TRIED AND TRUE
TV networks reaching out to the broadest possible audience; ‘stop trying to win Emmys’
Network TV is rebooting old dramas, such as Magnum P.I. starring Jay Hernandez, to make an appeal to the mass audience,
Peter Lenkov knows how to make new TV shows out of old hits, and that’s a specialty in high demand at major broadcast networks these days. “Hawaii Five-0,” his update of the 1970s detective series, is in its ninth season on CBS. He also oversees “MacGyver,” a revamp of the 1980s show about a handy secret agent.
For his third resurrected series, “Magnum P.I.,” which launched this fall, Mr. Lenkov followed the same mandate. By relaunching the Hawaiian adventures of Ferrari-driving private eye Thomas Magnum, he hopes to trigger the same experience audiences got from the original show in the 1980s.
“It boils down to escapism. Sitting down and watching something that for an hour makes you forget everything else,” says Mr. Lenkov, 52 years old. “It’s worked since the beginning of the medium.”
After a decade of sporadic attempts to compete with cable and streaming services in edgy, cool programming, broadcast networks are giving up on that and making a back-to-basics pitch for the masses.
For most of the networks, the fall season of new shows seems like a throwback: ensemble sitcoms, procedurals and reincarnations of long-dead hits. NBC alone already has three dramas about first responders in one city—“Chicago Fire,” “Chicago P.D.,” “Chicago Med.” They’re an alternative to the deluge of niche programs, and broadcasters are counting on producers like Mr. Lenkov to reformulate familiar fare to reach the broadest audience possible.
Skeptics in the TV industry see the broadcasters losing a war of attrition as audiences who favor more-traditional programming age, without being replenished by young viewers raised on Netflix, YouTube and other internet entertainment sources. At the same time, networks face challenges behind the scenes as more and more A-list producers and actors land lucrative deals with streaming TV producers, including Apple.
In addition to “Magnum P.I.,” CBS also revived the Candice Bergen sitcom “Murphy Brown,” with its original cast 20 years after the show’s finale. The most successful show added to Fox this season is a sevenyear-old sitcom, Tim Allen’s “Last Man Standing,” which the network jump-started after its 2017 cancellation by ABC. The highest-rated new drama on any network this season, NBC’s “Manifest,” began with a mystery premise—a vanished passenger jet—that echoed “Lost,” one of the biggest TV hits of the 2000s.
Broadcasters’ retrenchment is a major shift from their previous efforts at prestige TV. Since the rise in cachet of cable networks like HBO and streaming services like Netflix and Amazon, television creators have focused on producing shows with success measured in critical acclaim, word-of-mouth buzz and awards. Series such as “The Sopranos,” “Breaking Bad” and “Homeland” set new standards by dealing with difficult themes and earning obsessed audiences .
For the past10 years, networks intermittently tried to do the same. Most of their splashiest experiments died within a season or two, including period dramas like ABC’s “Pan-Am,” NBC’s “The Playboy Club,” CBS’s “Vegas;” dark serials such as ABC’s “Wicked City” and “Ten Days in the Valley;” mystery-driven sci-fi shows including NBC’s “Revolution,” ABC’s “Flashforward” and anti-hero vehicles like Fox’s “Lone Star” and “Rake”.
“They were chasing those kinds of shows for years, and when they put them on they would generally fail,” says Preston Beckman, a media consultant and former broadcast strategist who oversaw scheduling at NBC in the 1990s and Fox in the 2000s.
The networks had limitations that cable networks and streamers didn’t. The shows had to be safe enough to meet broadcast standards. Generally their appeal was too limited to draw the big audiences that networks need to guarantee advertisers.
“If you look at the 500-plus scripted shows out there, the vast majority have less than a million people watching. In a lot of cases that is by design, to reach a narrow, distinct audience,” says CBS Entertainment President Kelly Kahl. “That’s a different game than we’re playing. We are unashamedly a big tent network. We are designing shows to reach 10 million, not 750,000.”
With an older and, for years, larger viewing audience, CBS dabbled less with unproven formats than its broadcast rivals, rarely deviating from a menu heavy on crime procedurals (including three current versions of “NCIS”) and sitcoms that reverberate with laughs from live studio audiences.
Instead of imitating the kind of high-concept shows that grabbed attention for their smaller competitors, networks are more likely to say they’re counterprogramming, offering the straightforward entertainment most viewers want.
“It used to be that I apologized for working in broadcast,” says Fox President of Entertainment Michael Thorn. “Now I embrace it and own it.”
Harsh industry trends have compelled broadcasters to double down on what worked in the past. Over the past decade, the big four networks—ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC—together experienced a 35% drop in the percentage of households tuning into their live or same-day primetime programming, according to Nielsen. There was a 25% decline when factoring in programs recorded on DVR and watched within seven days of airing. Live sporting events have been a lifeblood.
Young people are steadily abandoning traditional television: Last year, 18-to-24-yearold viewers spent about 14.5 hours a week watching live and time-shifted TV, an 11% drop from the year before, according to Nielsen. Older viewers, too, are drifting to alternative platforms:18% of 35-to-54 year olds said Netflix is their default screen destination, up from 12% last year, according to a survey of TV viewers by Hub Entertainment Research.
The return to mass appeal is an attempt to stem the viewership drain. “Stop with the small shows and get back to the broad,” Mr. Beckman says. “They had to stop trying to win Emmys and critics and just win over the audience.” (The last time a broadcast series scored an Emmy Award for best drama was 2006, when “24” was in the middle of its original eight-year run on Fox.)
Though their combined audience has withered, broadcasters still outdraw cable competitors by far. Aside from AMC’s “The Walking Dead” and FX’s “American Horror Story,” no cable entertainment shows rank among the 50 highest-rated scripted series in the current TV season.
Few TV executives felt the networks’ shift in strategy more acutely than Channing Dungey. While head of drama at ABC, Ms. Dungey developed “American Crime,” which launched in 2015 and started fresh every season with a new story line. The so-called anthology format—made popular on cable by FX’s “American Horror Story” (2011) and “Fargo” (2013), and HBO’s “True Detective” (2014)—was a new direction for the network.
Ms. Dungey tapped Oscarwinning writer John Ridley to produce the show, which over three seasons dealt with addiction, sexual assault and illegal immigration. The series earned two Emmy awards for supporting actress Regina King, but generated relatively poor ratings. When Ms. Dungey was promoted to ABC president of entertainment in 2016, she had to figure out what was working. She canceled her own show.
“American Crime” was “extremely serialized and the subject matter was very dark and intense, and while we had a fervent number of very loyal fans, it wasn’t enough to sustain us in the broadcast space,” she says. “You do have to be realistic about the way people watch broadcast.” Ms. Dungey recently announced she would depart ABC, amid a leadership shuffle.
In addition to ratings, ABC uses viewer surveys, on-camera interviews with families and other data to help choose scripts to pursue. A key finding: “The importance of nostalgia and going back to things that people are familiar with, that make them feel safe,” says Elizabeth Sloan, senior vice president of consumer insights for the Disney/ABC Television Group.
In October, ABC launched “The Kids Are Alright,” a sitcom set in the1970s and featuring an Irish-Catholic family with eight sons. It joined other comedies that feature fashions, parenting styles and pop-cultural references from the past, including “The Goldbergs,” which takes place in the 1980s and spawned a coming spinoff set in the 1990s, “Schooled.”
The networks’ retro strategy has risks. Shows designed to feel recognizable to viewers who grew up on TV from the ‘70s, ‘80s or ‘90s, might not appeal to young people who weren’t born then, says Darcy Bowe, senior vice president of investment at Starcom USA, which designs media strategies for advertisers. “That’s a longterm concern for the networks. How do they attract a broad audience and at the same time attract a newer, younger audience to compete with other platforms?”
For most networks even holding steady in the Nielsen numbers would signal a win in strategy. But so far this season, only Fox has risen in its average rating among those 18 to 49, the demographic prized most by advertisers, compared to the same period last year. By that measure, Fox finished last season in last place among the big four networks.
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Overall, results are mixed. NBC and Fox have seen an uptick in total viewers drawn this season over last. CBS and ABC have seen declines.
The audience is getting older. For the 2017-18 season, the median age of viewers for broadcast network shows was 59.3 years old, up from 53.9 four years ago, according to research firm MoffettNathanson.
And older viewers watch a lot: In the first quarter of this year, people 50 to 64 averaged nearly 47 hours of TV a week, according to Nielsen, while those 65 and over watched almost 54 hours a week.
The strategy for harnessing younger viewers hinges on reaching them wherever they watch TV, whether on the web, a smartphone app—or even a competitor’s platform. In a promotion NBC ran during its telecast of the Emmy Awards, the network urged viewers to go to Netflix to catch up on earlier seasons of its comedy “The Good Place.” NBC says Netflix binges have helped boost viewership for fresh episodes of the show.
Mr. Lenkov, the retro series producer, wanted to emulate the television he came of age with in the ‘70s and ‘80s, a period associated with catchy theme songs, gimmicky premises and scenarios that didn’t force viewers to think too much.
“Very meat and potatoes. ‘Simon & Simon.’ ‘The A-Team.’ I had such a great relationship with those shows,” he says. He grew up in Montreal, where his mother was a homemaker and his father worked in lighting manufacturing. After getting his start in Hollywood with a movie script (“Demolition Man”) he wrote for “24” and became an executive producer on “C.S.I:NY.”
When hired to write a pilot for the new “Hawaii Five-0,” he tapped into the reasons his father watched the original version religiously for 12 years. Among them: “He wanted to go to paradise once a week and get away from the cold winters” of Canada.
“Magnum P.I.” is more personal to Mr. Lenkov, who as a kid drew cartoons of Tom Selleck as the mustached title character. A remake of the show has been his “white whale,” he says, recalling his attempts over the last decade to get a crack at it.
Among Mr. Lenkov’s updates: Magnum and his buddies are Navy SEAL veterans of Afghanistan and other military hotspots; the uptight Higgins character once portrayed by the late John Hillerma n is female (played by Perdita Weeks); and the actor in the title role, Jay Hernandez, is Latino and mustache-less.
Mr. Lenkov said he didn’t go back and study old episodes before he sat down to write. Instead he relied on his memory of what made Thomas Magnum distinctive. He wasn’t a typical tough guy with a gun, but a character who survived on his charm and wit. In addition to the nostalgia and name recognition that got some viewers to check out the show, “Magnum P.I.” brings other advantages. Because it is set in the same place as “Hawaii Five-0,” characters cross over from show to show.
“Magnum P.I.” is faring better than most new series, but with an average 8.6 million total viewers for the season so far, it is far from a breakout hit by CBS standards, suggesting some reboot numbness among viewers. Though the network’s search for marketable hooks from TV’s past has helped Mr. Lenkov put three series on CBS at once, he says he wants his next show to be an original concept.
“Every time somebody has an idea for rebooting something, I get called,” he says. “It could get silly after awhile.”
Broadcasters’ retrenchment is a major shift from their previous efforts at prestige television