Fitting Network TV for a Toe Tag

Fitting Network TV for a Toe Tag

Fitting Network TV for a Toe Tag

For 20 years, Ted Harbert worked at ABC. He started there right out of college in 1977, when the network, along with CBS and NBC, was the only game in town and was the hit factory responsible for Happy Days; Charlie's Angels; Rich Man, Poor Man and Roots. By 1996, when Harbert was running ABC, those glory days were ending. All three networks were still colossal, but Fox had established its beachhead, and cable's market penetration was almost complete. The '80s had seen the rise of MTV. And CNN was by then a big deal, not just an incinerator for Ted Turner's extra cash. ESPN was competing aggressively. Individually, none of these channels got much of a rating most of the time, but the damage was starting to add up.

"People would say, 'Oh, they're nibbling away, they're nibbling away,'" Harbert recalls. "And we would always say, 'Well, they can nibble, but they're never gonna really take us.' And then they took us."

Today, Harbert is president and C.E.O. of the Comcast Entertainment Group. He oversees The Style Network, G4—a six-year-old channel aimed at young men who love videogames—and C.E.G.'s most recognizable offering, E!, which features celebrity news. E! ranks 31st among the most-watched basic-cable channels, which means that, in general, less than 1 percent of America's 112 million TV households are watching it during prime time. Yet Harbert is probably sleeping better these days than his former colleagues at the broadcast networks.

When Harbert talks about television, it's with the sober clarity of someone who has looked at life from both sides now and has seen that only one business model is working. Cable networks target just those viewers who want what they have to offer. Broadcast networks want everyone. And the business of wanting everyone has never been worse. At the end of last season, ABC, CBS, and NBC reported their smallest combined audience ever, an event that has become a gloomy yearly occurrence. Meanwhile, cable—counting both basic channels and pay services like HBO and Showtime—now receives 55 percent of the total viewership.

It may be time to perform an autopsy on network TV, which some have pronounced officially dead at age 60, the victim of a lifetime of big spending, hard living, and bad planning. Here's the coroner's report: The evening newscasts have been mowed down by cable's heat, spin, and round-the-clock immediacy. In prime time, nobody watches reruns anymore—and reruns, along with syndication, used to be the only way comedy and drama series, the heart of a network's prime-time business, made money. (The way they make money now is...well, the networks will get back to you as soon as they figure that out.)

Speaking of old-school, half-hour sitcoms: Once, 50 of them were on the air at a time. Today, they're all but gone. Suddenly, people just stopped liking them. Prime-time news magazines? Barely holding on. "Protected" time slots? Viewers accustomed to Web surfing and channel flipping at hyperspeed aren't going to watch a new show just because they're too lazy to change the channel after The Biggest Loser. The audience for daytime soaps, a profitable staple since TV's infancy, has shrunk so dramatically that the form may vanish within a few years. This is all very bad news for a medium that hasn't come up with a fresh format since 2000, when CBS launched Survivor, the gold rush in reality-TV competitions. (P.S.: Survivor isn’t what it used to be either.)

It's unlikely that a broadcast network is ever again going to create a megahit like The Cosby Show, which at its mid-’80s peak drew as many as 50 million viewers an episode. For several years now, TV's top event has been Fox's American Idol. Last season, it drew 28.8 million viewers a week.

Conversations about the future of television tend to vault way past next week or next year into a world where schedules don't exist and 10,000 programming options are all available at any moment, half of them fully interactive. (Not enjoying this episode of Law & Order: Moonbase? That's OK—you can change the plot!)

It sounds like fun. But in reality, the number of cable channels has topped out. And the number of households that subscribe to basic cable—about 65 million—hasn't budged for a decade. That's roughly 58 percent of all American TV households and it's a much higher percentage of the total households that advertisers actually care about. People who have something to sell are attracted to viewers who have already demonstrated their willingness to buy something (like cable TV). The cable business is booming: Annual advertising revenues have jumped from $8.1 billion in 1997 to a projected $28.6 billion this year.

So before the death knell tolls, let's consider some ways broadcast TV might be reborn.

1. Accept the fact that niche is the new normal.

The most popular cable networks average fewer than 3 million viewers a night. But add up all those little niches, and how much of an audience is left? Even TNT and USA, the two cable channels whose original programming most closely resembles that of broadcast networks, are carving out distinctive spaces for themselves. Turner Networks president Steve Koonin has successfully promoted TNT as a network for drama and TBS as a home for comedy—two old-school broadcast mainstays. But, he says, "Within the wide berth of comedy and drama as prospective brands, we're looking at where there are underserved audiences, and we're finding them in family viewers, African Americans, women, and action lovers."

When groups that vast are being won over by cable, broadcast's claim that it reaches for everyone starts to ring a little hollow, especially when cable networks are making shows that are just like broadcast series, except a little better. To be fair to the networks, the playing field isn't level: Small cable channels can impress advertisers simply by growing. Networks can't—so a show with a viewership of 4 million is a hit on USA and a flop on CBS. But the differences are diminishing. In the spring, Koonin took an aggressive gamble to make this clear: He scheduled Turner Networks' upfronts cheek-to-cheek with those of the broadcast networks.

"Koonin was brilliant," says Brian Terkelsen, of the brand consultancy MediaVest. "In my opinion, that was the turning point. We'll all look back and say the one riff that he did onstage that week shifted everything for cable and broadcasting. What he did was, he got up there and said, 'If I were to tell you the story of two networks, and one had a talking car and a steroid in a unitard who was beating up an average guy in a game show, and the other had an Academy Award-winning actress in her second season and a Golden Globe winner in her fourth season, which would you think was which?'" Koonin then unveiled slides of the cheesy shows—NBC's Knight Rider and American Gladiators—and the classy ones: TNT’s Saving Grace and The Closer. Point made, brutally. "If anybody in the room didn't think, 'Holy shit! It's all changed,'" Terkelsen says, "they’re morons."

2. Know your brand.

"There are an awful lot of channels available to people in the average digital home," says FX president John Landgraf. "So if you don’t stand for something, you stand for nothing." FX, he says, "appeals to people with a certain taste for edgy, innovative quality." He has established the brand with material that's positioned exactly halfway between what the networks and pay cable offer. Its signature shows—Rescue Me, The Shield, Damages, Nip/Tuck—tend to be hard-driving adult dramas that are one big step raunchier, bloodier, sexier, cooler, and rougher than the broadcast networks' cop/lawyer/doctor equivalents.

It wasn't a smooth road for the network, which was founded in 1994. "FX toyed, in its earlier incarnations, with various branding strategies," Landgraf recalls, "from live television—its original motto was 'TV made fresh daily'—to a time when it was much more explicitly appealing to men." Back then, it often looked like the NASCAR channel. To redefine itself, FX had to make casual viewers expendable in order to build its rep with committed ones. "We want to have somebody's favorite show," Landgraf says, "not everybody's 10th-favorite show."

Rebranding to that degree isn't without its risks. Several years ago, Bravo became a haven for young, hip, gay-friendly consumers with lots of disposable income. That meant walking away from the (few) viewers who knew it as a poor man's PBS, a repository for dusty filmed productions of Swan Lake. If the one-two punch of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Project Runway hadn't succeeded, the channel could well have gone down for the count. Similarly, at Turner, Koonin canceled TNT's most popular offering—wrestling—in order to make its metamorphosis into a drama-driven cable network credible.

Those gambles paid off because Bravo, FX, and TNT all followed through swiftly to build on their initial hits. Likewise, AMC, which specializes in old movies, didn't waste a minute after critics acclaimed the first season of its original show Mad Men: It began developing other dramas, knowing its newfound audience needed more reasons to stick around. Without moves like that, a rebranding effort can quickly give rise to skepticism. A&E spent big money to buy reruns of HBO's The Sopranos because it wanted to be seen as the kind of network that would air a show like The Sopranos. But it's not; it's the kind of network that would air reruns of The Sopranos and take out the bad words.

In many ways, the networks themselves already have specific brand identities; they just don't admit it. For decades, CBS has had the most elderly demographic among the major networks. ABC specializes in comedies and light dramas with strong female appeal, from Desperate Housewives to Grey's Anatomy to Ugly Betty. Fox—with the exception of American Idol—is largely aimed at guys, whether via action dramas like 24 and Prison Break, Sunday-night cartoons, or the never-ending, shaky-cam glimpse of night-shift squalor that is Cops. The fledgling CW is building on Gossip Girl and America’s Next Top Model to chase young women. NBC's struggles are not unrelated to the fact that it's still trying to be all things to all people: When you offer programming like 30 Rock to a smart, affluent audience but also rely on diet contests, game shows, and To Catch a Predator to fill prime time, you can't blame viewers for not knowing what to expect.

3. Don't count on "flow" unless all your programming is aimed at the same audience.

Zip through FX's schedule, and at some point, you will see an episode of Rescue Me, followed by another episode of Rescue Me, and another and another. And when Bravo is hard-selling one of its hits, the word overkill is not in its vocabulary. "The great thing about our shows is, people want to see them again," says Andy Cohen, Bravo's senior vice president for original programming. "A lot of times, we'll premiere an episode of Top Chef and then rerun the episode right when it's over. And people stay tuned! Some of our shows are really like crack," he laughs.

This practice makes sense in two ways: It's cost-efficient and it builds loyalty. The tactic used to be dismissed as killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, until people noticed that the goose kept on thriving. Now it's just a matter, as Cohen puts it, of "feeding the beast."

Since embracing the episode-marathon strategy several years ago—as a way to pump life into Project Runway, which was struggling in its first year—Bravo has seen ratings for its flagship shows grow every season. The fourth cycle of Top Chef, which aired in the spring, outperformed the third, which beat the second, which outdid the first.

The broadcast networks used to count on that kind of steady growth in the first few years of one of their hits. But recently, scripted series like Ugly Betty and Heroes have started losing viewers after just one season. Given that alarming turnabout, you'd think the networks would be doing everything in their power to build the equity of a potential new hit. But no. Their schedules, set in stone decades ago, remain inviolable: news and chitchat before noon, soaps and talk shows in the afternoon, local and national evening news and infotainment later in the day, talk shows at bedtime. Some of these programming blocks justify themselves economically, but others aren't as cost-effective. Daytime soaps occupy a large swath of airtime that could occasionally be used to repurpose a network's prime-time schedule cheaply and efficiently.

4. Content counts.

Discussions at the networks about what's depleting their viewership tend to focus on familiar culprits: YouTube. The internet. Xbox. The iPod. Too many options. (Capitalism can be so unfair!) This leads to brainstorming sessions about making TV more like the internet, resulting in a lot of overexcited press releases announcing how one-minute "minisodes" of your favorite shows will be exclusively available on a network website, or Twittered to you line by line as they're being written, or beamed directly into your cerebral cortex via Bluetooth.

Enough already. Competition from other media is real, but it's also a convenient excuse to not focus on programming. You don't hear American Idol's producers whining about how the internet is draining their audience, because they know that their audience is on the internet. Viewers go there to talk, read, kvetch, and gossip—about American Idol.

Creating substance-free shows because you think your audience has no attention span is a sucker's game. And streaming shows for free is, so far, doing a lot more for viewers than it is for a network's balance sheet. Instead, the networks should try to make TV shows for people who want to watch TV shows. There seems to be no shortage of viewers out there: For all the hand-wringing about how new media are sapping television's audience, the average viewer of online video in April watched fewer than eight minutes a day. By contrast, the average household has its TV on for eight hours and 14 minutes daily. That's a record. (One that should make all of us rear back in horror, but that's another story.)

5. When you say the TV season is 52 weeks, you have to mean it.

Madison Avenue is still fond of the old-fashioned idea of fall as a launchpad for a new TV season, and so are many viewers. But does that mean the networks should continue taking summers off? Sure, they run original programming in July and August, but "original" in this context generally means a series so odd that they couldn't find a place for it in the regular season, or Celebrity Circus, or 85 variations on foreign game shows (this summer's flavor of the moment).

It's a bind, since a real commitment to top-quality original programming during the summer costs money that the broadcast networks don't have right now, but a diet of reruns and cut-rate schlock may cost them viewers. According to Comcast's Harbert, when broadcast execs ask for new shows year-round, "the finance guys say, 'You're killing me!' And the programming guys say, 'Yeah, but if I put on repeats, they're going to have terrible ratings, and we'll have no promo base for fall.' And everybody's right."

But investing in shows—and thus in audience building—is a smarter long-term strategy. It's no accident that cable hits like Lifetime's Army Wives, USA's Burn Notice, and TNT's The Closer all launched in summer, allowing cable to perform its annual raid on broadcast viewers.

6. Don't break faith with your audience.

Broadcast networks routinely spend three months promoting a show that they then cancel after two airings. Or they get a few million viewers hooked on a serialized drama and then drop it midway through a season, leaving fans hanging. This simply never happens on cable, where if a series gets a 13-episode order, those 13 episodes are damn well going to air, even if it's just because there’s nothing else to take their place. Every time the networks reshuffle their grid in a spasm of quick-fix panic, they disenchant more viewers.

7. If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em.

Ben Silverman, NBC's head programmer, may fret when one of his network's shows struggles against a basic-cable hit like Bravo's Top Chef or the Sci Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica. But his boss, NBC Universal C.E.O. Jeff Zucker, will rest easy, because his company also owns Bravo. And the Sci Fi Channel. And a whole lot more. The notion that the "500-channel universe" is a pie being cut into ever-tinier slivers ignores the fact that the vast majority of what we watch fills the coffers of a small handful of megaliths, just as it always has.

Take a closer look at that pie:

  • Besides Bravo and Sci Fi, NBC Universal also owns USA, the highest-rated ad-supported cable channel; MSNBC; CNBC; ShopNBC; Oxygen; Telemundo; and one-third of A&E Television, itself a conglomeration that includes A&E, the History Channel, and the Biography Channel.
  • Disney owns ABC, ESPN, SoapNet, ABC Family, its own one-third share of A&E, and half of Lifetime. It also, of course, owns the Disney Channel, the top-rated basic-cable outlet of any kind.
  • Viacom and CBS, though now traded separately on Wall Street, are both controlled by one man, Sumner Redstone. CBS owns Showtime, the Movie Channel, and half of the CW. Viacom’s list of properties includes MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Spike TV, BET, and Comedy Central.
  • Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. owns Fox, Fox News, FX, and, well, everything with the word Fox in it, from Fox College Sports to the Fox Reality Channel.
  • Time Warner owns the other half of the CW, as well as CNN, TNT, TBS, TCM, HBO, Cinemax, the Cartoon Network, and TruTV (formerly CourtTV).

So a half-dozen companies own not only five broadcast networks but also a majority of the cable channels that anyone actually watches—including all 10 of prime time's highest-rated cable networks, which together accounted for more than 18 million viewers a night last year. To anyone worried about where network viewers have gone: They may have left the building, but they haven’t escaped the compound.

8. Lowered expectations can be your best friend.

The current chaos in TV has a silver lining: In an era of on-demand options, streaming video, full-season DVD releases for latecomers, multiple airings of the same show, and the inexorable march of DVRs, the definition of success is more slippery than it used to be.

Eventually, a modernized ratings system will capture and aggregate all of these viewers, which will primarily help series that appeal to a young, I-want-it-when-I-want-it audience. By contrast, a show whose viewers could make up an AARP convention isn't going to benefit much from this brave new world. The ratings for 60 Minutes, for example, grow by only 3 percent when DVR use is factored in.

But until that's all sorted out, there's plenty of room for spin. In a TV universe without a center, if nothing is really a hit, then everything is. If you can't crack Nielsen's top 10, you can tell Madison Avenue that you wildly overperform among viewers with lots of disposable income—and you get as much as a 40 percent jump in audience when you take into account DVR use, as is the case with The Office. AMC's Mad Men counts as a hit because it's great, it wins awards and critical raves, and until recently, it was the only show of its kind on the channel, so there was nothing to compare it with.

The History Channel's Ice Road Truckers (a reality series devoted entirely to truckers driving across large expanses of ice) is a hit because it outperformed anything the History Channel had ever aired and demolished the image of the channel as a musty attic full of newsreel footage about Hitler. A show can even claim hit status because of the magazine covers, text-message traffic, and internet buzz it generates: From the amount of attention paid to the CW's teen soap Gossip Girl last season, one wouldn't know that it ranked 150th out of 161 shows and drew just 2.4 million viewers a week.

So the good news for networks is that it may be possible to stop the bleeding. The bad news is that the patient can't be cured. For 50 years, pop culture has moved in only one direction—toward more options, fewer mass phenomena, and greater consumer control. And there's no turning that around, especially with a generation of viewers that sees no meaningful distinction between a broadcast network and a cable channel.

What that means isn't just the end of a few old business models, but the end of TV as we've known it. America's most unifying cultural medium for the past 60 years has now followed music and movies in surrendering its mass appeal in order to cater to a populace organized entirely by self-defining niches. Welcome to the new era of post-popular culture, in which there's something for anyone, but nothing for everyone. What on earth will we all talk about tomorrow morning?