After Seinfeld
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television AFTER SEINFELD By Reuven Frank Last year ended forebodingly for the National Broadcasting Company. Jerry Seinfeld, the standup comedian from Queens whose eponymous halfhour...
...Audiences indeed showed up, and advertisers as well...
...This sometimes works, but not always...
...They have their own lingo and their own attitudes...
...But ABC found the response satisfactory...
...It starred Brooke Shields, Lea Thompson and Jenny McCarthy in forgettable sitcoms named Suddenly Susan, Caroline In The City and The Naked Truth...
...They have a schedule to fill, profit targets to attain, a "business plan" to meet, bonuses to earn...
...My producer friend got himself anEncyclopaedia Britannica atlas, a Book-of-theMonth Club premium that year, and arranged deals with airlines and travel agents to start sending his winners on exotic weekends around the globe...
...Despite their exposure in a time period that assured a great many viewers, they had not managed to develop a loyal following of their own...
...Hammocks, however, do not assure the success of the series placed in them or of the actors they star...
...Because of this, when a single "special" harking back to the sadistic old staple, Candid Camera, attracted a notably large audience during the November "sweeps" month, a weekly Candid Camera was put on the schedule for next season...
...Success in the Nielsens has meant heavy advertising revenue, even for the shows few people liked and no one remembers...
...More generally, the FCC's prime-time ruling lessened the networks' need for programs at a time when the well was running dry...
...The entrepreneurial appetite is unlimited...
...Of course, if there are not enough around that the managers consider good, they will settle for others...
...There were several successful spinoffs based on characters in the Mary Tyler Moore Show...
...The august New York Times, selfdeclared and self-consciously the newspaper of record, judged the news worthy of the top of its front page...
...There are very few new ideas being broached these days that appeal to those who must commit the money to realize them...
...At about this point Hollywood switched from television's antagonist to its ally: The studios began renting, not selling, their productions to the networks, then rented them again and again to individual stations, foreign buyers and, most recently, to the expanding videocassette business...
...From the academy to the wire services, outlines are being prepared to capitalize on the television phenomenon called Seinfeld...
...Meanwhile, the supermarket tabloids prepared for a year or more of voyeurism, innuendo and speculation about the future of Jerry Seinfeld and his three principal sidekicks...
...Where did you get that rule...
...So far, most of the solutions offered NBC, from without and within, have to do with "spinoff...
...The vacuum casts a shadow on the optimism hailing the explosion of channels that is supposed to be a happy consequence of the continuing upheaval in telecommunications...
...NBC's second ranking current comedy series, Frasier, is a spinoff of Cheers, the hit of more than a decade ago...
...What this actually refers to, scholastics of the Nielsens agree, is the theory that when you add the vast number of people who do not tune away after watching a hit show like Seinfeld to those tuning in early for a hit show like E.R., a profitable rating is guaranteed...
...Then came the coverage in People and the news magazines...
...Bookstores will have displays rivaling those they have had for Diana...
...But "going nighttime" necessarily required some grand revision...
...But when the programs were moved elsewhere in the schedule to shore up some weak night, they failed...
...After much jollity and double entendre, a couple would form...
...They pore over Nielsen's numbers like Dow-Jones chartists on Wall Street, making graphs only they comprehend and sharing terms neither the lay public nor their own employers understand...
...Next September, with Seinfeld gone, NBC's programmers will have lost the luxury of playing these games...
...Compounding NBC's troubled prospect is a sudden dearth of creative capacity affecting the whole industry...
...One of his creations had to do with a young man behind a partition, visible to the audience but not to the three young women vying to win him...
...Among other results, this effectively ended network television's "golden age" of live dramas...
...The producer said this had been fully taken into account, and that the standard rule of accompanying each couple with a married woman over 21 would be followed...
...They are of more recent vintage...
...Similarly, although several were suggested and even reportedly put in production based on characters in The Bill Cosby Show, none was ever broadcast...
...The next day it followed up with a long string of justplain-folks interviews chronicling the reactions of the program's about-to-be bereaved fans, and a lead editorial on the subject appeared the day after that...
...I asked him...
...entertainment schedule on Thursday nights...
...One or more of Seinfeld's three featured associates could have a new series built around him or her or them...
...The producer picked his chaperones from among his own rather large staff...
...This ruling, intended to help companies that syndicate programs to individual stations, in fact reduced the damage done to network television's earnings by the recently enacted ban on cigarette advertising...
...When he and his lawyer came to New York to present the plan to ABC and its lawyers, someone in those more innocent times raised the question of chaperoning...
...They may be right or they may be wrong, but little of what they see appeals to them...
...Yet M*A*S*H, the most successful comedy series of all, gave rise to no effective spinoffs...
...He related in joyous detail what was involved in the process that became known and accepted in ABC's offices and corridors as "going nighttime...
...Thus does American network television lumber toward the millennium...
...And it is...
...The interaction between the entrepreneurial and the creative in TV is revealing...
...There will be words and pictures and gossip about the details of their private lives, preferably salacious, but merely cuddly will do...
...Television executives who specialize in analyzing Nielsen ratings and manipulating the size of audiences are a large and distinct tribe...
...In their hearts, television's managers really prefer good programs to bad ones—even though that means as they define the terms...
...The crisis passed...
...The same thing happened at another network with a "sweeps" month special of homemade videotapes showing cute and amusing household disasters—infants urinating on diapering fathers, dogs eating Sunday dinner, and all the rest...
...Seinfeld "anchors" NBC's 8 to 11 P.M...
...Eventually there may even be revisionists claiming the program really was not such a big deal...
...These were, after all, trips of several days to be taken by unmarried couples under the auspices of the American Broadcasting Company...
...Jerry Seinfeld, the standup comedian from Queens whose eponymous halfhour weekly situation comedy series has since 1991 led the NBC schedule to astonishing audience figures and unprecedented profits, announced on Christmas Day that the 1997-98 season would be its last...
...For years, so many viewers flocked to Seinfeld and E.R...
...the creative capacity is finite and self-restricting...
...But it was...
...NBC used its Thursday swing slot to try to make comediennes out of actresses of the second, third and lower tiers...
...What NBC will face Thursday nights next September is what all who must provide the content for the anticipated new channels will face...
...the advertisers provided money...
...that they boosted the ratings of NBC's other Thursday night offerings as well...
...There will be endless inside stories guessing whether any or all the members of the Seinfeld repertory company would become stars in their own right...
...In relating all this, he uttered a sentence that deserves to be incised in the stone wall of the Hollywood branch of the Museum of Television and Radio: "My bookkeper has been to Tahiti five times...
...For example, the time period between two top programs is known as "a hammock...
...If a basic format worked, clearly it should not be altered...
...Sometime during those years, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) restricted the networks' prime time to three hours a night plus one more on the weekend, for a weekly total of 22...
...A young producer who had once been assigned to me as an executive trainee devised and owned several of these...
...In the case cited, certainly, holding that the average viewer is a lout too lazy to change his dial setting has earned big money...
...the networks provided audiences...
...Furthermore, the executives who will pick the new programs are not those who chose Seinfeld or Cheers or the earlier Bill Cosby Show...
...Two other situation comedies precede it, a third comes after it, and the night's prime time period closes with an hour-long drama, the hospital series E.R...
...An interesting sidelight on that era was the pattern set at ABC, still in its pauper phase, to fill holes in prime time with programs from its daytime schedule—especially game shows...
...The creativity dearth is due at least in part to the growth of a fourth full network, Fox, and two partial networks, WB and UPN, established by Warner Brothers and Paramount Pictures, to assure distribution for the TV shows they own...
...I made it up," he replied...
...Too many comedies and not enough dramas...
...There are already widely expressed doubts in the industry and among advertisers and other inhabitants of the periphery regarding NBC's surfeit of situation comedies —18 a week when a dozen is generally thought to be a full quota...
...But the Hollywood studios provided product...
...It may be instructive to look at the last time network television faced a paucity of material as it tried to fill its schedules...
...As noted before, one hundred times as many channels will not bring one hundred times as many writers, or actors, or directors...
...There will be books, too...
...What they gave us were Suddenly Susan, Caroline in The City and the Naked Truth...
...Or, for that matter, advertisers...
...It was very popular...
...Or one woman and three men...
...Since the format was off limits, the change had to be in the prize...
...Once again, the Law of Unintended Consequences came to the rescue...
...Fewer programs, obviously, meant fewer costs...
...That was back when there were only three major networks—actually two and a half from the perspective of those inside the industry, for ABC had not yet gone through the corporate restructurings that gave it the money and clout to get into the game as an equal...
...It should be noted that television programming executives and advertising agency vice presidents refer to such fare as "reality" programs...
...Other newspapers across the country thought the announcement merited banner headlines...
...The program would pay for, or arrange free, an evening at a nightclub, a boat trip to Catalina Island or some other date...
Vol. 81 • January 1998 • No. 1
