It is funny, in this age of the ubiquitous VCR, to be writing still about prime-time network ratings battles.
But at 7 p.m. Thursday (that’s 12:00 on the VCR most Americans apparently still can’t program), a battle royal will ensue, one that will make UPN’s pro wrestling matchups at the same time look like so many friendly strolls to the farmer’s market.
CBS’ blockbuster “Survivor” sequel begins going head-to-head with a special “Friends” on NBC, elongated by 10 minutes through the February sweeps month to steal some of “Survivor’s” thunder.
To put this swashbuckling schedule-making in perspective, you have the program that in its final first-season episode last August was 2000’s second most popular show taking on the current TV season’s second most popular series. Witnessing such a contest, the ancients would turn it into some legend about how earthquakes came to be.
Perhaps more significantly for TV’s future, you also have NBC offering the extraordinary counterpunch – series television that dares violate the 30-minute or 1-hour rule and, if it is successful, may foreshadow future rule-breaking.
And you have the VCR-challenged segment of the populace (a.k.a. “the people unwilling to read the manual”) being forced to decide: Chandler or Jeff Probst, Monica or Kimmi, Joey or Colby?
The reason the fight is taking place is clear. CBS has a hot property on its hands, a judgment confirmed by the fact that almost 45 million people watched Sunday’s wholly engaging post-Super Bowl debut of “Survivor: The Australian Outback.”
And Thursday, which NBC has dominated since the days of “Cheers” and “The Cosby Show,” is TV’s biggest money-making night, because that is when movie studios are clamoring to buy ads for their Friday debuts.
Some have suggested CBS would have been smarter to keep “Survivor” on Wednesday nights, where it aired during summer and where the winter competition is weaker.
“We don’t know what this show can actually do when it’s picking on shows its own size,” says Robert J. Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Center for the Study of Popular Television. “CBS’ idea was that `Friends’ was getting pretty long in the tooth anyway and this might be a way to euthanize it. But they might have made a risky miscalculation here.”
But as David Poltrack, CBS executive vice president for research and planning, explains it, putting “Survivor” on Thursdays — and following it with the popular freshman crime-solving drama “CSI” — is a bet that’s hard to lose.
“You can perhaps create a breakthrough on a night that has been dominated by NBC since 1984,” Poltrack says. “The bottom line is, if we succeed on Thursday night, we’ll make so much more money than we would on Wednesday even if the Thursday ratings were lower.”
In summer, remember, “Survivor” was going against reruns. This time around, it will be battling what is, to be precise, TV’s second-most-popular scripted series and its second-most-popular in the coveted 18-to-49 demographic. (“ER” and two editions of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” push “Friends” to fourth in the battle for all viewers.)
The suspicion here is that there is room and audience enough for both “Survivor” and “Friends” to do well. As Poltrack explained, normally about 62 percent of U.S. households have their sets on at 7 p.m. Thursdays. Some 14 percent watch “Friends,” which leaves an awful lot of room for “Survivor.”
But NBC is certainly taking the challenge seriously. In addition to expanding — or bloating, depending on how the writing goes — “Friends” during February, it will give viewers two weeks of new “Saturday Night Live” material to fill the final 20 minutes of the 7 p.m. hour. In “SNL” terms, that’s one sketch and 32 commercials.
For the final two weeks of sweeps, NBC will offer, first, a Conan O’Brien-hosted chat session with the “Friends” gang.
Then, in the final week, all three of its popular Thursday comedies, “Friends,” “Will & Grace” and “Just Shoot Me,” will expand to 40 minutes each, filling the 7-9 p.m. bloc.
During the quarterly sweeps periods, those months in which audience is measured most closely in order to set ad rates, viewers are accustomed to stunt casting and stunt plotting, but stunt show lengths is a new one.
It is due, largely, to NBC recently installing as chief programmer former “Today” boss Jeff Zucker, a guy who did not come up through the programming ranks.
If Zucker’s gambit, as it would be known in chess, works, it could become an occasional big arrow in the programmers’ quivers, especially during the November, February and May sweeps months.
But don’t expect it to change the general order of prime time. From viewers’ expectations to the real moneymaker, selling shows into syndication, too much of the TV business is locked into the traditional 30- and 60-minute blocs.
What’s nice about the change — beyond the fact that it is a change — is that it may bring new life to “Friends,” which has been, in fact, finally starting to show its age.
It’s still funny in and of itself, and absent its history it would still rank among TV’s top comedies.
But compare a given week’s episode this year with what has gone before, and there is a sense of wheel spinning.
“Survivor,” meanwhile, seems headed for another attention-holding exercise in epic backstabbing and group dysfunction.
There is unreality about this reality show now because we know all the contestants saw last year’s doings and because so many of them look more like TV people than regular people.
But the trade-off is that they seem to be more articulate about their feelings and motivations. The production has grown more polished and cunning, too, giving this Australian adventure the potential to be, once again, as complex and psychologically fascinating as, say, a good “Sopranos” episode.
