After all these years, why ‘fall TV’ is still a thing
It serves as a stage upon which billions of dollars in ad revenue are at stake
It’s odd how we cling to certain TV rituals. The whole idea of “Fall TV,” for example.
There’s an ongoing, revolutionary upgrade in the many ways we watch television, so how is it that consumers are still expected to gorge on two to three dozen premieres at once (from broadcast, cable and streaming) every September and October, the way we’ve always done it? Or, with a nod to HBO satirist John Oliver’s exasperated segments on outdated social conventions: How is fall TV still a thing?
Consider the18 days in late July and early August that the networks (broadcast, cable and now streaming) spend promoting their new fall shows to the Television Critics Association press tour at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, in much they same way did in the 1970s.
Some 200 reporters and critics get a good, long, hyped-up look at all the offerings that the new season will bring. They go to cocktail parties and interview the stars of the new shows.
The hotel itself, a mid-century beauty of the Mad Menera where the Golden Globes are held each year and ancient celebrity photos adorn the walls, has a way of making critics feel like we’ve stepped back several decades. There can sometimes be a sense of shared delusion and optimism. I always come back from a press tour with a renewed crush on TV, in love all over again.
Then I come to my senses, usually when I rewatch the final versions of pilot episodes and have to write reviews of them. The mutual (possibly insane) understanding, from network to critic to viewer, is that half of these shows won’t survive.
That’s usually because they aren’t very good, but also, increasingly, because of inundation. In this “peak TV” era (the hazardous-waste stage of TV’s latest “golden age”) a viewer has about 450 current dramas and comedies to choose from across mul- tiple platforms in a single year. More if you count foreign-made series, plus 700 or so others if you add nonscripted, “reality” programming.
Isn’t it ludicrous to still believe a deluge of new shows would manage to find just the right audience in an eight-week period tied to the changing colour of leaves? Especially in an industry that increasingly disregards its old measures of success, each choosing its own special cocktail of Nielsen ratings, in-house data, “buzz” (social-network traffic), critics’ reviews and acute measures of timeshifted viewing to determine a hit?
In addition to the extraordinary amounts of content people are watching on video screens, Alan Wurtzel, NBC’s president of research and media development, recently looked at factors that get viewers to start watching a new show at all.
He said 54 per cent of viewers of all ages agreed they probably would not start watching a show unless multiple episodes are available to them on demand. To them, a “new” show is likely to be one they haven’t had time to watch but has been out long enough to earn a reputation or personal recommendation.
Once they’ve decided to try it out, they want as much of it as possible, or else it’s not worth committing to. One ballyhooed premiere episode is not enough.
“The idea that you can just open up a show is not enough anymore,” Wurtzel said. “You may have to refresh people’s interest or knowledge about that show months later.
“This is a fundamental change in how people have been viewing TV.”
Superstore, the NBC sitcom about employees of a Walmart-like retailer that airs Thursdays on Global, is an example of what the future of TV premieres could look like. Originally slated as a midseason show, Superstore first aired in late 2015 as a “sneak peek”-style preview before its actual premiere in January. The ratings (live plus three days of timeshifted viewing) were so-so. But as more episodes aired and the show got a second look from critics, Superstore started to look more like a hit in the long haul.
It’s perhaps telling, then, that NBC sent only three new scripted shows into this fall’s sacrificial volcano: family drama This Is Us; adventure drama Timeless; and afterlife comedy The Good Place.
CBS has six new shows this fall, ABC has five and Fox has four.
Adding up all the new cable and streaming dramas and comedies premiering between Labour Day and Christmas, I count around 50 scripted shows. This includes HBO, which is launching four scripted series; even Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, which have no bottom-line reason to sell a “season” to viewers or advertisers, have directed some of their biggest offerings in 2016 to the fall.
If you think you make the best television, then fall is still the time to prove it. There are creators who still want to win that game the old-fashioned way.
“It actually is surprising sometimes,” said Jennifer Salke, NBC’s president of entertainment. “Someone will come in who I know could walk into any streaming platform and have a 13-episode order (but) really wants to crack the network thing because they grew up on NBC and that’s where they want to work.”
The reason fall TV is still a thing, after all, is that it serves as a stage upon which many billions of dollars in ad revenue are at stake, in an industry that reports a gross profit margin of 40 to 50 per cent on average.
Despite everything you read in the business pages about cord-cutters and consumer clout, television done the usual way makes big bucks.
Likewise, fall TV is still a thing because the streaming revolution has yet to produce a comparable moneymaker and attention-grabber.
We must also consider the ineffable, sentimental attachment. The memory of when the “Fall Preview” issue of TV Guide, thick as the New Testament, would arrive at supermarket checkout lines and you’d beg your mother to buy it so you could circle all the new shows you planned to watch. We have a fall TV season the same way we have a sense that it’s time for football games and the 800page September issue of Vogue.
Now is when we feast and this is how we bring in the harvest, because, for as long as almost anyone can remember, we’ve always done it this way.