Higher series survival rate signals shift in TV
LOS ANGELES — Fox’s Minority Report has fizzled in the ratings. So has ABC’s nighttime soap Blood & Oil, as well as NBC’s crime drama The Player and its sitcom Truth Be Told.
Not so long ago, all of these shows would likely have been cancelled. But all four are still on the schedule, as is every other network show that debuted this fall.
This year, the TV season has stretched into November without a single new title consigned to the rubbish heap — something that industry watchers say hasn’t happened since the early 1950s.
The absence of cancella- tions is another sign of the tectonic shifts underway in the television industry. Thanks to digital recording and streaming, millions of viewers no longer watch shows when they are first telecast — making network executives reluctant to kill a program that may be quietly building an audience that’s not being counted by traditional ratings.
Studio executives are “being really careful how they’re talking about shows that aren’t performing that well in the fall because they don’t want to cut their nose off to spite their face,” said Tom Nunan, a TV and film producer and former executive who now teaches at UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.
“They may actually have a real gem that was just on the wrong network, scheduled on the wrong day and wasn’t marketed properly that might actually have a life somewhere else if they’re thoughtful about it,” he said.
Another factor: Streaming services such as Netflix and Yahoo have shown willingness to grab programming castoffs in a bid to raise their own profile, making network executives doubly reluctant to hand over what could be a hit to one of their competitors.
After NBC in 2014 cancelled its quirky comedy Community, for example, Yahoo lavished millions of dollars to relaunch the series this year with original episodes. (The show did not produce a happy ending for Yahoo, however, as executives last month partly blamed Community for a $42-million writedown.) Hulu picked up Fox’s cancelled sitcom The Mindy Project this year.
So instead of networks cancelling shows outright, a new strategy has emerged — cutting the number of episodes, which happened with Minority Report, The Player, Blood & Oil and Truth Be Told.
By cutting the number of episodes produced instead of simply hitting the cancel button, network bosses can hedge their risk on a series that looks dicey, while keeping it out of the hands of competitors for as long as possible.
“The order reductions we are seeing are largely financial decisions, (with networks) trying to get some air time filled with the originally programmed shows but without longterm commitments,” said Jeffrey McCall, a media studies professor at DePauw University in Indiana.