Please stand by
Upheaval, new technology and wildly fluctuating viewing habits are about to change things even more on the small screen
Alex Strachan, Canwest News Service
Published: Saturday, May 03, 2008

Network TV is playing the waiting game.

The prospect of an actors’ strike in June, changing viewer habits, the proliferation of digital video recorders — now in 20 per cent of homes in the U.S. — and declining ratings for some of TV’s biggest hits add up to create a cloudy picture of mainstream broadcast TV’s future.

The major TV networks have mounted a full-court press to lure viewers back into the fold with new episodes of returning favourites like Lost, Grey’s Anatomy and House — even as the end of the season looms. On-air promotional campaigns designed to resemble fall-style launches have reminded viewers when and where those programs will return.

The traditional fall season is up in the air, though.

One network, NBC, has said it will do away with the concept of a fall season altogether, and has instead moved to a year-round model — a decision likely to affect CTV and Global Television, which simulcast many of NBC’s shows here.

The other U.S. networks — CBS, ABC, The CW and Fox — are adopting a wait-and-see approach. Those networks will unveil their fall plans next month; CTV and Global will follow in June. CBC announces its fall schedule on May 26, but even the public broadcaster is mulling over a move to a year-round schedule, once the NHL playoffs end in June.

The writers’ strike meant that several new comedies and dramas have gone straight to series, bypassing the usual network process of ordering pilot episodes and choosing the best.

NBC has already ordered several episodes, sight unseen, of Crusoe, based on the classic novel by Daniel Defoe and described as “equal parts MacGyver, Castaway and Pirates of the Caribbean,” and Kath & Kim, a U.S. adaptation of a hit Australian comedy, starring Molly Shannon as a 40-something divorcee and Selma Blair as her immature, self-absorbed daughter.

NBC’s decision to do away with pilots prompted the network to pick up the new Canadian series The Listener, starring Craig Olejnik as a paramedic with the ability to read minds. The Listener, produced by Toronto’s Shaftesbury Films for CTV, is slated to debut on NBC in the summer of 2009, after its debut on Canadian TV.

The writers’ strike also means that returning first-year series like Life, Pushing Daisies, Dirty Sexy Money and Chuck will be relaunched in the fall as if they are brand new and have never aired before.

Kate Walsh’s character in the Grey’s Anatomy spinoff Private Practice returned to Grey’s Anatomy Thursday, in an episode intended to promote Private Practice’s return in the fall.

Industry insiders insist that while ratings dipped in the fall for some of TV’s biggest hits — Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives both dropped by double-percentage points from the previous year, according to U.S. Nielsen Media Research — just as many viewers are watching as before.

That’s because more TV viewers are recording programs using digital video recorders, and then watching them later. Networks now combine so-called “live ratings” — those viewers who watch a program live, as it’s being broadcast — with those who watch the program later — so-called “live-plus-seven” ratings — to calculate how many viewers are watching any given program.

Because it can take Nielsen up to two weeks to calculate DVR ratings, the initial ratings, which are announced just days after a show airs, aren’t necessarily indicative of how many people are watching a particular TV show.

Younger viewers, ages 18-49, are particularly inclined to watch their favourite TV programs using DVRs, watching live over the Internet or downloading episodes to watch later. That can significantly affect the number of viewers who watch a program deliberately targeted toward a younger audience. Nielsen’s live-plus-seven ratings show, for example, that the overall audience watching Survivor Micronesia: Fans vs. Favorites jumps five per cent once DVR ratings are factored into the equation.

“The DVR is our friend,” NBC research president Alan Wurtzel told reporters last summer at the semi-annual gathering of the Television Critics Association. “DVR people watch a lot more TV, and we have the proof.”

Even so, DVR ratings, live video streaming and iTunes downloads can’t mask the fact that traditional viewing of the broadcast networks is down, and in some cases dramatically so. Desperate Housewives registered a season-low 16 million U.S. viewers when it returned April 13, despite near-constant on-air promotion and a comfortable hammock position behind the season finale of Oprah’s Big Give.

“The television industry is under tremendous press from advertisers,” NBC Entertainment co-chair Marc Graboff told reporters. “The audience is rejecting scheduled television, and they are rejecting repeats.”

“Unfortunately, from a network television standpoint, that’s where we recoup our investment in programming. We make our money not just from the original program but repeats as well.”

With rare exceptions — American Idol, the Oscars telecast, major sporting events — there is no longer such a thing as a cohesive “viewing public,” with families gathered around the set in a kind of Diefenbaker-era bliss.

The audience is more diverse — and dispersed — than ever before. Increasingly, programs, and the cable channels that show them, target a specific audience with specific tastes and interests.

Factor in new technologies like broadband video-streaming over the Internet and mobile programming on cellphones and iPods, and the very idea of reaching a mass audience — the foundation on which mainstream, network broadcasting is based — looks increasingly shaky.

“Audience fragmentation is a huge factor,” Graboff said. “Twenty years ago, the No. 1 network had 33 per cent of the audience. Last year, the No. 1 network had 4.4 per cent. Audience fragmentation, repeat programming, time shifting and commercial skipping are putting a tremendous amount of pressure on our business model, which is the 30-second advertising spot.

“The solution . . . is not going to be over the next few months. It’s going to be over the next few years.”

Audience fragmentation and new file-sharing technology aside, network TV’s future may not be as bleak as some predict. In the end, it all comes down to content. With consumers watching TV on their own terms, ratings have never mattered more. And good shows will always draw a large crowd.

Warner Bros. Television Group president Bruce Rosenblum, for one, thinks television has never been better.

“The next 12 to 15 months are going to be stressful, challenging times for those of us on the studio side,” Rosenblum acknowledged. “The good news is that the creative state of our television business, from scripted dramas to scripted comedies, has never been stronger.”

Rosenblum’s studio produces ER, The Closer, Pushing Daisies and the filmed-in-Vancouver dramas Smallville and Supernatural, among other series.

“This is top-of-the-line quality you’re seeing, night in and night out,” Rosenblum said. “We’re proud of that. And we’re proud of the creative community — the writers, the actors, the directors and the producers — who deliver that quality.

“We are smack in the middle of a digital revolution. And that means, every single day, that there are new distribution opportunities, new production opportunities. This is good news for viewers. This is good news for our audience. What we have to do now is figure out what these opportunities are going to mean to our traditional business model.”

From The Vancouver Sun