
...the advance word is that he will break new ground in sexual explicitness and perhaps violence, and that advertisers are reluctant to sign up...
...Last season's winners are put up first...
...In 1993 the Super Bowl had its largest number of viewers...
...A large board on an easel, marked off vertically into the days of the week and horizontally into the half-hours of prime time, dominates the room...
...The one agreed hit among the new programs is Grace Under Fire (ABC, Wednesdays, 9:30 p.m...
...on their part, the major advertisers, who do their buying in the spring, are anxious to get aboard hits and avoid failures...
...Actually, two things...
...Finally, ABC canceled him, incurring the wrath of his wife and providing weeks of Grade-A grist for the gossip mill...
...Then, as the season was ending, NBC exploited the final episode in the 11-year run of Cheers to ratchet the number of Americans watching to more than 93 million...
...Every move on the board requires the network's chief of research—i.e...
...The procedure is known as "up-front" buying...
...Louis...
...That is not the pointless exercise it may seem to the laity...
...However, since the Reverend Donald Wildmon, the Mississippi crusader for purer television, has already begun a campaign of full-page newspaper ads denouncing Bochco and ABC, and is thereby promoting awareness of the series, its sponsor troubles may be temporary...
...Next comes a massive weekend meeting in a New York conference room...
...On the other hand, if someone would make an offer...
...Nor may we forget the three blockbuster Amy Fisher docudramas...
...For those who tuned in late, Tom Arnold is married to the wildly successful Roseanne Arnold, star of ABC's long-running weekly series Roseanne...
...But, as Fred Allen said, imitation is the sincerest form of television, so a new class of vice presidents is looking to maintain the momentum of 1993...
...We are not discussing cultural milestones here, only audience size...
...Be that as it may, once the network schedules were announced they were "shared out," which means the ratings analyzers at the networks and the advertising agencies cast the runes to predict the audience share each network and each program will have come September...
...In fact, this year only ABC received its affiliates in the traditional venue for these meetings, Los Angeles' Century Plaza Hotel, where for four decades ice-sculptured swans melted to puddles in honor of net-work television...
...Kindergartens use similar boards...
...The Fox and PBS networks, the independent stations, all of cable, plus people watching their VCRs, divide up the other 40 percent of Americans owning TV sets...
...The second thing that happened is less dramatic...
...The New York Times was mean enough to calculate how many of NBC's new family-oriented dramas featured divorced men or women, then gallantly offered that the phenomenon merely reflects the changing nature of the American family...
...It has been widely observed that just as Hollywood is going back to more PG-rated pictures, because someone noticed that the multimillion-dollar blockbusters were rated PG, television is going back to softer, warmer topics, family concerns, middle-class settings...
...August newspapers titillated the readers of their business pages with hints that Paramount was after NBC, Disney was panting for CBS, and this one was seen having lunch with that one...
...What I found striking was that, despite the sluggish economy, not since the middle '80s when new proprietors took over the three old networks has there been such an aura of stability in the industry...
...After months of ideas being bandied between network program developers and the studios that produce the shows—ideas concerning what kind of series should be launched, who the stars might be, budgets, available writers, and the rest—the New York bigshots fly to California to pass judgment on the results...
...The much heralded labeling of violent shows may have the same effect, attracting rather than warning off...
...So far as anyone can tell, the rumors were true, at least in part...
...Selling them makes no sense...
...He was snapped up by CBS, where he is to resurface a year from now...
...The prospects for Grace Under Fire are very good because it has been scheduled to follow ABC's popular series, Home Improvement...
...ABC will have eight hours of new shows...
...As he always does, Bochco is going against the tide...
...Benchley...
...The official description of the series says it deals with "a recovering alcoholic who lands a job as the manager of a bus station in St...
...Never mind that last season the Jackie Thomas Show, featuring Tom Arnold, proved the concept is flawed...
...As logic dictates, NBC, whose entertainment schedule ranked third in last season's Nielsen ratings, has replaced the most programs, eight and a half hours' worth...
...Also pay...
...Like most of the received wisdom shaping decisions at this conclusive session, the hammock strategy presumes that a great majority of viewers are too tired to get up, walk to the set and turn the dial...
...The rationale is that such programs draw several in a viewing family to watch together, instead of each in his or her own room, with his or her own TV set (and his or her own remote control...
...Those events, incidentally, are less extravagant than they used to be...
...A few leading affiliates are similarly clued in before their network has a big bash to tell all of its stations what joys await in the coming season...
...Ending every mega-hit series in a blaze of promotion was all it would take to repeat the Cheers achievement...
...they ain't Homer or Hiroshige or Beethoven...
...There was not only rumor but belief that the new folks, having stripped a few assets and sold off a few treasures, would hand over their acquired properties lock, stock and affiliates to any well-heeled suitor breaching their portal...
...or it may be felt, enabling the same titles, with sandpaper backing, to adhere...
...To begin with, on several occasions one network or another assembled so huge an audience for a single event that the most obtuse executive realized no other medium could, or would foresee-ably, match this sort of power...
...Consequently, each network closes its fall schedule still clinging to the magic of flow...
...Some favored newspaper writers get peeks at the lineup prior to the official announcements...
Vol. 76 • July 1993 • No. 9
