The gaping maw of network television

Being a network programmer used to be simple.  You were one of only three (then four) networks, so anyone who had a series to sell had limited options.  More than three-fourths of the shows on your network were probably renewed, so you had relatively few holes in your schedule to fill.  You heard some pitches, and then all the networks (at the same time) commissioned “pilots.”  During “pilot season” in Hollywood, unemployment among actors plummeted as dozens of pilots were filmed simultaneously.  The networks watched the pilots, maybe ad some focus groups, and then the next September would be transformed into “Fall Premiere season!”

Now?  The broadcast networks have to compete not only with basic cable, but with premium cable, Netflix, Hulu, and even the cyber-equivalent of a shopping mall, Amazon. Very little TV is successful, even with diminished expectations, so you need to replace over half of your time slots on a regular basis.  Shows no longer get 22 episode orders; 10 is the new norm, so you must find twice as many shows to fill the same number of empty time slots.  Actually, make that three times as many, because no one will watch a re-run anymore (kids, if you don’t know what a “re-run” is, ask your grandparents).  There is no “pilot season” any more as now series can start anytime of the year, not just September.

The one underlying constant of network television is that the networks have 22 hours of television to fill in prime time every week (less for Fox and the various weblets over the years).  You can’t have dead air, and major broadcast networks can’t fill time with infomercials (although that would be an improvement in some cases).  So, the next time you watch network TV (assuming you do watch network TV) and wonder “How the heck did that get on the air?” no you know the answer.

The necessity of filling all that time per week is an explanation of why TV started tackling difficult subjects before they show up in major studio movies.  NBC broadcast one of the first films about AIDS, An Early frost, in 1985, nearly a decade before Philadelphia tackled the same subject.  If you are producing a movie you only have to fill 2 hours, but broadcast networks have 1,144 hours of prime time to fill every year.  With that much time to fill you produce crap like Full House, but you also take a chance on addressing controversial topics.

Given the complexity of the situation, networks can be forgiven for being a little squirrelly in making their renewal/cancellation decisions. I have written before about how networks are now loathe to say a show is “cancelled,” preferring instead to simply announce that no additional episodes will be ordered and then letting the episodes simply run out.  That way there is no way that a cancelled show might suddenly get hot and get better ratings before the end comes (and it can go to another network).

Now, even the post-run cancellation announcement isn’t the last word.  NBC announced that it would not be showing more episodes of Timeless, the mostly incoherent show about time travelers battling a mysterious adversary.  Apparently, one of the time travelers then went into the future and brought back a newspaper hailing Timeless as the biggest hit of 2018, as the show was uncancelled.  The reason?  NBC looked at its Fall schedule and saw a Timeless-shaped hole that needed to be filled.

I gave Timeless more than a fair shot, as I stuck with it despite its increasingly absurd premise.  The MVP of the series was Malcolm Barrett as Rufus, the pilot of the time machine who was the show’s best actor and most reliable source of intentional humor (in the first episode Rufus, who is African-American, points out to the time machine’s inventor that there is no time or place that he can go in American history “that’s going to be awesome for me.”).   The rest of the cast ranged from intriguing to wooden.

Eventually the entire conspiracy about chasing a villain with the improbable name of Garcia Flynn (of the Acapulco Flynns?) just imploded onto itself.  It was just another show attempting to emulate the late, not lamented series Lost by setting up mysteries and then steadfastly refusing to provide any answers.  The difference is that I never (maybe foolishly) lost faith that the creators of Lost had some end game in mind, while Timeless just seems to be making it up as they go along.

In another development in the new “Platinum Age of Television” we now live in, the CW announced that they had, in fact, cancelled two of their lowest rated shows, Frequency and No Tomorrow, but then released a wrap up for each on their website.  As a faithful viewer of No Tomorrow, and knowing the title was prescient, I was happy they at least added a tag to the final episode to let everyone know how the characters turned out (assuming all of humanity wasn’t killed by the coming inevitable apocalypse).  It used to be when your show was cancelled, that was the end, something I seem to recall Sheldon having a problem with on Big Bang Theory.  Now everyone can have some sense of closure.

The nature of television has been topsy-turvy in the past decade, but one thing is constant: the need for programming to fill the gaping maws of the networks’ schedules.  Binging sites like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon don’t have “time” to fill and so don’t have this problem, but their existence makes it harder for networks to fill those one thousand plus hours per year with quality material.  Consider that the next time you turn on your TV and complain there are 400 channels but nothing on.