How does that Bette Midler song go? “You’ve got to have friends . . .”
Change “friends” to “Friends” and you’ve arrived at the programming strategy devised by the four major television networks as they approach the start of the 1995-96 season. Their fall schedules blatantly acknowledge the need for lots and lots of “Friends” knockoffs.
Last year at this time, viewers emphatically put their stamp of approval on the aggressively with-it NBC sitcom, about an overcaffeinated clan of stylish singles in Manhattan. “Friends” took off on Thursday nights, while grouchy old Dabney Coleman’s “Madman of the People” (Oh, you forgot?) fizzled in the catbird position between “Seinfeld” and runaway smash “ER.”
Prime-time schedules were set last May, after a two-month square dance among programmers, production studios and independent producers.
During this chaotic period, pilots were hurriedly created and auditioned, in the hope that some network executive might want to fit the show into the fall lineup. Preference usually is given to producers with a good track record, access to a particular star or writer, or the ability to quickly copy another network’s successes.
Thus, the proliferation of “Friends” look-alikes.
CBS, the No. 1 network only two years ago, watched its fortunes plummet last year, so it decided to take drastic action to find a new audience among young adults. In a controversial programming decision, it nuked the heart of its reliable–if geriatric–Sunday night lineup.
“Murder, She Wrote” was pulled from the post-“60 Minutes” time slot it anchored for 10 years, to be replaced by the younger-skewing “Cybill” and frisky new “Almost Perfect” (starring Nancy Travis and Kevin Kilner as urban workaholics looking for love). CBS has pitted the venerable whodunit starring Angela Lansbury against the kids from the coffeehouse, whose show since has become NBC’s lead-off attraction at 7 p.m. Thursdays.
CBS hopes that “Murder, She Wrote” will provide an alternative for older viewers on Thursday nights and buy some time for their program development people. For its part, NBC is counting on its sophomore sitcom to provide the same sort of jumpstart to its powerful Thursday night lineup that “Mad About You” gave “Friends” last September.
The quietly effective “Mad About You” now is expected to help NBC gain a foothold on Sunday nights but it, too, faces formidable competition. Besides “Cybill”–a surprise mid-season hit for CBS–Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt must face a more romance-oriented “Lois & Clark” on ABC, Fox’s scrappy “The Simpsons” and WB’s new teen-oriented “Kirk.”
This season, the networks pretty much have abandoned the Family Hour concept, with many of the new shows–slotted between 7 and 8 p.m.–obsessing on anatomical humor and sexual innuendo. While most of this material still falls within the PG category, it does noticeably raise the ante from the snarky days of “Three’s Company.”
Different strokes for different folks’ families.
Fox has become successful by welcoming pre-teens and teens to its network, but Madison Avenue prefers a prime-time audience with disposable incomes and access to credit cards, and ABC, NBC and CBS seem to be listening. The name of the game is survival, and even Fox is making moves to attract viewers closer to voting age.
This summer, Disney and Westinghouse became so convinced of the value of even a decreasing network audience–from a 94 percent share in 1978 to 59 percent last season (not counting Fox) and 55 percent in late summer (even counting Fox)–that one bought last year’s No. 1, ABC, and the other grabbed No. 3 CBS. If advertisers weren’t confident of the marketing reach of the broadcast networks, it’s doubtful these deals would have been made.
The strength of “Friends”–No. 1 throughout the summer in reruns–will be tested early, as it tries to help kick off “Caroline in the City” and “The Single Guy,” two highly touted new sitcoms about terminally unmarried young professionals with great hair. The downside is that the audience at 7 p.m. generally is smaller than it is later in the evening, which could negatively affect the show’s powerful demographics.
“Mad About You” again will try to work its magic by pumping some life into the returning “Hope & Gloria” on Sundays, and getting audiences in a mood to stay tuned for “Sunday Night at the Movies.” It was a decision that so incensed Reiser that he snubbed NBC Entertainment boss Warren Littlefield before an affiliates meeting this spring.
There’s so much comedy on the networks this fall–more than 50 half-hour shows, including 13 new ones featuring put-upon young singles–that network creative executives have voiced concern that the script-writing pool is becoming dangerously shallow and the laughs could stop without warning. If their sitcom strategy fails, the networks likely will retrench and possibly take another stab at cheaper reality-based shows and newsmagazines or more expensive hourlong dramas (the popularity of “ER,” No. 2 in households and among adults, stopped the flow of newsmagazines virtually singlehandedly), sophisticated cartoons or even variety shows.
Programmers have, for the most part, used established shows to give a lift to the new question marks. CBS especially is trying to maximize its assets, such as they are.
Last year, it had one great night of comedy, Monday; a surprisingly strong evening of dramas, on Saturdays; and, at least, the first two hours of Sunday. Here’s how changes made in its Monday lineup have affected the rest of the week.
CBS is hoping, desperately, that Monday holdovers “The Nanny” and “Murphy Brown” will boost the chances of two bubbly new comedies, Elizabeth McGovern’s “If Not for You” and Nancy McKeon’s “You Can’t Hurry Love.” If so, they all could help “Chicago Hope,” which will lose Mandy Patinkin later in the year.
On Sundays, it is expected that “Cybill” will maintain a good portion of the “60 Minutes” audience, and thus provide a cushion for “Almost Perfect”–just as Shepherd benefited from Candice Bergen’s presence last year. “Dave’s World” goes to Tuesdays, where it is slotted between the steamy new nighttime soap “Central Park West”–from the creator of “Melrose Place” and “90210”–and “Bless This House,” which CBS expects to be a breakout hit.
“Monday night has always been, for us, a night of great comedy, going back to Lucille Ball,” says Steve Warner, vice president of program planning and scheduling for CBS. “But the shows determine the audience, I don’t think the audience determines the shows.”
The “goal,” he says, is to fertilize the rest of the schedule with proven material.
On Thursdays, “Murder, She Wrote” will try to help find an audience for “New York News,” yet another Mary Tyler Moore vehicle, and “48 Hours,” one of the few remaining newsmagazines.
“The classic story is that Thursday night was considered a low viewing night on television,” says Warner. “After `Cosby’ arrived in 1984, it went from being the second-lowest night to the second highest. For us, on a Thursday night when you’ve got a `Seinfeld,’ `Friends’ and `ER’–which have a younger-skewing audience–on NBC, we should try to counterprogram.
“If `Cybill’ performs as we suspect , it will be a very good thing for us financially.”
ABC will throw fragile new dramas “Charlie Grace” (Mark Harmon) and “The Monroes” (William Devane) against NBC’s Thursday-night juggernaut in an apparent suicide mission. For its part, Fox will try to capture a young black and Hispanic audience with “Living Single,” the raunchy flight-attendant sitcom “The Crew” and hip-hop cop show “New York Undercover.”
One programming decision that raised eyebrows when CBS made its scheduling moves last May involved “Bless This House,” a hybrid of “The Honeymooners” and “Roseanne.” It stars Andrew (no-“Dice”) Clay and sultry Cathy Moriarty, two actors no one would expect could fit within the normal confines of the Family Hour–but they’ll let the insults and double-entendres fly as CBS’ Wednesday opener.
If the move pays off, “Bless This House” and “Dave’s World” could grease the way for “Central Park West” and “Courthouse,” which features plenty of steely-eyed single lawyers.
Backing up their scheduling decisions, the networks will try to give their pet projects as much of a chance as possible. WB already has sneak previewed “Kirk” and UPN has launched a second season of “Star Trek: Voyager,” using it to attract viewers to psycho-thriller “Nowhere Man”; ABC will sneak preview its ambitious courtroom drama “Murder One” (from Steven Bochco) in the Tuesday-night spot usually held by “NYPD Blue,” before moving it to Thursdays at 9 p.m., opposite “ER”; and it similarly will give “Jeff Foxworthy” and “Maybe This Time”–with Marie Osmond as a divorced woman–midweek openings, before settling into their Saturday periods.
The networks seem to think that all the conspiracy theorists and white-knuckle viewers stay home on Friday nights.
NBC starts off with the venerable “Unsolved Mysteries,” while CBS hopes the quirky “Picket Fences” will lead naturally into the gory psycho-drama “American Gothic” (starring Gary Cole as an evil cop), and Fox continues to broadcast from the Twilight Zone in the new “Strange Luck” and cult favorite “The X-Files.”
“Friday night is a great time to be scared,” says Chris Carter, creator of “The X-Files.” “It used to be considered a wasteland.
“ABC’s T.G.I.F. lineup appealed to all the kids left at home by their parents. We decided that `X-Files’ could only be a hit if we found a new audience and didn’t try to capture an existing one.”
Prime-time schedules, of course, aren’t etched in stone. Already, several mid-season replacements are ready to go and the rescheduling of disappointments can be expected to start in early October.
“The Nanny” blossomed only after it was repotted a half-dozen times, then piggy-backed on slow nights in an effort to find an audience. The patience of NBC’s “Homicide” audiences was rewarded with a full season of continuing drama only last year, after a jagged schedule that defied logic. Even “Monday Night Football” has been known to land on Thursday nights occasionally.
What’s at stake?
Well, beside the reputations and clout of studios and independent producers, who increasingly have been able to dictate to the networks where and when their programs ought to be situated, there’s money.
Last year, a 30-second commercial spot could cost anywhere from about $90,000 to $600,000, depending on ratings and time slot–and that was before the season opened. The price tag for time on “ER” and “Friends” jumped after the audience’s feelings became known, although, conversely, if a show doesn’t perform as expected, networks have to give money back to advertisers.
Producers not aligned with ABC/Disney, CBS, NBC, Fox, WB and UPN could start feeling the financial pinch soon, as well, now that networks are allowed by law to create and market their own shows. Studios fear networks will give their own children a greater chance to succeed than someone else’s offspring.
Moreover, the networks are engaged in a battle to contain erosion of their audience turf. Aggressive independent stations now draw respectable numbers to first-run shows, such as “Baywatch” and “Hercules”; cable is offering an increasing number of original and theatrical programs; direct-broadcast-satellite transmissions bypass the networks to air a broad menu of movies and sports; and the home video market continues to thrive, with digital discs just around the corner.
With the Baby Bells expected to enter the programming fray by the end of the century, this could be a do-or-die year for the networks. With a little help from their “Friends,” however, they just might outlast the doomsayers.
