It’s that time of year again. This is when the top five broadcast networks do their song and dance in front of Madison Avenue ad people, CBS touting how it’s still #1 in overall viewers, NBC arguing that if you squint hard enough they still might be #1 among adults under the age of 50, ABC pointing out how if you take sports out of the equation they’d actually be tied for first place in the key adult demo, Fox mostly mumbling something about Empire and walking away quietly, and The CW beginning with, “So, about this new DC comic book show…” and ending with “Sure, no one watches Jane the Virgin, but it’s really, really good.”
For us, it’s a chance to mourn the shows on the way out (Forever! Constantine!) and geek out over as well mock some of the new shows (one of them has a modern day Frankenstein in a police procedural!), but for the networks it is the most important time of the year. This is when the ad buyers decide how much advertizing to buy at each network for the upcoming TV season, and we’re talking big money here. According to THR, “The ad buyers will dole out an estimated $9 billion” in overall advertizing at the networks. However, that’s down by as much as 7% from 2014-15.
Can you really blame the advertisers? Just look at the current state of the top five networks: Overall viewership was down an astounding 20% at Fox this year (high-profile ratings bomb Utopia killed their Fall schedule), NBC and CBS both dropped in the 18-49 demo (11% and 4% respectively), and The CW is simply happy that its overall ratings remained flat. ABC and its 5% year-over-year improvement in the 18-49 demo is really the only network which can genuinely brag about growth. Probably not coincidentally, the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau has reported that “the audience for live TV is dropping at a rate of roughly 10 percent per year as viewers abandon both broadcast and cable networks.”
Not surprisingly, everyone blames streaming, and worries over how to best quantify TV ratings, convinced that Nielsen is under-reporting because it does not track viewing on mobile devices. As I previously explained, Nielsen is like a ruler in world where we now need a microscope. At this point, almost all of the networks don’t even bother with reporting live ratings anymore, favoring Live+3 and Live+7 to emphasize how many people are actually watching their shows instead of lamenting how view people are watching them live. However, due to the time-sensitivity of most ads, the advertizing people don’t so much care if a show is watched more than 3 days after it airs. And that’s how you end up with the run of live network musicals, mountains of cash being thrown at DVR-immune live sports programming, and NBC bizarrely transforming its returning multi-camera sitcom Undateable into a show which will film and broadcast every single episode live.
Now, the network execs are parading on a New York stage, working from their prepared talking points, and showing off sizzle reels for all of their new shows (or playing piano while Dolly Parton belts out “I Will Always Love You”), like a habitual cheater trying to convince a repeatedly spurned spouse, “It’ll be different this time, baby, I swear.” Not counting summer or online-only shows, ABC has 10 new shows for 2015/16, CBS has 9, The CW has 3, Fox has 12, and NBC has a staggering 20. But we know it’s not really going to be different. Most TV shows lucky enough to make it on the air are highly unlikely to make it to a second season. Your fate is normally tied to the current health of your network, like how ABC renewed 7 of its 11 2014/15 freshman shows which have already aired (two don’t premiere until this summer, another was canceled before it ever aired), CBS renewed 5 of its 8, and The CW renewed all but 1 of its 4.
See a full run-down of the new, canceled and returning shows at THR.
Things were unsurprisingly less kind at Fox where of its 11 freshman shows only Empire, Gotham and The Last Man on Earth are coming back, although Empire is easily the biggest new hit show on any network. NBC’s ratings turnaround in recent years is largely a Voice/sports-inflated mirage. Unless it’s made by Dick Wolf and has “Chicago” in the title, they simply cannot launch new shows anymore. Of the peacock’s 18 freshman shows, only 1 is returning, The Mysteries of Laura. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt should have been on their schedule, but they let the next 30 Rock (which, to be fair, was never a ratings winner) walk out the door to Netflix because they very frankly told Tina Fey they had no idea how to launch comedies anymore and let her shop the show elsewhere.
So, ratings are down, ad people are forking over fewer dollars, and even the network that launched Empire is mostly floundering. The obvious next moves are risk management and alternate revenue streams. That’s why we’re getting so many remakes (an African-American Uncle Buck at ABC), revivals (Heroes Reborn and Coach at NBC, The X-Files at Fox, The Muppets at ABC), adaptations (Limitless and Rush Hour at CBS, Minority Report at Fox), and comic books (Supergirl at CBS, Legends of Tomorrow at The CW, Lucifer at Fox). This is not dissimilar to the way the movie studios have favored sequels, remakes and comic books in recent years as domestic attendance has continued to decline. Those types of movies are easier to sell to international audiences, establishing a new normal in which the domestic box office dollar is not as important. Similarly, TV ratings aren’t quite as important to the networks as they used to be. Instead, as Vulture explained, the networks are into “asset creation” whereby you leverage “the network platform to create shows that bring in revenue from sources other than advertising — sales to international markets, U.S. cable networks, and, increasingly, streaming players such as Netflix or Hulu.”
But asset creation inevitably prioritizes those assets you actually control. To again use a movie analogy, all of the film studios used to both make their own movies and own their own theaters. So, they would play their movies in their theaters, but The Supreme Court made them stop doing that, thinking it unseemly for the studios to control both production and exhibition. Well, now the TV networks are doing something somewhat similar. The four major broadcast networks have their own sister studios which produce TV shows, and The CW, co-owned by Warner Bros. and CBS, is like a farm team for WB-TV and CBS Studios. Back when ratings were amazing and the ad dollar strong it didn’t so much matter if an ABC Studios TV show aired on NBC. Now, corporate synergy is the method of the day, and the networks prefer to only air shows they own.
Alternative revenue streams only kick in if a network has some sort of financial stake in a show. If a series is produced by an outside studio, the network only has one big way to make money from it: selling ad time. That’s fine when a show is a big hit, but with so many series now getting by with modest ratings, broadcasters don’t have any interest in modestly performing shows they can’t fully exploit. That’s why Fox axed Almost Human last season (the show came from Warner Bros. TV) and why ABC pulled the plug on Cristela (which has actually improved ABC’s Friday ratings).
For example, the big success story of the 2014/15 season was ABC, which responded to the sorry state of broadcast television by choosing to embrace the power of Shonda Rhimes (How to Get Away With Murder), commit to being the home of family sitcoms and racially diverse programming (Blackish, Fresh Off the Boat, Cristela), and push a couple of high-quality programs (American Crime). They did so in a cost-effective manner. Of the 2014/15 freshman shows they decided to renew, only Fresh Off the Boat hails from an outside studio, 20th Century Fox Television. All of their 2015/16 shows are ABC Studios productions or co-productions. The same is generally true across the board at all of the networks, with many a promising pilot passed over because it hailed from an outside studio, although there are still a handful of more traditional arrangements where a network has agreed to air a show it doesn’t own, such as Fox running with WB-TV’s Lucifer.
We Minored in Film 
Is this the reason The Following was canceled? Is it because it came from an outside network?
Good question. The Following was indeed from an outside studio, WB – TV to be exact. Maybe if Fox owned it they would have been more inclined to keep it around, although with the seasons being only 15 episodes long they still had 2 or 3 more seasons to go before they would have approached the coveted 88 to 100 range for syndication. The Following is also a bit of a lame duck show in that the guy green lit it, Kevin Reilly, has since been fired as the president of the fox network and replaced by the two people who used to run 20th Century Fox TV, who naturally want to back their own projects. Also, the ratings were not great this season. Just at a glance, I see that it was regularly getting beat by big bang theory reruns on cbs, and in the key 18 to 49 demo it was doing worse than some cw shows like flash and arrow, although those air on different nights meaning they were not in competition.
Sometimes I am surprised network TV is still around for anything other than sport, news and live broadcasts.
Although I live in Australia and can’t really comment on the state of the USA and only really speak for myself, I can say that I have not deliberately watched network television for 10 years except when the Eurovision Song Contest is on. (I say “deliberately” because if it is on at the gym, I will watch “Air Crash Investigations”.)
These days, so much content is available on DVD/BluRay, streaming, illegal download and unauthorizingly put on YouTube. The world has shifted. People are now able to enjoy a social life with a healthy dose of post-work exercise then come home to watch what they want, when they want. I wonder if the networks will inevitably give up on the traditional format… or have so much product placement that it pays production costs. Also, I think networks sometimes treat viewers like crud. NBC have been particularly terrible by not consistently airing “The Blacklist” – having random breaks from the weekly schedule. I am also still annoyed at ABC for cancelling “Pushing Daisies” in 2009 then greenlighting the mediocre “V” reboot.
“Sometimes I am surprised network TV is still around for anything other than sport, news and live broadcasts.”
Agreed. As the years go by those will be the things they most rely on, even more so than they already do.
One additional area they have looked at for alternate revenue is definitely product placement, like Modern Family doing the episode filmed entirely with iPhones (although the showrunner claims up and down they did it just because he genuinely loves Apple products, and I’d previously read that Apple does not pay for product placement but will provide products free of charge to be used in programming, e.g., these iPads and MacBooks are your’s to play with, hint, hint, nudge, nudge).
And the networks definitely have a history of treating their viewers like crud in ways that can turn people against them forever, like how some are still weary of Fox for canceling Firefly.
Sometimes the product placement is really on the nose. I haven’t seen any “Modern Family”. The recent history of car companies “giving” free vehicles to film productions is well known and jarring. eg “The Matrix”. Worst case was “Transformers” – Bumblebee is meant to be a VW Beetle goddamnit!! Not too bad: Sony, who produced Breaking Bad, were not omnipresent with their supply of laptops and TVs.
Fox do have a huge history of treating shows like crud. RIP “Firefly”, “Futurama” and “Wonderfalls”…
My favorite product placement is probably all of the free cars that pop up in TV shows. The procedurals are all overrun with them. For the longest time, Bones always had one or two scenes per episode in which Deschanel and Boreanaz were in a car together on the way to a crime scene (or coming back from one or coming back from interviewing suspects), and they would briefly marvel at their new fangled ability to use the steering wheel to talk to the co-workers back at the lab via the car’s fantastic bluetooth capabilities, the show often working in some kind of relative close-up on the car company’s logo (I think it was Ford).
Heh. They spent all that money on advertising and you still didn’t remember the brand name with 100% certainty. 🙂
Kind of indirectly on-topic for a moment: I wonder how effective car advertising is. Purchasing a car is a significant investment that requires a fair bit of consideration and investigation. Despite all the advertising, in the end, I went to several dealerships and still picked a car that was the most attractive, which I don’t recall seeing advertising for.